Compared by critics to Borges, Nabokov, and Kafka, contemporary fantasist Jeff VanderMeer (The Southern Reach Trilogy) continues to amaze with this surreal, innovative, and absurdist gathering of award-winning short fiction. Exotic beasts and improbable travelers roam restlessly through these darkly diverting and finely honed tales. In 'The Situation,' a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta-ray to be used for educational purposes (once described as Dilbert meets Gormenghast). In 'Three Days in a Border Town,' a sharpshooter seeks the truth about her husband in an elusive floating city beyond a far-future horizon; 'Errata' follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world. Also included are two stories original to this collection, including 'The Quickening,' in which a lonely child is torn between familial obligation and loyalty to a maligned talking rabbit. Chimerical and hypnotic, VanderMeer leads readers into a new literature of the imagination.
