The Spoons That Are My Ears!

That's the way things are. Priorities and protocols change. But I have been especially remiss in not blogging about one particular anthology in which my work appears, because it is perhaps the most important anthology I have ever been in. The Big Book of Modern Fantasy edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer was released last summer by Vintage and I received my author's copies in September. It is a vast book and a really remarkable one.

Vintage (one of my favourite publishers) were taken over by Penguin (also one of my favourite publishers) so one of my biggest writing ambitions has been realised, namely to be published by a large mainstream publisher whose books I have loved for years and years. More importantly for me, my story, which is a novelette, appears alongside many authors who I have worshipped during my long reading life: Nabokov, Borges, Calvino, Márquez, Ballard, Cortázar, Bulgakov, Delany, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, and many others, including Alasdair Gray and my favourite short story of all time (although it's more of a novella) 'Five Letters from an Eastern Empire'.