Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, editors, The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (Del Rey, 2007)
I'm almost embarrassed to review this collection, I enjoyed it so much. My enthusiasm borders on awe.
Kelly Link and husband Gavin Grant are the joint creative force behind Small Beer Press. Their names will also be familiar to fans of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology series, which the couple co-edits with the great Ellen Datlow. There are more then a few of their fans hanging around the Green Man offices, as a search of our archives will show. But nothing, nothing prepared me for the truly amazing, masterfully choreographed assortment of weird and fantastical fiction and "fiction" found in the pages of The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.
If you've never perused the Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (LCRW for short) site, do. According to the site, The Best Of LCRW anthology is already a Hugo nominee. And no wonder. The collection opens with a fantastic introduction by Dan Chaon. He recalls a college fiction-writing course for which he wrote a story about a little girl living in a castle with her dying grandmother. The little girl's only friend, a severed telepathic human head, floats in a jar on a shelf in the castle library. His teacher returned the story with a single comment: "Dan~ I don't accept genre fiction in this course!" He interprets this to mean, "among other things: no dwarves, faeries, cannibal mutants, spaceships, asteroids, etc. No telepathic severed human heads. NO GENRE FICTION!!!"
We here at the Green Man Review would find life and much literature dull, dull, dull indeed without the ingredients so apparently reviled by certain college writing professors. Chaon learned his lesson, at least for that particular course. He wrote a story about a little girl living on a farm in Nebraska with her dying grandmother, her only friend an alcoholic deaf-mute who lives in a trailer. The story culminates with the little girl imagining the deaf-mute communicating with her telepathically, which, in this literary, non-genre story, was obviously a metaphor for the little girl's need for human intimacy. The teacher's comment? "Dan~ powerfully realistic and moving!"
And so the stage, for the attentive, appreciative reader, is set for The Best of LCRW. Not wasting any time getting to the good stuff, the anthology opens with Link's own "Travels With the Snow Queen." Here's another story which would stick in the collective craw of college writing professors everywhere. This fairy-ish somewhat-tale, told in second person narrative, wanders through a world simultaneously too weird to relate to and too familiar not to recognize. It won a James Tiptree, Jr. award in 1997. This and the next offering, co-editor Gavin Grant's "Scotch: An Essay Into a Drink" (complete with recipes) are two of the best in the collection.
The quality of the pieces remains unrelentingly high. There were a couple which didn't suit my personal tastes, but I can objectively chalk that up to subjectivity. With this understanding, I'd claim there is not a single low point in this entire work. Really, not a single one. Even stories which don't suit my aesthetics are obviously of superior caliber to the majority of writing floating about in the rest of the universe. (Coming to mind as my least favorites are "You Were Neither Hot Nor Cold, but Lukewarm, and So I Spit You Out" by Cara Spindler and David Erik Nelson -- a fantastic title, but not a love story I could get behind; and "The Fishie" by Philip Raines and Harvey Welles, simply because I find myself unable to fully appreciate a story I read three times and still can't understand.)
Though I might wish the anthology had not ended on such an unpleasant note ("You Were Neither Hot Nor Cold. . . ." is meant to be unpleasant, so it's in no way an unsuccessful story), the flow and weave of poetry, fiction, articles, reviews, and a sub-genre I've come to think of as "the memoirish tale" are incredibly effective. It's hard to go wrong with contributions from the likes of Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Joy Fowler, Jeffrey Ford, Theodora Goss, and so many others -- over fifty pieces of every flavor imaginable in the table of contents. I was incredibly grateful for the extensive contributors' bibliographies section at the end of the book. So many great writers, so many great offerings, and such subtle skill at editing, at choosing to house these all under one shiny roof. A bargain at twice the price (list price $14.95), you won't go wrong with LCRW's best. Not if you want to have your genre fiction and eat it, too.
