This comprehensive collection contains over a hundred short stories and novellas by some of the greatest writers of our and past ages: including Rabindranath Tagore, Murakami, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Daphne Du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Lord Dunsany, China Mieville, Kelly Link, and the father of weird fiction, HP Lovecraft himself.

In the introduction, the editors clarify that they are working with Lovecraft’s understanding of "the weird":

...a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of the traditional ghost story or the Gothic tale (...) the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane…

The result is a marvellous, vast collection of stories of all kinds: some realistic, with just a twist of the strange, others completely written in the speculative mode, and still others full of horror. Together, they demonstrate the rich and varied tradition that fantastical fiction inhabits, including some mainstream literary fiction names such as Joyce Carol Oates and Jamaica Kincaid.

A Publishers Weekly review called the collection “one of the most far-reaching and inclusive speculative anthologies to ever see print”, and a “standard-setting compilation is a deeply affectionate and respectful history of speculative fiction’s blurry edges.”

For a breathtakingly diverse dive into what the "strange" and "dark" story can be, and for the sheer pleasure of reading a well-crafted tale that will always take you into the unknown, this anthology is difficult to match.

Published 2012.