The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

This omnivorous selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and World Fantasy Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado is a display of the most boundary-pushing, genre-blurring, stylistically singular science fiction and fantasy stories published in the last year. By sending us to alternate universes and chronicling ordinary magic, introducing us to mythical beasts and talking animals, and engaging with a wide spectrum of emotion from tenderness to fear, each of these stories challenge the way we see our place in the cosmos. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 represents a wide range of the most accomplished voices working in science fiction and fantasy, in fiction, today each story dazzles with ambition, striking prose, and the promise of the other and the unencountered.
"Simply put, Carmen Maria Machado is one of short fiction’s contemporary masters. Indeed, if you pay attention to short fiction at all, you almost certainly have already read—and been blown away by her work. She’s a force in both the literary and the genre worlds, first publishing a plethora of much-lauded short fiction that made her a star and then going supernova with the release of her collection Her Body and Other Parties. That book, which gathers much but not all of her body of work, won many awards, such as the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for many others, including the National Book Award, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (L.A. Times Book Prize), the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Kirkus Prize, and others. And if all that weren’t impressive enough, it’s also in development as a television show at
FX."