Book cover of The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

Book description

Collecting more than two dozen stories that appeared for the first time in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—the premiere speculative fiction magazine—this extraordinary anthology celebrates sixty years of top-notch genre fiction. Many of these highly acclaimed, award-winning authors’ careers were jump-started by their appearances in Fantasy & Science…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1 as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Ray Bradbury and I share birthdays, so I wanted to include him, and he is one of the greats included in this anthology. It also features Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, and more amazing authors. The story, “All Summer in a Day,” is so powerful that it stayed with me my entire life (I read it in 1964, age 9!). I think it stuck with me because it depicts a group of kids my age at that time bullying another classmate into missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity out of sheer meanness…

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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