My Favorite Fantasy Collections of 2005

Day Two! Hello, Cleveland -- are you ready to rock?!

Again, these are all in alphabetical order by author, so you can't figure out how I voted for World Fantasy. I only have a Top 10 list here; there are fewer collections published than novels (or, maybe, I'm harder on short fiction). But all these books are well worth reading.

• I Live With You by Carol Emshwiller
  Emshwiller writes tough, biting stories that don't always make me happy, but which do impress me.
  
• 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
  If there were more story collections like this, I might finally stop saying that I hate horror. At least three of the stories in here ("Voluntary Committal," "The Cape," and "Best New Horror") are world-class, and that's flabbergasting for a new writer's first batch of stories.
  
• To Charles Fort, With Love by Caitlin R. Kiernan
  Dark, languid stories that always end just before the events that you're expecting and dreading.
  
• Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
  I think I like her first collection better -- it's a bit more varied in style -- but Link is a short-fiction powerhouse, who can make the English language do absolutely anything she wants it to.
  
• Harrowing the Dragon by Patricia A. McKillip
  McKillip isn't prolific in the shorter lengths -- she's been writing for thirty years, and this medium-sized book is her collected short fiction -- but all of it is choice. She manages to do new things with fairy-tale material that isn't the same as the great mass of "new takes on fairy tales."
  
• Looking for Jake by China Mieville
  This is a bit uneven, since it's all of his stories to date, but it's well worth reading, and the best stories here are as good as anyone's.
  
• The Complete Symphonies of Adolph Hitler by Reggie Oliver
  Low-key ghost stories in an old-fashioned vein; this is something I would never have heard of without World Fantasy. I'm glad I did: not only is the book itself a beautiful physical object, the stories are little gems, evocative of a world very different from my own.
  
• In the Palace of Repose by Holly Phillips
  Many of the books on this list -- many of the books I looked at that aren't on this list -- are full of stories all in the same style and of the same type. Phillips's collection isn't like that; every story here is different, and every story is successful at doing whatever it sets out to do.
  
• Strange Itineraries by Tim Powers
  Powers's collected short fiction fills up only a relatively small book; I wish there was more of it. But we take what we can get, and this is worth grabbing with both hands.
  
• The Keyhole Opera by Bruce Holland Rogers
  By weight, this is more than half non-genre, but don't let that stop you. Rogers is one of the best short-story writers out there, and this contains an amazing array of stories, flash fiction, and even odder items.

These will be harder to find than the novels (only a couple were published by anything larger than a small press), but I have faith in the ability of you folks to find good writing.