About the Author

Rob Spillman is editor of Tin House magazine and executive editor of Tin House Books. He was previously the monthly book columnist for Details magazine and is a contributor of book reviews and essays to Salon and Bookforum. He has written for the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Review, British GQ, Connoisseur, Details, Nerve, the New York Times Book Review, Premiere, Rolling Stone, Spin, Sports Illustrated, SPY, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Worth, among other magazines, newspapers, and online magazines. He has also worked for Random House, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. Joy Williams is the author of five novels, including The Quick and the Dead and most recently Harrow, five collections of stories, including Ninety-Nine Stories of God, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Paris Review's Hadada Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which she was elected in 2008. She lives in Arizona and Wyoming.

Reviews

"Stories--subtly disturbing, ruthlessly brilliant--by eighteen top-of-the-trend writers."--Ursula K. Le Guin "Compellingly weird and weirdly compelling narratives." --Publishers Weekly "Reinventing surrealism and pushing fiction's boundaries ..." --Ms. Magazine "Fantastic Women is a book you want to keep close to you at all times. Reading it made me feel I was inside the imaginations of 18 wildly talented writers. What fantastic company they make."--Vendela Vida, author of The Lovers and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name "Fantastic Women puts on a clinic of what's possible in the short story today. And 'fantastic' is an understatement. The best anthology I've read in years."--Ben Marcus "That the future is female is nowhere more thrillingly beholdable than in the dominion of literary fiction, where women writers' rejection of rote realism and received forms has cleared the way for visionary misadventure, soulful weirdness, and verbal outlandishments of the highest order. The page-by-page grit and shimmer of these stories, the unlidded imagination and teeming wisdom of these bold and unpredictable writers, reanimate our language and our literature. Here at last is an anthology that's all guts and all gusto, motioning forcibly toward the new world that all of us--women and men alike--had better know now or never."--Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive