In the Forest of Forgetting

“It doesn't seem too hasty to exclaim, ‘Classic!’” —Booklist, starred review

“An original voice, and an original vision: crystalline, precise, mordant and devastating.” —Ellen Kushner

A Mythopoeic Award finalist

Mythic Delirim Books is proud to make World Fantasy Award and Locus Award winner Theodora Goss’s 2006 story collection In the Forest of Forgetting available in electronic format. With an introduction by Terri Windling, this book gathers sixteen tales from an author that Locus at the time dubbed “one of the more distinctive, graceful, and haunting new voices in fantasy.”

Cover art by Virginia Lee.

*Starred Review* Goss' contribution to the exciting showcase of the new weirdness, Feeling Very Strange (2006), is a version of Sleeping Beauty that unfolds in history as well as time: when the prince arrives for the great awakening, he's a bulldozer driver clearing the forest. That story opens this collection of others that are frequently as incidentally funny. Comedy is here a seasoning, however, of the richly astringent flavor of fine literary fantasy, in which happy endings are tentative, temporary, or even repugnant. In "Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold," possible paradise is spurned because it requires death in the here and now. In "Sleeping with Bears," the narrator's best friend weds a bear, and how can that turn out? (Still, at the end, the narrator is dating the groom's brother.) In "Letters from Budapest," their recipient, a dealer of objets d'art, learns that his aspiring artist brother has found the ideal teacher but may never paint again; meanwhile, that Old Master--actually a mistress--wants the dealer to be hers. More conventionally but oh-so-satisfyingly developed are the stories in which the witch Miss Emily Gray and the turn-of-the-century North Carolina girl Rose appear. Both are in the volume closer, "Lessons with Miss Gray," about learning how to obtain one's heart's desire--and it doesn't seem too hasty to exclaim, "Classic!" Ray Olson
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