The winner of the second annual Fountain Award, sponsored by the Speculative Literature Foundation, and for which I was a juror, is "The Annals of Eelin-Ok" by Jeffrey Ford, originally published in The Faery Reel, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.
It was wonderful to be on the Fountain jury, not just because the other jurors were thoughtful, passionate, friendly, and intelligent, but because the award specifically looks for stories both within and outside the SF field, so you'll see from our list of honorable mentions that stories came from such places as Fence, One Story, and StoryQuarterly as well as Fantasy & Science Fiction. The honorable mentions are very honorable, indeed, because about 150 stories were nominated by editors from around the
The other big news of the day is that the LitBlog Co-op has announced its first Read This! selection. (You'll have to follow the link to find out what it is...) Though I'm a member, I'm a recent member, and because of the timeframe, only the original members voted on this selection, so I don't actually have anything yet to say about it. I'll be reading the book soon and will, perhaps, comment then.
Just one small point -- the stories were nominated by editors not only from around the country, but from around the world! I was pleased to see plenty of noms from publications in Australia and the U.K. this year, and I hope we'll see more next year. There's a lot of great stuff out there.
ReplyDeleteFixed. And I did actually know that, of course. But for some reason I was thinking "the world" is "the country". Disturbing thought...
ReplyDeleteWell, global village and all that, I suppose (?)
ReplyDeleteFor the sake of completeness in mentioning all non-"the country" countries that participated -- we had nominations from Canada, too!