Unstuck Vol. 2

Unstuck #2

by Matt Williamson (Executive Editor), Leanna Petronella, Collin Blair Grabarek

Unstuck returns with more than 500 pages of elephant men and minotaurs, magic charms and lost islands, talking dogs and miniature husbands, library urchins and zombie bank robbers, mechanical cattle, and many other curiosities. You'll find new fiction and poetry from writers like Steve Almond, Kate Bernheimer, Jedediah Berry, Gabriel Blackwell, Edward Carey, Matthew Cheney, Brian Conn, Rikki Ducornet, Caitlin Horrocks, AD Jameson, J. Robert Lennon, Jonathan Lethem & John Hilgart, Paul Lisicky, Elizabeth McCracken, Ed Park, Donald Revell, Mary Ruefle, Tomaz Salamun, David J. Schwartz, Mathias Svalina, Daniel Wallace, Dean Young, and Matthew Zapruder, along with dozens of captivating line drawings by Matthew Domiteaux.

Genres: Speculative Fiction, Poetry, Fiction

708 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 18, 2012

Reviews

[Kalin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The pieces that really struck a chord with me here were Charles Antin's "Maria and the Mice", for the beauty of its irony, and Miles Klee's "Everybody's Bluffing", for the color of its language (though the horror of its ending struck me too, in a rather less titillating way).

I also liked Daniel Hornsby's "Asterius", Gabriel Blackwell's "A Model Made out of Card", Erik Anderson's "The Language of Nim", Caitlin Horrocks's "The Untranslatables", and Elizabeth McCracken's "Foundling".

[Justin Lakey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to give this collection a star rating because it's, well, a collection. Some of the stories deserve five stars, while others are just bad. I enjoyed the collection as a whole. I guess the genre would be kind of experimental fiction, with some poems thrown in. The stories I enjoyed are:

The Screw That Holds the World Together by Collin Blair Grabarek
Difficult at Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Lurky Seven by Leila Mansouri
Three Tales of a Very Windy Town by Lyubomir P. Nikolov
The Great Loneliness by Maria Romasco Moore
The Season for Cranes by Genevieve DuBois
The Untranslatables by Caitlin Horrocks

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

First off, hardly a story in here was weak or was a miss. I rarely read a collection so tightly packed with intriguing, wildly creative and important stories. Most impressive is their tendency to select stories that go way beyond genre. It may look like a zombie story at first, but it will turn out to have a weirdness and thoughtfulness that goes far beyond this genre. I honestly think they are ahead of their time in highlighting stories that make the very idea of genres obsolete.

[Sean]

Like a holiday in a strange and beautiful, and sometimes scary, country. So sad to leave.