THE BEST OF CRANK!
edited by Brian Cholfin
Seventeen tales, 1987—96, collected from the small press magazine Crank!, whose editor Cholfin’s mission statement is to dismantle the concept of genre altogether—a marketing strategy, not a literary classification, he insists, with some justification. Anyhow, Ursula K. Le Guin contributes one of her fascinating cultural-sexual studies, “The Matter of Seggri”; Brian Aldiss has robot troubles in “The Servant Problem”; Gene Wolfe offers a story set in his Book of the New Sun creation. Other well-known authors include Lisa Tuttle, Michael Bishop, R. A. Lafferty, A. A. Attanasio, David R. Bunch, and Gwyneth Jones. Most revealing of all, Jonathan Lethem appears no less than three times, with two solo efforts and a collaboration with Carter Scholz. Unquantifiable, eccentric, eclectic, worth a try.