Tired of the same old fantasy? Here are nineteen much-needed antidotes to clichéd tales of swords and sorcery. Fantasy is back, and it's better than ever!

"This volume showcases the nuanced, playful, ever-expanding definitions of the genre and celebrates its current renaissance." --Washington Post Science fiction and fantasy can encompass so much, from far-future deep-space sagas to quiet contemporary tales to unreal kingdoms and beasts. But what the best of these stories do is the same across the genres--they illuminate the whole gamut of the human experience, interrogating our hopes and our fears. With a diverse selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Charles Yu, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 continues to explore the ever-expanding and changing world of SFF today, with Yu bringing his unique view--literary, meta, and adventurous--to the series' third edition.

Collects the best of Peter S. Beagle's short stories, ranging across 45 years of his career from early stories to freshly minted tales that will surprise and amaze readers.

2004 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire winner Peter S. Beagle’s The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances celebrates the beginning of Beagle’s extraordinary career as a fantasist. Widely available for the first time and with a new preface by the author, this delightful book contains seven short stories and three essays by one of the most popular authors in the history of the fantasy field. The Last Unicorn, Beagle’s most beloved novel, was an underground best-seller in the late 1960s and 1970s and is still in print and enchanting new readers today. It reached an audience far beyond the market for fantasy books, tying in with an emerging counter-culture and selling hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies. The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche contains two of Beagle’s popular unicorn stories, ?“Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros” and ?“Julie’s Unicorn,” as well as “?Lila the Werewolf” (anthologized in the Oxford Book of Fantasy) and a tribute to J. R. R. Tolkien, ?“The Naga.”

Peter S. Beagle is the author of the beloved fantasy classic The Last Unicorn. Now, with Janet Berliner, he has gathered fantastic tales of unicorns combined with the theme of immortality by of the finest writers in the genre, including Karen Joy Fowler, Charles de Lint, Ellen Kushner, Tad Williams, Robert Sheckley, Dave Wolverton, and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. New in this edition is Julie's Unicorn, a story written especially for the anthology Beagle himself. Each tale celebrates the myth and mystery of one of fantasy's most enduring, and bestselling, subjects: unicorns!