RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksAnn and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, by challenging the limited perspective of Anglo supremacy still common in the genre, easily outclasses its recent peers. Like their 2016 effort The Big Book of Science Fiction, it is a thorough attempt to broaden and update the classics, making them altogether more reflective of a diverse, multifarious precedent, and quite a bit stranger in the bargain ... here is a distinct feeling of fresh air in The Big Book of Classic Fantasy where little-known Yiddish surrealists and Japanese wizardry mingle politely with crusty old stalwarts like Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann ... This book is not a refinement or distillation of classic fantasy, but an interrogation of it, a broadening of the space of its possibilities ... The Big Book of Classic Fantasy by embracing the strange and the esoteric, shows that classic fantasy has always been a more complex imaginative space, and it exceeds its brief to provide new views of the fey things lurking just out of sight.
