Amazing collection with a little bit of everything but all done with great quality of writing. There was not one dull story. Like eating a box of expensive chocolates but having no idea what kind I'd be biting into. I will be purchasing the next two books and awaiting the release of the 4th!

2.5 stars - Metaphorosis ReviewsAn anthology of speculative fiction edited by Mike Allen.I've been seeing these anthologies for a while now, and been intrigued. [Full disclosure: I submitted several stories to later editions, and was soundly rejected.] So, when I saw them all for sale, I took a chance and bought them all. Win some, lose some.I expected to like these stories. There are lots of big names here - some I've read, some I haven't. I wanted to like them. The feeling I got from what I'd

While not every story here was my particular cup of tea, this is still an amazing and gorgeous collection over all. I loved many of these odd little stories and am eager to read the rest of the series!

I think this anthology did exactly what it set out to do, and among the contributors are some of my very favourite authors, yet somehow this just wasn't the book for me. Many of the stories were just too insubstantial, or I didn't connect with their particular style. However, I loved (loved, loved) "The Woman", and "Oblivion: A Journey" was another standout.

Very unusual collection of mostly sci-fi tales. A bit depressing. My favorite story was "All the Little Gods We Are."

Aptly named, tales of beauty and strangeness indeed. Mix of fantasy and science fiction, all of them quite accomplished and lovely. Two that stand out the most in my mind are "The Woman" by Tanith Lee, a melancholy tale of how it would feel to be the last woman left on earth, and "All the Little Gods We Are" by John Grant - completely unexpected, a memorable, moving story about a boy meeting his soul-twin.

Woeful. "Clockwork Phoenix" bills itself as being a collection of "Tales of Beauty and Strangeness." With a single exception (and a few also-ran's) the authors of this anthology wouldn't know beauty and strangeness if it clubbed them over the head with a sledgehammer. The book suffers from what was, in retrospect, a foreseeable problem: the desire to be "strange" and "beautiful" at the expense of having either a good plot, well developed characters, or a combination of the two. This shirking of

"Tales of Beauty and Strangeness" is a perfect subtitle for this book, because it sums it up admirably. All of the stories are strange and beautiful in varying degrees: the first couple made me wonder if I was going to regret buying the three Clockwork Phoenix collections -- the first story is Catherynne M. Valente's, and it's very characteristic of her: too much so, in fact, like a distillation of all the richness of her writing into a morass. But, happily, as I got further into the collection,...

Mike Allen's collection of oddities by authors both known and unknown came highly recommended to me, since it's right up my alley. I tend to be leery of shorts/ anthologies though. It's a lot harder to get twenty stories right than it is to just get one, in my opinion. Allen does a nice job of picking stories that deliver- at least in mood if not always other areas. All of the stories of this anthology have something to recommend them to readers of my admittedly eclectic tastes. I also found it

Fiction C643 2008

I'm a really bad anthology reader so I only read Catherynne Valente and Leah Bobet in this. Basically I'm just hunting down Leah Bobet's short fiction because she only has one novel so far and I need more Leah Bobet in my life.

Found many stories a little hard to get into - mostly all well crafted but not my thing, generally.

Partway through this anthology, I wasn't really sure I enjoyed it. Most of the stories are really well-written and emotionally hard-hitting; they tend towards vignettes on topics that are not generally explored in traditional sci-fi or fantasy. If I had to classify most of the stories into one genre, they would be in "gritty fantasy" or "mythic sci-fi".These are not stories that you read because they make you feel good. They are stories you read because they make you feel, full-stop, and because...

I've had this for some time and finally got around to reading the anthology. I found most of the stories interesting and certainly diverse. I loved Ian McHugh's Angel Dust and Leah bobet's 'Six'. I was also very much drawn into the story 'Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela' by Saladin Ahmed. There were a couple of stories that I found a little inaccessible like 'The Secret History of Mirrors' and 'Never Nor Ever' but that is more something about my taste in short stories rather than their qua...

Tales of beauty and strangeness and rape. Seriously, I could let it go if it happened in one or two stories, but there was sex of a dubious consensual nature in at least four stories and I didn't even read all of them. A lot of the other stories tended towards the grotesque rather than the beautiful, so I'd say the subtitle is pretty misleading.

2.5There have been several annuals/journals that boasted this claim - cutting edge fantasy, genre-pushing, etc. Interfictions, Unstuck to name a couple. The thing is, none of these, in my opinion, has actually come out and made good on their claims. The stories inside come across bland, uninspiring, as if authors submitted their trunk stories to these journals and saved the truly exciting stuff for publications like Clarkesworld, Apex. I have yet to read the (retired) annual Polyphony, so hopefu...

(view spoiler)[ Plan on reading: • The Woman by Tanith Lee• A Mask of Flesh by Marie Brennan• Root and Vein by Erin HoffmanMaybe read: Bell, Book, and Candle by Leah BobetOblivion: A Journey by Vandana SinghChoosers of the Slain by John C. WrightAkhila, Divided by C.S. MacCath (hide spoiler)]

This collection leaves an uneven impression with ups and downs. There are some stories I liked but there are more I couldn't get into, even after giving some of them a second chance. However, I must applaud the editor Mike Allen for the interesting concept. Getting the reader out of the safety zone is an unusual and remarkable goal. The stories in detail with the rating in brackets. My favorites are in bold.Catherynne M. Valente, "The City of Blind Delight" (4/5)I enjoyed the prose of Catherynne...

It pains me to say this b/c I love the Clockwork Phoenix series, but this was a DNF for me. The stories were mostly all very dark, most were too ambiguous/weren't really clear to me what was happening, and a high number had sexual violence against women and girls (with no trigger warnings for any of those stories). I got to Akhila Divided, by C.S. MacCath which contains a VERY graphic and violent rape and was done (there are only three stories left after that).As always, the writing in all the s...

I'm a little too tired right now to write a more comprehensive review, but I definitely loved this book! I'm glad I put it on my Amazon.com Wish List and more glad my sister and brother-in-law got it for me for Christmas!! YAY!