This is not your ordinary fiction. Is it weird fiction? Yes. However, the nature of the stories defy categorization, and slip between genres, bending structures and adding surprising elements. It can be surreal and strange, and certainly non-conventional. Most of the stories are good to exceptional. In my humble opinion, one was longer than it needed to be, and there was one clunker. I am glad to have slowly consumed the anthology, particularly relishing the story by George Saunders.If you are g...

There were a couple stories I didn't like, and a bunch of forum threads I wasn't interested in, but in all honesty the stories are mostly incredible and I'd really recommend this one.I love how the cheesy Kafka quote on the cover becomes a pretty clever joke once you read "Bright Morning."

Some stories were extremely good while others fell flat. Overall good though

A variety of good stories whose variety actually underscores the fact that 'slipstream' fiction isn't exactly a genre. The anthology also includes an interesting discussion about the nature of slipstream writing and what constitutes 'making one feel strange'.

Feeling Very Strange is an odd anthology. Now that slipstream is more widely recognized as a genre, the sections titled "I Want My 20th-Century Schizoid Art"--while intriguing from a historical perspective--comes across as counterintuitive to the overall goal an anthology like this implicitly seems poised to accomplish: the creation of a slipstream canon. This is because these sections mainly focus on how slipstream is not a "real" genre, that the genre is invoked only when mainstream writers su...

Hmm... I'll admit my interest in this book was mostly academic, since it was suggested to me recently that my short stories fall into the category "slipstream." Having never heard the term I was excited to finally have a genre for my shit, and quickly started parroting it to anyone who asked me what my writing was like ("it's like, um, slipstream...?"). Had I actually read anything in my supposed genre? No, of course not. Not until I came by this book by accident in the library three weeks agoHe...

A few good stories in here nothing new or groundbreaking. Initially sceptical when the introduction starts telling what emotions and themes i should be feeling for each story rather then let me do it for myself. Also the rather confused and irritating definition of the term "slipstream" which is made even more annoying by the continued documentation of the writers and editors pretentious correspondence with each other over the label and genre of "slipstream" which some rightly in my opinion stat...

This anthology isn't really a cohesive whole, and that's a good thing. The stories contained within are supposedly from a newish genre called slipstream. According to Bruce Sterling, slipstream's unifying force is cognitive dissonance. What this anthology demonstrated is that Slipstream isn't a genre at all, and that's there nothing new about it. It is, in fact, anti-genre, and a demonstration of how some our great young writers don't give a damn about genre boundaries. Much of the fiction here

At the littoral between the turbulent lagoon of mimetic (that is, so-called "literary") fiction and the vast, wild ocean of... well, of everything else, lies the infinitely permeable barrier reef of slipstream.The term's come up for me before, of course—most recently in the review I wrote just before this one, for Steve Erickson's Shadowbahn—but here is a whole bookful of the stuff. How could I resist?Actually, though, I ran across Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology quite by coincide...

Normally when I give an anthology three stars it's because it has a mix of good and bad stories. Here, the quality variation was minimal; there's nothing here I hated reading, but also nothing I fell in love with. They're all . . . solid, which is a weird thing to say about slipstream, but then, despite all the introductory material, I'm still not sure, having read this, that I have any idea what slipstream is.Still. Some solid stories. Worth picking up, if you see a copy floating around.

This is a solid anthology that invites critical discussion. I've actually seen several of these stories before, in various collections. It's interesting to see them in this editorial context, and to think about what they may (or may not) have in common.

"Feeling Very Strange" contains some of the best short stories I have read. Many of them, "Hell is the Absence of God" in particular, left me with a peculiar emotional/philosophical wistfulness that I quite enjoyed.Slipstream is a genre attempting to make itself exist. Sort of a chicken/egg time travel paradox. Slipstream is not sci-fi, maybe fantasy, is definitely fiction, and is also a bit strange. The people that obsess about such things are only those who use not only setting, but purpose to...

Ironically, my only real complaint about this book is the concept behind it: I'm not sure that the term "slipstream" (coined by sf writer Bruce Sterling to describe superficially mainstream literary works that nonetheless incorporate genre elements) is really a useful or even meaningful term. For the most part works described as such seem to end up being defined more by what they aren't than what they are: science fiction whose "scientific" aspects are nonsensical or only tangential to the plot,...

I nearly gave this 4 stars, but going back through and averaging my ratings for each story, I came out closer to 3.5 stars. All the stories have some interesting, inventive features, but like so many anthologies, it is a bit of a mixed bag and only a few of the stories really stand out.As far as the effort to lock in on a definition of "slipstream," Kelly and Kessel stumble around in their introduction--consciously so. And this effort is made a focus in subsequent sections featuring text from an...

This is a very fuzzy collection. It opens with an essay about how hard it is to pin down Slipstream as a genre or sub-genre, and later intersperses conversations between Slipstream authors about what the heck it is. If Slipstream really is the genre of stories that make you feel strange, then arguing over its boundaries is utterly futile, because like Horror being "the genre that makes you scared," what does it for one person does nothing for others. Eventually we defined Horror as "whatever loo...

This book so nearly has five stars. Four and a half.The stories "Light and the Sufferer" by Jonathan Lethem and "The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon are each worth the price of admission. The interstitial ruminations by selected authors on the genre-blurring and mind-bending of this hotly contested subgenre were very useful to me as a writer."Borges meets scifi" which is what the back says, is just too limited and vague.Here's my attempt to explain it, with help from the writers in the b...

I saw this book on a slipstream list, and that it had Kelly Link's amazing "The Specialist's Hat," and a number of author's I admire very much, so I definitely need to read this.

It seems fitting that I attempt to write a review while in an allergy stupor because slipstream stories can sometimes make me feel like my head's in a fog and I'm looking at the world through a haze. I learned of this sub genre only a couple of years ago (at an ICFA where I got the lovely Jim Kelly to sign the book...I have no idea why I didn't nab John Kessel for his signature too). The intro by the editors, Kelly and Kessel, alone is worth the price of the volume, in my opinion, but there many...

I just discovered that "slipstream" is the name of the type of story I've always loved---one that is rooted in a regular world, but in which strange and unreal elements appear. I like it much better than straight fantasy or regular reality! This collection has some great stories in it, and, as is the case with this weird kind of writing, some I don't like as much, but that's okay! I loved the story by Ted Chiang, Jeffrey Ford, George Saunders (I always love him!) and Bruce Sterling. If you are a...

Despite Kelly and Kessel's introduction, I'm still not sure what the "slipstream genre" is or if it even exists, but I did find several notable stories in this collection. All of the stories were good, but these were hauntingly memorable:Light and the SuffererJohnathan LethemAliens in science fiction are often cast at extremes of predation or benevolence, but this story seems to ask, "What if aliens arrive and they just aren't much use?" I was pleased to see this has been made into a film.Sea Oa...