The Best of Crank!

By: Bryan Cholfin

Book Overview

Gathers stories by Lisa Tuttle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, R.A. Lafferty, Gene Wolfe, and Brian Aldiss. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312867395
• ISBN13: 9780312867393
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Tor Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Steroids and implants for the brain

I got this book as a gift from my girlfriend -- turned out to be the nicest gift I've gotten in ages. I am a really hard-to-please reader. Books don't usually make me laugh out loud in pleasure. This book made me laugh in surprise/pleasure/disorientation about 200 times. It kept leading me down paths and then switching course, which I love. And most of the paths momentarily pursued were really pretty inventive. So yeah. Read this book. It's got BRAINS and it's got a SOUL, or whatever the sci-fi-book equivalent of a soul would be. Every story in it is intense, challenging, contains a wallop, speaks for itself, changes a worldview, or is somehow UNIQUE. If you thrive on kookiness, if you are bored with mainstream pulp and shudder at artsy self-conscious pretentiousness, if you gasp with orgasmic pleasure upon having your expectations truly defied, and if your ultra-super-big-brain is getting tragically stale with a general lack of input, then darn it pick up this book of short stories and romp away.Worth every penny.These are some of my favorite short stories:Mood Bender: set within a disturbingly familiar future, this dark little story of puppets and economy is my favorite. The author zooms through dozens of crazy-true ideas about art, advertising, audioanimatronics, mood, money, religion, and lots more. Clap if You Believe: if you've ever been over to your girlfriend's/boyfriend's house for dinner and been suspiciously scrutinized by your lover's parents, well, this story will twist your heart in all the right places. Ouch.Nixon in Space: All I will say is, I have never read anything remotely like this weird short story in my life. The lunatic way McCleary mixes history and humorous fiction makes the head swim; I got tickled in a mindspot I hadn't known existed. "We want to go to the mooooooooon!!!"I, Iscariot: Errr, I wouldn't have expected a long short story about Judas to be interesting or engaging, but this one was beautifully crafted and contains so many inventive details that I got really sucked in. Let's face it, Christianity can be so darned BORING since our culture is SATURATED with the stuff. To those of us outside the religion, most attempts by ministers and screenwriters to update the mythology for the 21st century come across as crippled in their conception. Maybe more stories like this one could rejuvenate the enterprise, make it more accessible to people who are too lazy to be atheists or run all the way to Buddhism for their worldviews. Anyway, this story is about what would happen if computer programmers designed a virtual trial for Judas (resurrected after 2000 years of posthumous infamy) to be broadcast live to a skeptical audience of millions.I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows: What if the world suddenly got really smart? What if everyone had more brains than they knew what to do with, more brains than could fit inside their head? What if somewhere outside this new supersmart consciousness, a group of koo

Yummy anthology just keeps cranking!

It's my privilege to have kicked off the very first issue of CRANK! with my story "Clap If You Believe," which also has the honor of being included among editor Bryan Cholfin's choices for this "best of" compilation. This journal deserves all the accolades it has received, and THE BEST OF CRANK! is an anthology that moves from strength to strength. Buy it and enjoy!

A wonderful concentration of quality literature.

I bought this book as soon as I could. The stories in each issue of "Crank" are great to begin with, so the editor's picks for the cream yield an almost unspeakably good set of reads.