An anthology of SF stories from beyond the US and UK. As with any anthology the quality of the offerings is variable, but one author has gone straight onto my wishlist, [[Aliette de Bodard]], with a noirish tale of a private detective searching for a missing person in her AH Xuya series, where N. America was colonised by China from the West, Europe from the East, and the Aztecs from the South. ( )

I really enjoyed "Transcendence Express", "The Kite of Stars", and "The Lost Xuyan Bride", but I didn't care for most of the rest of the stories.

Also, kind of a weird thing bugged me: I think the editor must have done a big find and replace to change every instance of "while" to "whilst"—that's a fine word, but I don't think "meanwhilst" or "for a whilst" are correct. ( )

See my Reading Progress entries for thoughts on each story. Some good stuff here, especially Aliette de Bodard's amazing entry. ( )

A collection of sci fi, fantasy, and horror from all over the world. Some was written in English, others translated.

I didn't like most of these stories. Some were too surreal for me to get a handle on what was happening and, even more importantly, why I should care (most obvious example: Zoran Zivkovic's "Compartments," in which the main character walks through train compartments and various characters tell him stories). Others were too obvious and cliched for my tastes (ex: Yang Ping's "Wizard World," in which a MMO player gets hacked and eventually decides to live life outside his computer, or the love spell gone wrong in Tunku Halim's "Biggest Baddest Bomoh") or were too fundamentally unbelievable for me to get engrossed (why did the butcher's boy agree to leave his family and all he knew just to help some stranger collect items for a magical kite for thirty years, as in Dean Francis Alfar's "L'Aquilone du estrellas"?) A few were nicely creepy but I didn't get the point of them (Jamil Nasir's "The Allah Stairs"), or why they were so recursive (Nir Yaniv's "Cinderers"). I didn't particularly enjoy Anil Menon's "Into the Night" or SP Somtow's "The Bird Catcher," about old men and cultural change, but I bet if I cared less about sf/f and more about literary considerations, I'd like them better.
I liked Kristin Mandigma's "Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-Realist Aswang": the premise is great fun, and the style of the letter is as well:

With regard to your question about how I perceive myself as an "Other," let me make it clear that I am as fantastic to myself as rice. I do not waste time sitting around brooding about my mythic status and why the notion that I have lived for five hundred years ought to send me into a paroxysm of metaphysical angst for the benefit of self-indulgent, overprivileged, cultural hegemists who fancy themselves writers. So there are times in the month when half of me flies off to--as you put it so charmingly--eat babies. Well, I ask you, so what? For your information, I only eat babies whose parents are far too entrenched in the oppressive capitalist superstructure to expect them to be redeemed as good dialectical materialists."

I was very intrigued by the world building in Aliette de Bodard's "The Lost Xuyan Bride," in which North America is dominated by Greater Mexica and Xuya, with all the alternate cultural and historical shifts that implies. I'd like to read more by this author.

Overall, this book was a collection of stories that just didn't fit my tastes. I wanted more worldbuilding, more characterization, more plot, and instead I got a lot of surreal nonsense, hackneyed plots, and very little plot indeed. This is not to say that these stories were bad, but they weren't what I look for in sf/f. ( )

The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar, is, as the title suggests, an anthology of sf/f short stories and novellas by mostly non-Western authors, many of whom North American readers will not have run across before. I've found, however, that it is best to take these stories a few at a time - for whatever reason, I've been having difficulty reading the entire volume back-to-back, and therefore don't yet have a full picture of the quality of the work. Having read about half of the stories thus far, though, I would consider most of them to be quite good. I have a big problem with the table of contents, however, in that it lists the stories but not the authors, which is very annoying; one hopes that is not the case in any dead-tree edition and that it's limited to the Kindle e-book version. Overall, this Early Reviewers copy is fairly interesting in terms of reading new-to-me authors in the sf/f realm, but it will be a while before I'm completely done with it, so at the moment my recommendation for it is rather tentative. ( )