The Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod, Volume 2

“MacLeod is a brilliant writer.” —Tim Powers

“Ian MacLeod writes like an angel. He strings together ideally chosen words into sentences that are variously lush, sparse, subtle, bold, joyous, mournful, comic and tragic.” —Paul Di Filippo

Welcome to the second half of the collected worlds of one of fiction’s great myth-makers. Blending naturalistic settings with real—and unreal—histories, dark presents, strange pasts and star-flung futures, Ian R. MacLeod’s multi award-winning stories defy easy classification, but are always vividly elegant, compelling, and filled with wonder.

In “The Chop Girl,” a young working at a World War Two RAF bomber airbase discovers the true meaning of luck, whilst “The Discovered Country” projects a world in which the dead enjoy an endless afterlife whilst the merely living struggle to survive, and “The Visitor from Taured” twists a modern urban myth into a tale of one man’s search for a Theory Of Everything, and Snodgrass tells a very different version of the Beatles’ rise to fame.

Nothing in MacLeod’s visions is ever quite what it seems, yet they remain deeply real and involving. If you haven’t read MacLeod before, you can expect to be moved and surprised. If you have, then you need no further introduction other than to say that Nowhere—and its companion volume Everywhere, which features many of his best longer stories—represent a generous and wide-ranging summary of his work, along with many insights into the creative process which are provided by the fresh introductions and afterwords.