This ambitious anthology from the publishers of Tin House magazine brings together a collection of unusual stories from some of the most imaginative women writing in the United States today. I recognized some of the authors, such as Samantha Hunt, Gina Ochsner, and Karen Russell, from their Orange Prize nominations. Other names were new to me.

Also new to me was the approach these authors took in telling their stories. As the subtitle says, these stories are surreal (although I didn't find them sublime in either "exalted" or the German philosophical sense). Perhaps it was my state of mind when I decided to read this book, but based on its description, I did not expect this level of strangeness. But then who would expect a story where a woman turns into a deer every night? Or a story told from the point of view of a clam? Really, how could anyone expect any of this? It was the strangest bunch of stories I've read since Kate Bernheimer's Horse, Flower, Bird last year (reviewed in Belletrista Issue 7).

Speaking of Kate Bernheimer, her story "Whitework" is reprinted in this volume. This is a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Oval Portrait." Another retelling in Fantastic Women is "Snow White, Rose Red," by Lydia Millett. The original is an old German fairy tale about two sisters who befriend a bear and help a nasty dwarf. In Millett's version, the sisters are summering in the family cottage, which is the Fifth Avenue way of describing a robber baron's Adirondack mansion. Their parents are described as "the mother who wasn't all there and the father who wasn't there at all," and the bear and dwarf in this story are conflated into a guy who's momentarily a little down on his luck. When read along with the original (which is easily found online) Millett's tale is terrifically clever. It was also one of my favourite stories in the book.

The other stories in Fantastic Women are from the authors' own original ideas. Even in this collection of odd pieces, "The Dickmare," by Rikki Ducornet stands out for its oddness. I found it mysterious and philosophical, but at the same time I had a feeling I was reading clam porn. Still, her sentences are beautiful, and the story is amusing, and I will never look at mollusks the same way again.

Another favourite of mine was "The Doll Awakens," by Stacey Richter, which I can best describe as "uncanny." It reminded me of a story that would be made into a Twilight Zone episode, or perhaps one of Stephen King's non-horror stories. Miss Pretty had once been cherished by Tina, but "then years passed and a litany of bad things happened until finally she was shoved into a box and left to rot, in a trailer without climate control, with several pieces of her original outfit gone AWOL." Miss Pretty's life gets interesting again when two losers turn the trailer into a meth lab.

One more story I enjoyed immensely was "Americca," by Aimee Bender. For a time, ten-year old Lisa's family is being "backwards robbed." Mysterious items just show up in her house. A tube of toothpaste, a can of lemongrass corn chowder, and my favourite, piles of thin, worn towels. As mysteriously as the backwards robberies began, they also stop, but Lisa carries the effects into her adult life.

What all eighteen of these stories have in common is that they defy easy description, they push buttons, are definitely quirky and baffling, and will sometimes make the reader uncomfortable. Not only was this book a fun read, it also gave me a long list of authors to look out for and whose work I'll watch.