I'm reading this big anthology at the moment. It's a great way to try out a bunch of popular authors I'd heard of but never got into at longer lengths. For example, I bounced off Scott Lynch's novel The Lies of Locke Lamora but here the novelette "A Year and a Day in Old Theradane" proved highly stylish and enjoyable. There's also one by Patrick Rothfuss I haven't got to yet, "The Lightning Tree", which I'm hoping will make up for the fact I couldn't get into The Name of the Wind. It also includes several non-genre stories which have been quite eye-opening. I would never ordinarily read a crime or psychological thriller or whatever they're calling it this week writer like Gillian Flynn but her story here "What Do You Do?" is very effective in the way it constantly twists the reader's perceptions (and has the most attention-grabbing first sentence in existence), and "Bent Twig" by Joe R. Lansdale is brutally violent but contains some of the funniest dry American wit I've ever read. There's a particular scene involving a crap ventriloquist which had me helpless with laughter. And I'm not even halfway through this massive book yet. All the stories are long novelette or novella length rather than short stories.
It should be noted that the table of contents linked to on Joe Abercrombie's blog above is incomplete, as the anthology also includes a George R. R. Martin story at the end.
