num_pages: 273
description: Compared by critics to Borges Nabokov and Kafka contemporary fantasist Jeff VanderMeer continues to amaze with this surreal innovative and absurdist gathering of award-winning short fiction. Exotic beasts and improbable travelers roam restlessly through these darkly diverting and finely honed tales.In The Situation a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta-ray to be used for educational purposes (once described as Dilbert meets Gormenghast). In Three Days in a Border Town a sharpshooter seeks the truth about her husband in an elusive floating city beyond a far-future horizon; Errata follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin a shaman and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world. Also included are two stories original to this collection including The Quickening in which a lonely child is torn between familial obligation and loyalty to a maligned talking rabbit.Chimerical and hypnotic VanderMeer leads readers through the postmodern into a new literature of the imagination.
language: English
title: The Third Bear
publisher: Tachyon Publications