The Best of Kage Baker

Dust jacket illustration by J. K. Potter.

Kage Baker’s death in 2010 silenced one of the most distinctive, consistently engaging voices in contemporary fiction. A late starter, Baker published her first short stories in 1997, at the age of forty-five. From then until the end of her life, she wrote prolifically and well, leaving an astonishing body of work behind.

The Best of Kage Baker is a treasure trove that gathers together twenty stories and novellas, eleven of which have never been collected anywhere. The volume is bookended by a pair of tales from her best known and best loved creation: The Company, with its vivid cast of time traveling immortals. In “Noble Mold,” Mendoza the botanist and Joseph, the ancient “facilitator,” find themselves in 19th century California, where a straightforward acquisition grows unexpectedly complex, requiring, in the end, a carefully engineered “miracle.” In “The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park,” an autistic Company operative named Ezra encounters a lost soul named Kristy Ann, and finds a way to give her back the world that she has lost.

Among the volume’s many other highlights are a pair of brilliant Company novellas: the Hugo Award-nominated “Son, Observe the Time” and “Welcome to Olympos, Mr. Hearst,” a tour de force set in the Hollywood of the 1930s and featuring an encounter with legendary newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. There is also a generous assortment of equally brilliant standalone tales, including “Calamari Curls,” the account of a faded resort town that takes a surprising turn into Lovecraftian terrain, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated “Caverns of Mystery,” in which ancient stories play themselves out repeatedly, shaping and altering the world around them.

These are only a few of the pleasures waiting within this book. The Best of Kage Baker is exactly what the title proclaims: the best short work of a gifted and irreplaceable writer. Anyone with an interest in first-rate imaginative fiction – anyone with an interest in lovingly crafted fiction of any kind – needs to read this book.

Table of Contents

• From Black Projects, White Knights
• Noble Mold
• Old Flat Top
• Hanuman
   
• From Children of the Company
• Son, Observe the Time
   
• From Gods and Pawns
• Welcome to Olympos, Mr. Hearst
• The Catch
   
• From Mother Aegypt
• Leaving All His Cares Behind
• What the Tyger Told Her
   
• From Dark Mondays
• Calamari Curls
   
• Previously Uncollected
• Maelstrom
• Speed, Speed the Cable
• Caverns of Mystery
• Are You Afflicted With Dragons?
• I Begyn as I Meane to Go On
• The Ruby Incomparable
• Plotters and Shooters
• The Faithful
• The Leaping Lover
• Bad Machine
• The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover copies

Limited to 250 numbered copies, bound in leather