My college-era friend David Moles, who has accomplished more of his dreams than I have of mine, had an idea a few years ago. Epics, he would tell those who would listen, have lost their charm; they have turned into tedious repetitions of stories --- stories which, by the time they are finished, have become so dense and inpenetrable and boring that neither the reader nor the author can remember why they started in the first place. It doesn't have to be that way, he mused; and so he -- for a while in collaboration with Wheatland Press, then (after some complications) not, set out to produce an anthology of short stories that would make epics charming again. An anthology in which the writers were paid more the shorter their stories.

Twenty Epics was released on Tuesday; i got my copy on Friday. It has, I would venture, succeeded at its goal. Many of these stories succeed brilliantly in evoking entire worlds in their brief handfuls of paragraphs.