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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9606100" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Something published by a university press?  Not, like, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annual_World%27s_Best_SF" target="_blank">annual World's Best SF</a> anthologies, which started in '72?The first six collections are what you want.  The stuff from the 1950s and 60s.  Sadly in 1969 his wife Jonquil passed away, and Leiber's drinking got worse, and it shows in the stuff published in the 70s and especially the terrible collection from '88.  The earlier stuff is great, though!<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Sought_Adventure" target="_blank">Two Sought Adventure</a> (1958). Collection of six short stories. Later expanded and retitled as Swords Against Death.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_and_Deviltry" target="_blank">Swords and Deviltry</a> (1970). Collection of 3 short stories.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_Against_Death" target="_blank">Swords Against Death</a> (1970). Collection of 10 short stories; an expanded edition of Two Sought Adventure</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_in_the_Mist" target="_blank">Swords in the Mist</a> (1968). Collection of 6 short stories.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_Against_Wizardry" target="_blank">Swords Against Wizardry</a> (1968). Collection of 4 short stories.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swords_of_Lankhmar" target="_blank">The Swords of Lankhmar</a> (1968) . Expanded from "Scylla's Daughter" in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_(magazine)" target="_blank">Fantastic</a>, 1963.</li> </ol>Credit to TwoSix for linking the <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2023/10/lester-del-rey-invention-fantasy-book-publishing.html" target="_blank">article</a> about Judy-Lynn and Lester Del Rey making the fantasy genre into its own thing post-Tolkien, specifically looking for knock-offs and launching Shannara, Xanth, and Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane in particular for that purpose.  We see all sorts of trilogies and series get published in the wake of this move, and gradually lengthening into those doorstoppers across the 80s and into the 90s, more or less reaching their bloated apotheosis with The Wheel of Time, which debuted in 1990.  When I was little, in the early 80s, I had Tolkien and Heinlein, Le Guin and Andre Norton and Katherine Kurtz and Anne McCaffrey and such handed down from my mom and dad, and the Prydain books from the 60s which were actually written for kids.  By the late 80s TSR was pumping out D&D-specific fiction, and my local secondhand bookstores were jam-packed with cheap fantasy and sci-fi being re-sold since fantasy had exploded ten years before.  It was, definitely.  Though he was a big fan of the pulp swords & sorcery he was subverting, and his early stories are mostly pulp S&S themselves.  He did criticize Tolkien, Heinlein, Lovecraft, and others for the politics embedded in their works.  He included LotR in his co-edited 1988 Fantasy: The 100 Best Books , though, and I understand that the review in there is genuinely positive.</blockquote>

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