"Thank God for people like Bryan Cholfin, who became a publisher so more of his favorite writers could see print, who carried the brilliant but overlooked SF magazine Crank! on his shoulders, and who somehow convinced Tor Books to publish this similarly great but commercially suicidal anthology. Because of people like him, science fiction still stands a chance of overcoming the inbred, stagnant, bad-joke image it somewhat deservedly acquired in the world of literature. . . . With the publication of The Best of Crank!, Cholfin may have achieved his dream of helping return science fiction to the literature of ideas--a true literature, of all ideas."
"Many stories from Crank! could have appeared decades ago in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies. A high compliment indeed; but that such work is still marginal suggests how conservative things have gotten. . . . The best of The Best of Crank! is excellent. . . . A dangerous vision of what SF can be."
"Bryan Cholfin's The Best of Crank! won over this reviewer's heart before it was even opened. How many sci-fi anthologies have a cover painting from the Museum of Bad Art, a dust jacket photo showing the editor's disheveled (and unoccupied) office, and flap copy which notes that 'much to its editor's annoyance, stories from Crank! have lost the Hugo and Nebula Awards to substantially inferior work'? We know at the outset that this book has its heart in the right place--within hailing distance of its spleen. . . . Readers who are open to innovative and witty short fiction could hardly do better than to nab a copy."
"Crank! carved out a kind of anti-space in the world of science fiction. . . . The anthology earmarks stories too good and strange to miss."
"To be able to assemble an anthology as strong as The Best of Crank! from seven issues of any magazine is a phenomenal accomplishment. . . . The Best of Crank! will probably annoy science fiction's traditionalists. But Cholfin has published some innovative work that might otherwise have been lost. . . . The quality is consistently as good as or better than the leading established magazines in the field."
"In its short life Crank! was one of the finest--some would say the finest--herald of cutting-edge fiction on the market. Like Dangerous Visions and New Worlds before it, it championed the kind of stories that really didn't have a home anywhere else. . . . If Asimov's SF and Analog are the meat and potatoes of short fiction in this field, Crank! was its Heimlich maneuver."
"Thoughtful readers looking for daring flights of fiction ought to be alerted to The Best of Crank!"
"Maybe the only sensible thing to say about The Best of Crank! is that it's a really excellent collection of stories, whatever they are--Nouveau New Wave, spec fab, slipstream, who theoretically cares?"
"Crank! has been, from its inception, a scream against the dark night of genre and a haven for chimeric literary forms and writers who take chances. Here are stories that dance right on the edge of the abyss of the Unsayable. Some fall over, while others spread unexpected wings and fly."
"I've not come across a more original science fiction and fantasy anthology than Bryan Cholfin's The Best of Crank! in years."
"This collection of some truly mind-bending, genre-stretching stories on the cutting edge of fiction reminds me of reading Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions for the very first time at age eighteen."