A week without a dose or two of good, short fiction is like a day without vitamins — you might be able to survive, but you won't feel as peppy as you otherwise would. Two recent releases from Golden Gryphon press — Attack of the Jazz Giants by Gregory Frost (Golden Gryphon/344 pages/$25.95) and Live! From Planet Earth by George Alec Effinger (Golden Gryphon/363 pages/$25.95) — bear out that philosophy quite well.

. . .

The stories and introductions in Live! From Planet Earth are a blast from the past and a celebration of one of SF's finest writers, the late, great George Alec Effinger. From "Solo in the Spotlight," in which a U.S. President aboard Air Force One looks to his daughter's Tarot Deck to provide answers during the middle of an international crisis (shades of Ronald Reagan!) to one of Effinger's Hugo nominated tales, "The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything" (in which do-gooder, know-it-all ETs drive the human race off the planet), this is one of those must-have collections for completists. Bradley Denton, Howard Waldrop, Mike Resnick and a host of others offer introductions to each short story. Gardner Dozois introduces Effinger's "O. Niemand" stories — collected here in one group for the first time — stories which the author wrote under a pseudonym when he wanted to mimic the styles of literary greats like Hemingway, Twain and Steinbeck. As with everything else he did, Effinger does so with style.

— Dorman T. Shindler, Subterranean Magazine #2, 2005