Dead Man's Hand edited by John Joseph Adams

This is an excerpt of an interview from the fantastic website SF Signal one of the truly must-read sites for pop culture fans of all kinds. Serious interviews coupled with
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 Kristin Centorcelli | Wednesday, May 14th, 2014 at 2:00 pm 

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John Joseph Adams

KC: There are so many awesome names in this anthology! How the heck do you choose what stories to include?

JJA: The process for Dead Man’s Hand was more or less the same as for any other theme anthology: Basically I try to think about what authors that I know and like could do something interesting with the theme in question.

In some cases, I look for folks who I know have written on the subject before. For instance, I recruited Joe R. Lansdale because he’s a legend in this subgenre, having written not only the Jonah Hex comic for an influential run, but also the genre-defining novel Dead in the West. I asked Mike Resnick to write something because he has a current weird western series ongoing from Pyr Books. I invited Alan Dean Foster because of his series character Mad Amos Malone, which he’s been writing about off and on for many years now. I brought Fred Van Lente on board because he wrote the original comic the movie Cowboys & Aliens was based on. There were several other cases along these lines as well, where there were authors I was a fan of who I knew had written weird westerns, so I reached out to try to get them to participate.

Other times, there was just something about the author’s work that I made it seem like a safe bet they’d be able to turn in something interesting on this topic. Sometimes it’s just a shot in the dark, and you just don’t know until you ask. A few folks I asked just flat out said “I don’t like westerns” (which is fair enough!). But plenty said yes. There were a few I really hoped to get that I couldn’t, but I can’t really complain about the table of contents–as you say, it’s quite a star-studded affair.

By the time the book was done, I realized that not a single person had written about Wild Bill Hickok, which in retrospect really surprises me. But given the anthology is named after the legendary gunslinger, I figured it would behoove me to try to add a story on that topic. Luckily I didn’t have to look far to find someone: When I was grousing about the lack of Hickok stories over dinner, my wife, Christie Yant, said she’d take a shot at it, and so we ended up with the eponymous story that closes the book, “Dead Man’s Hand.”

Otherwise, it’s the usual editorial method: Did I like the story? Does it fit the theme? etc. For Dead Man’s Hand, I actually had a couple of stories I loved that I couldn’t include because I didn’t feel like they sufficiently fit into the western genre. 

for the rest of the piece go here:
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/05/interview-john-joseph-adams-editor-of-dead-mans-hand-an-anthology-of-the-weird-west/#more-93788