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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN num: 9780142437766
ISBN number: 014243776X
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 432
Printing Date: February 24, 2004
Publishing house: Penguin Classics
Release Date: February 24, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 66044
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Product Description:
This selection brings together tales from across the author's entire career. Liberal selections of earlier tales - including the entire Gods of Pegana as well as such notable works as 'Idle Days of the Yann' and 'The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth' - are followed by memorable later tales, including several about the garrulous traveler Joseph Jorkens and the outrageous murder tale 'The Two Bottles of Relish.'
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Rated by buyers -
There has never been anyone quite like Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Lord Dunsany. H.P. Lovecraft wrote clumsy imitations before discovering his own distinctive vein of glutinous, astronomical horror. Almost all heroic fantasy from the 30s till yesterday is indebted to him, however remotely. But he is not to everyone's taste, so what is he like?
Lord Dunsany travelled much in "the East", saw ancient cities and vanishing customs and ways of life. All of his fantastic tales are born of his longing for Lost Glory, for days when the world was colossal, heroic, unquantified, golden, lawless, drastic and permeable to the marvellous. Arch humour and the intolerable mingle with adventure and wonder. He loved the King James Bible, and his own style is modelled on its Semitic cadences, at once terse and oratorical, brief archaic sentences frequently beginning with "And".
A wealthy man who could write to please himself, he was one of the very first to set tales in a purely imagined world. He was not a linguist like Tolkien and his invented names have an uncouth look: Slid, Mlideen, Soorenard, Zeenar, Zumbiboo, Rhoog, Mowrah Nawut. First he wrote "The Gods of Pegâna" and "Time and the Gods", which tell of the gods that rule over his private world and their unsuitable, disconcerting dealings with humankind. These are prose poems or parables, all very short (those in "Pegâna" often less than a page.) Ambrosia for the Dunsanian, but not the best start for the unconverted.
Three other collections of wonder-tales are more substantial. "The Sword of Welleran", "The Fall of Babbulkund", "The Fortress Unvanquishable", "Idle Days on the Yann", "Carcassonne", are hard to beat as glimpses of wondrous, impossible worlds. Some of the tales are set in the "real" world; Dunsany also wrote more conventional stories, as well as plays, poetry and autobiography.
The Fantasy Masterworks paperback, containing all five fantasy collections, appears to be out of print, but this is a well-chosen selection. It prints "The Gods of Pegâna" complete, selects wisely from the longer wonder-tales, and adds some examples of Dunsany's work in other genres. Try reading one of the stories named in the paragraph above to see if you'll ever be a fan.
Rated by buyers -
Awesome stories that stick with you. I'm a Lovecraft fan, and loved hearing the earlier notes on which Lovecraft elaborated.
Rated by buyers -
This is the book you search for on a cool autumn evening or a late summer day. It is a book you want to read and savour. The tales are timeless, sometimes melancholic filled with fantasy, delight and the fleeting nature of life, existence and the world (or worlds) around us. Dunsany evokes the sublime, the sacred, the profane and the childlike. I'm not the greatest fan of Tolkien (I found The Lord of the Rings long-winded). But then again I prefer vignettes of life. These tales offer the vignette of the fantasy world. Gods, goddesses, warriors of old, travelers in faraway lands, story-tellers...children playing pirates... there is everything you need in this book to have - well literally - a 'second childhood'.
I loved the earlier mythological work 'The Gods of Pegana' as much as 'The Tales of Wonder'. The prose poems were equally wondrous and in a few I could see where the Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges was highly influenced.
If you are interested in early fantasy literature, when the genre was in its infancy, pick up this collection. It is not antique, it is not dated. The best part is the writing is readable, accessible and highly poetic. Dunsany has a way with words and his story telling ability is highly admirable. Read this and you'll want to read more of him.
Rated by buyers -
Brothers and sisters, words fail me in trying to communicate to you who and what Lord Dunsany was. The truth is so simple, and yet seems so fantastic that you might hesitate to believe it. Along with E. R. Eddison, he is the best fiction writer that there ever was, or likely ever shall be (the same could be said of Dunsany as a short story writer in general, and must be, because we are here to tell the truth for a change). Tolkien, for example, is nothing but a pale shadow cast by the sun that is Dunsany; Lovecraft was a rather silly-seeming imitation. Once you have drunk from this well nothing else even comes close; it will almost ruin you for other writers. The question is, if he is just the deepest, saddest, funniest, most clever, most beautiful, and again excepting only Eddison the flat-out best writer of any kind the latter-day Western world has produced -- and he is, brothers and sisters, he IS -- why doesn't everyone know about it? Why has he fallen into obscurity?
The reason is simple and obvious. Look around you. The world has gone mad. We have lost all connection to the real. And this great man, this Lord Dunsany, saw it, saw it before almost anyone, saw it happening all around him. And he went out and wrote stories about it, stories that are the least real things ever created on the surface -- but touch the very highest levels of reality in their deeper parts. It is just those parts that are invisible or despised in our mad world, and that is why he is hated, ignored, forgotten -- by all but a few, a few who can peer through those veils of madness. Dunsany's work is not escapism. It is literature, literature of the highest order; literature of an exponentially higher order than any of the garbage pushed down our throats by the academics and pseudointellecutal humanities majors whose task it is to maintain this madhouse of a world -- you know, the kinds of people who despise Lord of the Rings and talk themselves into believing that deviant, culture-destroying nut cases such as James Joyce are great writers.
Brothers and sisters, you have found the source of that which you have so long sought. This book, all his best books, are a door into another world, a saner and better world, a world within you waiting to be discovered. Buy this book. Buy all of Dunsany's short story collections, especially the early ones. They will haunt your dreams forever and if you let them, they might even change your life, all without your noticing quite how, why, or when.
Rated by buyers -
What a marvellous writer Lord Dunsany was!
He influenced everyone, everyone who ever wrote fantasy: HP Lovecraft, Jack Vance, John Crowley, Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, Clark Ashton Smith, Roger Zelazny, the list goes on and on. He has the astonding ability to conjure believeable worlds and nail them down with unsurpassed beauty in 500 word, three page stories! Like Faberge Eggs, each tiny short story conveys lost worlds of intense poetic beauty.
He loved the sounds of King James English and returned to it over and over to fashion his worlds. *The Gods of Pagana* (printed in it's entirety) is no less than a series of drole Myths about the creation of the universe, paralleling and reflecting Greco Roman myths and even Genesis. The Pagana section is really a clever story cycle and most effective if you start from the beginning and read in sequence.
Dunsany doesn't much care for our modern world, (but what's to care for?...). He comes up with names for his imaginary cities that just roll off the tongue.
Dunsany wrote a story about a thief who is being pursued, running away with his stolen loot from the house at the End of the World. He runs down a long curving staircase on steps carved into the rock. Down and down he runs pursued by the nameless terror behind him, until the steps get larger and larger and the curve gets greater until he falls off the lower edge of the world into space! Now that is vision. (I think that happened to me in a nightmare once.) A number of his stories deal with the House at the End of the World - an English country house, a stone fence and outer space beyond.
The orignal hardbound editions (not this paperback) had funny etchings to go along with the stories. These are stories you will love and treasure and if you like this book, it's well worth your time to seek out the complete *Book of Wonder* series.
He cranked out these clever little worlds in story after story, *The Book of Wonder* and it's successors, written before and during World War I. He became saddened by the War and it's results (and the subsequent one). Dunsany continued to live until the early 1960's, or so, never to return to this form of exotic fantasy.
This book is a survey of decades of his writing. A great introduction to some of his most famous stories. The book tails off somewhat at the end with the Jorgens stories and other post WW1 stuff which is not up to the quality of the crystalline visions in his earlier works.
To think that he accomplished so much with so few words and authors yesterday with their word processors and multi-volume series accomplish so little in comparision.
Read him. He is the source.
Cannot be more highly recommended.
And Lord Dunsany was a real titled English (or Irish) Lord, a Peer of the Realm.
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