The King of Elfland's Daughter

Author: Lord Dunsany
Publisher: WordFire +ORM
ISBN: 1680573756
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
From “one of the greatest writers of this century,” a fantasy masterpiece about the aftermath of a marriage between a mortal prince and an elfin princess. —Arthur C. Clarke Before the fellowships and wardrobes and dire wolves . . . . . . there was the village of Erl and the Kingdom of Elfland. Considered formative to the development of the fairy tale and high fantasy subgenres, The King of Elfland's Daughter follows Alveric, who leaves home on a quest with a few basic instructions: locate the Princess Lirazel in Elfland, convince her to return to Erl and marry him, and together produce the first magical Lord of Erl. But what happens when a village gets exactly what it asked for? How does an elf learn to live as a human? Is love lost once, lost forever? The people of Erl are about to find out. Take a walk through the fields we know and see if you can spot the pale-blue peaks of the Elfland Mountains. Fans of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Neil Gaiman will adore Lord Dunsany’s influential 1924 classic as much as those authors themselves did. “No amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm.” —H. P. Lovecraft “We find that he has but tranfigured with beauty the common sights of the world.” —William Butler Yeats “No one can understand modern fantasy without understanding its roots, and Lord Dunsany's work is immediately significant as well as enjoyable even today.” —Katharine Kerr “A fantasy novel in a class with the Tolkien books.”—L. Sprague de Camp

The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Author: Michael Swanwick
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504025660
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book: “Combining cyberpunk’s grit with dystopic fantasy, this iconoclastic hybrid is a standout piece of storytelling” (Library Journal). Jane is trapped as a changeling in an industrialized Faerie ruled by aristocratic high elves and populated by ogres, dwarves, night-gaunts, and hags. She is the only human in a factory where underage forced labor builds cybernetic, magical dragons that are weaponized and sent off to war. When the damaged dragon Melanchthon tempts Jane with promises of freedom, the stage is set for a daring escape that will shake the foundations of existence. Combining alchemy and technology, a coming-of-age story like no other, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter takes place against a dystopic mindscape of dark challenges and class struggles that force Jane to make costly decisions at every turn. A finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and the 1994 Locus Award, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter a is one-of-a-kind melding of grimdark fantasy and cyberpunk grit from the Nebula Award–winning author of Stations of the Tide. It engages the reader in a nihilistic world in which nothing is as it seems and everything comes at a steep and often horrific price.

Daughter of the Salt King

Author: A. S. Thornton
Publisher: CamCat Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 0744300509
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Book Description
A 2021 Foreword INDIES Award Winner in Romance and Finalist in Fantasy A 2022 Benjamin Franklin Award Runner-Up in Best New Voice: Fiction “The heat and romance of the desert, the push and the pull of Emel’s desperation, and the magic and humanity of a caustic jinni make Daughter of the Salt King an irresistible ride.” —Amy Harmon, New York Times bestselling author “This riveting debut novel will leave readers eagerly awaiting Thornton’s future works.” —Booklist A girl of the desert and a jinni born long ago by the sea, both enslaved to the Salt King—but with this capricious magic, only one can be set free. As a daughter of the Salt King, Emel ought to be among the most powerful women in the desert. Instead, she and her sisters have less freedom than even her father's slaves . . . for the Salt King uses his own daughters to seduce visiting noblemen into becoming powerful allies by marriage. Escape from her father’s court seems impossible, and Emel dreams of a life where she can choose her fate. When members of a secret rebellion attack, Emel stumbles upon an alluring escape route: her father’s best-kept secret—a wish-granting jinni, Saalim. But in the land of the Salt King, wishes are never what they seem. Saalim’s magic is volatile. Emel could lose everything with a wish for her freedom as the rebellion intensifies around her. She soon finds herself playing a dangerous game that pits dreams against responsibility and love against the promise of freedom. As she finds herself drawn to the jinni for more than his magic, captivated by both him and the world he shows her outside her desert village, she has to decide if freedom is worth the loss of her family, her home and Saalim, the only man she’s ever loved. For readers who enjoy epic desert fantasies and forbidden romance like The Forbidden Wish by Jessica Khoury, The Wrath & the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh, and Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri.

The Night Circus

Author: Erin Morgenstern
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385534647
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two starcrossed magicians engage in a deadly game of cunning in the spellbinding novel that captured the world's imagination. • "Part love story, part fable ... defies both genres and expectations." —The Boston Globe The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.

Desire and Pursuit of the Whole

Author: Frederick Rolfe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781903933145
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
This is a description of Venice at the time when it served as an asylum for undesirables from all over Europe, as well as erotic vacation destinations for some, in much the same way Thailand and similar countries are today. It stands as a scurrilous sensual testament to his fervent affection for the physical beauty of the city of Venice. It was first published posthumously in 1934 in a heavily edited version and finally, in an unexpurgated edition by Quartet in 1993. This is the first annotated edition with details of the people libelled in the book.

Fantasies of Time and Death

Author: Anna Vaninskaya
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 1137518383
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
This book reveals the unique contribution made by the three founding fathers of British fantasy—Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison and J. R. R. Tolkien—to our culture’s perennial reassessment of the meanings of time, death and eternity. It traces the poetic, philosophical and theological roots of the striking preoccupation with mortality and temporality that defines the imagined worlds of early fantasy fiction, and gives both the form of such fiction and its ideas the attention they deserve. Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien raise some of the oldest questions in existence: about the limits of nature, human and divine; cosmic creation and destruction; the immortality conferred by art and memory; and the paradoxes and uncertainties generated by the universal experience of transience, the fear of annihilation and the desire for transcendence. But they respond to those questions by means of thought experiments that have no precedent in modern literary history. This book has won the '2021 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award' for Myth and Fantasy Studies.

Lud-in-the-Mist

Author: Hope Mirrlees
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1667639919
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
"The single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century ... a little golden miracle of a book." —Neal Gaiman Hope Mirrlees penned Lud-in-the-Mist--a classic fantasy, and her only fantasy novel--in 1926. When the town of Lud severs its ties to a Faerie land, an illegal trade in fairy fruit develops. But eating the fruit has horrible and wondrous effects. "Helen Hope Mirrlees was born in England in 1887. Mirrlees was a close friend of such literary lights as Walter de la Mare, T.S. Eliot, André Gide, Katharine Mansfield, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and William Butler Yeats. Under her own name, she published three novels: Madeleine— One of Life's Jansenists (1921); The Counterplot (1924); and her 1926 classic fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist, which has acknowledged inspiration to the likes of Neil Gaiman, Mary Gentle, Elizabeth Hand, Johanna Russ, and Tim Powers."--SF Site "Hope Mirrlees' writing, usually underrated, moves between gently crazy humour, poetic snatches, real menace, and real poignancy."—The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean

Author: Lord Dunsany
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681463180
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 18

Book Description
Toldees, Mondath, Arizim, these are the Inner Lands, the lands whose sentinels upon their borders do not behold the sea. Beyond them to the east there lies a desert, for ever untroubled by man: all yellow it is, and spotted with shadows of stones, and Death is in it, like a leopard lying in the sun. To the south they are bounded by magic, to the west by a mountain, and to the north by the voice and anger of the Polar wind. Like a great wall is the mountain to the west. It comes up out of the distance and goes down into the distance again, and it is named Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean.

The Charwoman's Shadow

Author: Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett Baron Dunsany
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
An old woman who spends her days scrubbing the floors might be an unlikely damsel in distress, but Lord Dunsany proves once again his mastery of the fantastical. The Charwoman's Shadow is a beautiful tale of a sorcerer's apprentice who discovers his master's nefarious usage of stolen shadows, and vows to save the charwoman from her slavery.

The Curse of the Wise Woman

Author: Lord Dunsany
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description