The people of the obscure village of Erl demand to be ruled by a magic lord, so their aging ruler sends his son Alveric on a quest into Elfland to wed the elfin princess Lirazel. Alveric wins her hand and brings her back to Erl, and the couple have a son, but Lirazel struggles to adapt to human society and its stranger customs, like time and change. When a scheme by her father, the King of Elfland, spirits her away and Elfland itself withdraws beyond the fields we know, Alveric sets out on...

The Gods of Pegāna, Lord Dunsany's first published book, is a strange and wondrous creation. In it he invents an entire pantheon of gods who rule over the titular world, from the sleeping creator Māna-Yood-Sushāī to the lesser gods who while away the eons at play. The prose alternates between biblical, high-minded, and childlike, with the gods frustrating their human subjects through single-minded and often completely inscrutable actions. When they're not busy being mysterious, th...

The Charwoman's Shadow is one of Lord Dunsany's many early fantasy novels, and one of several works that helped shape the fantasy genre as it's known today. It blends historical romance with magic and magical creatures in a purported Spanish "golden age," a setting Dunsany also used in his earlier novel Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley.The Lord of the Tower and Rocky Forest, Gonsalvo, wants nothing but the best for his children, but the dire state of his...

Lord Dunsany earned literary fame through his otherworldly short stories. This book compiles fifty-one of them, without a seeming theme except that they're extremely short-sometimes as short as a few paragraphs. The stories range from morality tales, to dreamlike vignettes, to gloomy prophecies told in a foreboding voice. A thread of bleak humor sometimes runs through them, like with much of Dunsany's literary output.Fifty-One Tales was published simultaneously in England ...

The Book of Wonder is one of Lord Dunsany's many collections of fantasy short stories. While many of his collections were illustrated, this particular one is different-the illustrations were completed first. Dunsany then used the illustrations as inspirations for the stories around them.This collection features fourteen short stories, all of them whimsical, imaginative, and deeply strange. Dunsany writes stories that don't always have a happy ending, and these are no excep...

This volume contains the following 20 works, arranged alphabetically by authors’ last names: Anonymous: “Beowulf” Anonymous: “The Epic of Gilgamesh” Barrie, J. M.: “Peter Pan” Baum, L. Frank: “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” Bulgakov, Mikhail: “The Master and Margarita” Burroughs, Edgar Rice: “A Princess of Mars” Burroughs, Edgar Rice: “Tarzan of the Apes” Carroll, Lewis: “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” Carroll, Lewis: “Through the Looking Glass” Chesterton, G. K.: “The Man Who Was Thursday...

If you were looking for the Holy Bible of the horror anthologies, consider yourself lucky, because you just found it! Cosmic horror, supernatural events, ghost stories, weird fiction, mystical fantasies, occult narratives, this book plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. This collection of the greatest mysterious dark tales gathers together more than 100 authors and more than 1000 short stories (!), which makes it truly unique in its kind. Be ...

A classic collection of short stories from one of the twentieth century's most influential fantasy authors.Irish author Lord Dunsany majorly influenced generations of writers, including J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, and many more, and his Fifty-One Tales, a collection of short stories first published in 1915, has delighted readers for more than a century. These vignettes—some no more than a few paragraphs long—offer brief glimpses into worlds of sparkl...

If you were looking for the Holy Bible of the horror anthologies, consider yourself lucky, because you just found it! Cosmic horror, supernatural events, ghost stories, weird fiction, mystical fantasies, occult narratives, this book plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. This box set includes all the seven volumes of the collection.

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. ClarkeBefore 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...

The Collected Fiction of Lord Dunsany gathers together many of Lord Dunsany's classic works of fantasy and assorted fiction in a single inclusive volume. Alongside Dunsany's brilliant prose, the evocative original illustrations of S. H. Sime bring many of the stories to life in vivid detail.Born Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the 18th Baron of Dunsany, Lord Dunsany's works ranged from poetry and plays to fantasy and adventure fiction. Lord Dunsany's prodigious works in...

First published in 1912, "The Book of Wonder" is a short story collection by Lord Dunsany, a writer and playwright now most famous for his fantasy stories, predominantly in the form of short stories and with an atmosphere and style so different to what is now considered fantasy fiction as to put it almost in another genre."The Book of Wonder" contains 14 short tales, each one strong in elements of the fantastic, the mythic, the romantic and often too the tragic. Dunsany writes stor...