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Showing 1 - 20 of 24 items
By Malcolm C. Lyons, Ursula Lyons, Robert Irwin, Malcolm C. Lyons, Ursula Lyons,, Nick Laird. 2010
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end…
this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.By Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards, Hermann Palsson, Paul Edwards. 1985
Combining traditional myth, oral history and re-worked European legend to depict an ancient realm of heroism and wonder, the seven…
tales collected here are among the most fantastical of all the Norse romances. Powerfully inspired works of Icelandic imagination, they relate intriguing, often comical tales of famous kings, difficult gods and women of great beauty, goodness or cunning. The tales plunder a wide range of earlier literature from Homer to the French romances - as in the tale of the wandering hero Arrow-Odd, which combines several older legends, or Egil and Asmund, where the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops is skilfully adapted into a traditional Norse legend. These are among the most outrageous, delightful and exhilarating tales in all Icelandic literature.By Jesse Byock. 2006
In a land of ice, great warriors search for glory...When a dragon threatens the people of the north, only one…
man can destroy the fearsome beast. Elsewhere, a mighty leader gathers a court of champions, including a noble warrior under a terrible curse. The Earth's creation is described; tales of the gods and evil Frost Giants are related; and the dark days of Ragnarok foretold.Journey into a realm of legend, where heroes from an ancient age do battle with savage monsters, and every man must live or die by the sword ...By Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Sibelan Forrester, Anna Gunin and Olga Meerson, Olga Meerson. 2012
'She turned into a frog, into a lizard, into all kinds of other reptiles and then into a spindle'In these…
tales, young women go on long and difficult quests, wicked stepmothers turn children into geese and tsars ask dangerous riddles, with help or hindrance from magical dolls, cannibal witches, talking skulls, stolen wives, and brothers disguised as wise birds. Half the tales here are true oral tales, collected by folklorists during the last two centuries, while the others are reworkings of oral tales by four great Russian writers: Alexander Pushkin, Nadezhda Teffi, Pavel Bazhov and Andrey Platonov. In his introduction to these new translations, Robert Chandler writes about the primitive magic inherent in these tales and the taboos around them, while in the afterword, Sibelan Forrester discusses the witch Baba Yaga. This edition also includes an appendix, bibliography and notes. Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth ChandlerWith Sibelan Forrester, Anna Gunin and Olga MeersonBy Kaaron Warren, Elizabeth Bear, Reggie Oliver, Richard Bowes, Steve Duffy, Melanie Tem, Lisa Tuttle, Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, Barbara Roden, Nicole J. LeBoeuf, Kathe Koja, Steve Rasnic Tem, Carol Emshwiller, Michael Cisco, Margo Lanagan, John Langan, Laird Barron. 1989
A collection of &“mesmerizing tales, each one creepier than the next&” that go beyond the traditional vampire myths (Library Journal).…
When we think of vampires, an image instantly arises: fangs sunk deep into the throat of the victim. But bloodsucking is merely one form of vampirism. For this brilliantly original anthology, multiple award-winning editor Ellen Datlow solicited stories from many of the most powerfully dark voices in contemporary horror, who conjure tales that will chill readers to the marrow. In addition to the traditional fanged creatures, Datlow presents stories about the leeching of emotion, the draining of the soul, and other dark deeds of predation and exploitation, infestation, and evisceration . . . tales of life essence, literal or metaphorical, stolen. Seventeen stories by such acclaimed authors as Elizabeth Bear, Richard Bowes, Kathe Koja, Margo Lanagan, Carol Emshwiller, and Lisa Tuttle redefine the terror of vampirism.By Thomas Malory. 2006
He was born to be King. But he would die for his people ...From the moment he draws the sword…
Excalibur from a magic stone, King Arthur is hailed as the saviour of England. With his loyal band of brothers, the Knights of the Round Table, he reigns over a golden age of chivalry and enchantment.But dark forces are stirring in the land. Sir Launcelot's fatal attraction to Arthur's beautiful wife Guenever threatens to divide the realm. And when the scheming Mordred tries to usurp the King, one last epic battle must be fought on English soil ...By M Sivadasa. 1995
Half mythical, heroic and sagacious, the emperor Vikramaditya is widely regarded as India's greatest monarch. This collection of stories tells…
of the ruler's fabled encounter with a vetala, a genie who inhabits the body of a corpse. The emperor begs the spirit for his help against a mighty necromancer and is told in return twenty-four tales, each of which presents a situation he might face as a king and culminates in a riddle that he must solve. With each answer, Vikramaditya displays his deep wisdom, proving himself to be the ideal monarch and winning, in the twenty-fifth tale, the guidance he needs from the vetala to destroy his powerful enemy. Written down in medieval times but inspired by an oral tradition stretching back centuries, these wise and witty tales rank amongst the great masterpieces of Sanskrit literature.By Stephen Belcher. 2005
Gathering a wide range of traditional African myths, this compelling new collection offers tales of heroes battling mighty serpents and…
monstrous birds, brutal family conflict and vengeance, and desperate migrations across vast and alien lands. From impassioned descriptions of animal-creators to dramatic stories of communities forced to flee monstrous crocodiles, all the narratives found here concern origins - whether of the universe, peoples or families. Together, they create a kaleidoscopic picture of the rich and varied oral traditions that have shaped the culture and society of successive generations of Africans for thousands of years, throughout the long struggle to survive and explore this massive and environmentally diverse continent.By Charlie Jiao, Katalina Watt, Kavya Venkat, Mary Zambales, Archita Mittra, Mirha Butt, Moachiba Jamir, Audris Candra, L Chan, Nathanael Boon, M K Sarraj, Ashley Deng. 2024
Lost spirits stroll the halls, a vengeful Kaperosa haunts the lake, and the past comes back with a burning vengeance.…
All this and more inside the rusted gates of the Mallory Thorne School of Excellence.Haunted Hallways: The Mallory Thorne School of Excellence is a chilling collection of stories all taking place on the grounds of a mysterious boarding school, featuring some of the most up-and-coming Asian voices in horror from across the globe. With the allure of the Gothic, and of the ghosts that were left behind, melded with themes of identity, religion, and home - the perfect spine-tingling tale awaits you inside.By T Cooper & Adam Mansbach. 2006
Cooper & Mansbach team with some of today’s most talented writers to vitalize American history. “This is a ‘people’s history’…
with tongue in cheek: delightfully funny, imaginative, but with a subtle undertone of seriousness. I enjoyed it immensely.” —Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States History is distorted the moment it’s recorded—and in these politically dishonest times, challenging the stories we’re told is more important than ever. In this groundbreaking anthology of original fiction, a diverse group of America’s best writers takes on the task of creating counter-narratives to mainstream American history. Here are some of the moments and the people left out of the textbooks. Here is what else happened—on the margins of American life, and in between the lines of our history books. A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing brings together an eclectic array of celebrated authors and cartoonists to create a patchwork, anecdotal history of this complicated country. From the Chinese discovery of America in 1426 to the new McCarthyism of a post–9/11 world, this collection recasts everything from the moon landing to the Lindbergh kidnapping, westward expansion to the sexual proclivities of Civil War officers. Riveting, inventive, and politically vital, this anthology picks up—and yanks on—America’s supposed commitment to seeking the truth . . . even if that truth is revealed in fiction. Original stories & artwork by: Daniel Alarcon, Amy Bloom, Kate Bornstein, Alexander Chee, T Cooper, Keith Knight, Ron Kovic, Paul La Farge, Felicia Luna Lemus, Adam Mansbach, Valerie Miner, Tommy O’Malley, Neal Pollack, David Rees, Sarah Schulman, Darin Strauss, and Benjamin Weissman.By Stephen King, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind. 2004
Acclaimed writer and editor Robert Silverberg gathered eleven of the finest writers in Fantasy to contribute to this collection of…
short novels. Each of the writers was asked to write a new story based on one of his or her most famous series: from Stephen King's opening piece set in his popular Gunslinger universe to Robert Jordan's early look at his famed Wheel of Time saga, these stories are exceptionally well written and universally well told. Features short stories set in the worlds of......Stephen King's The Dark Tower...Terry Pratchett's Discworld...Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth...Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker...Robert Silverberg's Majipoor...Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea...Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn...George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire...Anne McCaffrey's Pern...Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga...Robert Jordan's Wheel of TimeAt the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.By Jack V. Haney and Sibelan Forrester. 2021
Up to now, there has been no complete English-language version of the Russian folktales of A. N. Afanas’ev. This translation…
is based on L. G. Barag and N. V. Novikov’s edition, widely regarded as the authoritative Russian-language edition. The present edition includes commentaries to each tale as well as its international classification number. This third volume contains 305 tales, those numbered 319–579, as well as forty-five additional tales from among those denied publication by the Russian censors. The folktales of A. N. Afanas’ev represent the largest single collection of folktales in any European language and perhaps in the world. Widely regarded as the Russian Grimm, Afanas’ev collected folktales from throughout the Russian Empire in what are now regarded as the three East Slavic languages, Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian. In his lifetime, Afanas’ev published more than 575 tales in his most popular and best-known work, Narodnye russkie skazki. In addition to this basic collection, he prepared a volume of Russian legends, many on religious themes; a collection of mildly obscene tales, Russkie zavetnye skazki; and voluminous writings on Slavic folklife and mythology. His works were subject to the strict censorship of ecclesiastical and state authorities that lasted until the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Overwhelmingly, his particular emendations were stylistic, while those of the censors mostly concerned content.By Jack V. Haney. 2015
Up to now, there has been no complete English-language version of the Russian folktales of A. N. Afanas’ev. This translation…
is based on L. G. Barag and N. V. Novikov’s edition, widely regarded as the authoritative Russian-language edition. The present edition includes commentaries to each tale as well as its international classification number. This second volume of 140 tales continues the work started in Volume I, also published by University Press of Mississippi. A third planned volume will complete the first English-language set. The folktales of A. N. Afanas’ev represent the largest single collection of folktales in any European language and perhaps in the world. Widely regarded as the Russian Grimm, Afanas’ev collected folktales from throughout the Russian Empire in what are now regarded as the three East Slavic languages, Byelorusian, Russian, and Ukrainian. The result of his own collecting, the collecting of friends and correspondents, and in a few cases his publishing of works from earlier and forgotten collections is truly phenomenal. In his lifetime, Afanas’ev published more than 575 tales in his most popular and best-known work, Narodnye russkie skazki. In addition to this basic collection, he prepared a volume of Russian legends, many on religious themes; a collection of mildly obscene tales, Russkie zavetnye skazki; and voluminous writings on Slavic folk life and mythology. His works were subject to the strict censorship of ecclesiastical and state authorities that lasted until the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Overwhelmingly, his particular emendations were stylistic, while those of the censors mostly concerned content. The censored tales are generally not included in this volume.By William Bernard Mccarthy. 2007
For years, many folklorists have denied the possibility of a truly American folk or fairy tale. They have argued that…
the tales found in the United States are watered-down derivatives of European fare. With this gathering, William Bernard McCarthy compiles evidence strongly to the contrary. Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales represents these tales as they have been told in the United States from Revolutionary days until the present. To capture this richness, tales are grouped in chapters that represent regional and ethnic groups, including Iberian, French, German, British, Irish, other European, African American, and Native American. These tales are drawn from published collections, journals, and archives, and from fieldwork by McCarthy and his colleagues. Created along the nationalist model of the Brothers Grimm yet as diverse in its voices and themes as the nation it represents, Cinderella in America shows these tales truly merit the designation American.By Jack V. Haney. 2014
The folktales of A. N. Afanas’ev represent the largest single collection of folktales in any European language and perhaps in…
the world. Widely regarded as the Russian Grimm, Afanas’ev collected folktales from throughout the Russian Empire in what are now regarded as the three East Slavic languages, Byelorusian, Russian, and Ukrainian. The result of his own collecting, the collecting of friends and correspondents, and in a few cases his publishing of works from earlier and forgotten collections is truly phenomenal. In his lifetime, Afanas’ev published more than 575 tales in his most popular and best-known work, Narodnye russkie skazki. In addition to this basic collection he prepared a volume of Russian legends, many on religious themes, an anthology of mildly obscene tales, and voluminous writings on Slavic folk life and Slavic mythology. His works were subject to the strict censorship of ecclesiastical and state authorities that lasted until the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of the twentieth century. Overwhelmingly, his particular emendations were of a stylistic nature, while those of the censors mostly concerned content. The censored tales are generally not included. Up to now, there has been no complete English-language version of the Russian folktales of Afanas’ev. This translation is based on L. G. Barag and N. V. Novikov’s edition (Moscow: Nauka, 1984-1986), widely regarded as the authoritative edition. The present edition includes commentaries to each tale as well as its international classification number.By Jack V. Haney. 2013
This volume of folktales from the Far North of European Russia features seventeen works by five narrators of the Russian…
tale, all recorded in the twentieth century. The tales, distinguished by their extraordinary length and by the manner in which they were commonly told, appear to have flourished only in the twentieth century and only in Russian Karelia. Although the tales are easily recognized as wondertales, or fairy tales, their treatment of the traditional matter is anything but usual. In these tales one encounters such topics as regicide, matricide, patricide, fratricide, premarital relations between the sexes and more, all related in the typical manner of the Russian folktale. The narrators were not educated beyond a rudimentary level. All were middle-aged or older, and all were men. Crew members of a fishing or hunting vessel plying the White Sea or lumberjacks or trappers in the vast northern forests, they frequently began the narration of a tale in an evening, then broke off at an appropriate moment and continued at a subsequent gathering. Such tales were thus told serially. Given their length, their thematic and narrative complexity, and their stylistic proficiency, one might even refer to them as orally delivered Russian short stories or novellas.By Austin Bunn. 2015
A brilliant, inventive debut story collection in the vein of Kevin Wilson and Wells Tower.Brimming with life and unforgettable voices,…
the stories in Austin Bunn’s dazzling collection explore the existential question: what happens at “the end” and what lies beyond it? In the wry but affecting “How to Win an Unwinnable War,” a summer class on nuclear war for gifted teenagers turns a struggling family upside down. A young couple’s idyllic beach honeymoon is interrupted by terrorism in the lush, haunting “Getting There and Away.” When an immersive videogame begins turning off in the heartbreaking “Griefer,” an obsessive player falls in love with a mysterious player in the final hours of a world.Told in a stunning range of voices, styles, and settings—from inside the Hale-Bopp cult to the deck of a conquistador’s galleon adrift at the end of the ocean—the stories in Bunn’s collection capture the transformations and discoveries at the edge of irrevocable change. Each tale presents a distinct world, told with deep emotion, energizing language, and characters with whom we have more in common that we realize. They signal the arrival of an astonishing new talent in short fiction.By Christa C. Jones. 2023
Djeha—also known as Juha, Jeh’a, and Ch’ha, among many variations—is an iconic figure, the trickster hero of an oral folktale…
tradition that has existed for centuries. The famous Maghrebian prankster is a poor, cunning, and resourceful character that delights in immoral behavior. Orientalists Auguste Mouliéras (1855-1931) and René Basset (1855-1924) were among the first Frenchmen to collect and translate popular Berber folktales. Today, trickster folktales from Algeria’s mountainous Kabylia region are not well known in the Anglophone world, even though they continue to be highly popular in France and in North Africa. Djeha, the North African Trickster is an annotated, critical translation of Auguste Mouliéras’s folktale collection Les Fourberies de Si Djeh’a, first published in French in 1892.The volume contains sixty tales and an in-depth introduction in which Christa C. Jones discusses jocular literature in Islam, the widespread oral folktale tradition linked to Djeha and his Turkish twin brother Nasreddin Hoca, and the impact of colonialism on the gathering and dissemination of the tales. The trickster is at the center of six themed chapters: “Family and Kinship”; “Animal Tales"; “Faces, Places, or Daily Life in the Village"; “Foodways”; “The Intricacies of Hospitality: Beware of Friends and Foes!"; and “Religion, Death, and the Afterlife.” Each chapter contains ten folktales preceded by a short introduction that contextualizes the pieces using historical, folkloristic, literary, and ethnographical sources. Ultimately, the book contributes to the preservation of an ancestral oral heritage, delivering this enduring character to new audiences.By David G. Hartwell. 1999
Travel to the Farthest Reaches of the ImaginationAcclaimed editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell is back with his fourth annual…
high-powered collection of the year's most inventive, entertaining, and awe-inspiring science fiction. In short, the best.Here are stories from today's top name authors, plus exciting newcomers, all eager to land you on exotic planets, introduce you to strange new life forms, and show you scenes more amazing than anything you've imagined.So sit back and blast off for an amazing trip withStephen Baxter Gregory Benford David Brin Nancy Kress Bruce Sterling Michael Swanwick and many more...By Rachel Caine, Jennifer Estep, Kevin Hearne, Seanan McGuire. 2013
A star-studded urban fantasy anthology starring bestselling authors Rachel Caine, Jennifer Estep, Kevin Hearne, Seanan McGuire, and Rob Thurman, and…
including Delilah S. Dawson, Kelly Gay, Mark Henry, Hillary Jacques, Jackie Kessler, Kelly Meding, Allison Pang, Nicole D. Peeler, and Jaye Wells, whose stories explore the creepy, mysterious, and, yes, sometimes magical world of traveling carnivals.Come one, come all! The Carniepunk Midway promises you every thrill and chill a traveling carnival can provide. But fear not! Urban fantasy’s biggest stars are here to guide you through this strange and dangerous world. . . .RACHEL CAINE’s vampires aren’t child’s play, as a naïve teen discovers when her heart leads her far, far astray in “The Cold Girl.” With “Parlor Tricks,” JENNIFER ESTEP pits Gin Blanco, the Elemental Assassin, against the Wheel of Death and some dangerously creepy clowns. SEANAN McGUIRE narrates a poignant, ethereal tale of a mysterious carnival that returns to a dangerous town after twenty years in “Daughter of the Midway, the Mermaid, and the Open, Lonely Sea.” KEVIN HEARNE’s Iron Druid and his wisecracking Irish wolfhound discover in “The Demon Barker of Wheat Street” that the impossibly wholesome sounding Kansas Wheat Festival is actually not a healthy place to hang out. With an eerie, unpredictable twist, ROB THURMAN reveals the fate of a psychopath stalking two young carnies in “Painted Love.”