#or Dunsany's Pegana stories

[sayonaramidnight]

Tagged by @starlightcleric ages ago, but never forgotten <3

1. the last book I read:

Anna In w grobowcach świata (Anna In in the tombs of the world), a modern retelling of a Sumerian myth by Olga Tokarczuk <3

2. a book I recommend:

The whole Wheel of Time series!

3. a book that I couldn’t put down:

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey. When I first got it, I read it until 2 am or so, and only stopped because I was too sleepy to go on.

4. a book that I’ve read twice (or more):

The books from questions 2 and 3.

5. a book on my TBR:

Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky!

6. a book I’ve put down:

Lolita. I'm not sure whether it just wasn't my cup of tea or it wasn't the right time to read it; maybe someday I'll get back to it, because every dropped book feels like a personal failure to me :<

7. a book on my wish list:

Green Rider by Kristen Britain. Don't ask why. I don't know. I've never read it, but it's been haunting me since I first saw it 20 years ago or so, but had no money to buy it. Now it's nowhere to be found and I'm not even sure whether it's any good. But it was calling out to me back then. It promised a lot.

Also, The Riddle-master's game by Patricia A. McKillip. I do have an e-book, but holding a physical copy of a book and reading it is just something else :<

8. a favourite book from childhood:

Andersen's fairy tales, illustrated by my favourite artist:

9. a book you would give to a friend:

Probably a book the friend would be interested in XD

10. a book of poetry or lyrics you own:

I'm ashamed to say I don't think I've got any? I used to, when I was much younger, but they've long fallen apart or been given to my neighbours' kids. Because it was mostly children's poetry XD

11. a nonfiction book you own:

Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will - a lovely gift from my bestie <3

12. what are you currently reading:

Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You.

13. what are you planning on reading next:

The Gods of Pegana and Other Fantasy Tales - a nice big collection of short stories by Lord Dunsany! Actually, I started reading it this morning, because why read only one book, if you can read TWO? <3

Tagging: @traveleorzea, @risualto, @raceofhearts and every bookworm who sees this <3

[dangerouscommiesubversive]

related to the "how do you organise your books" poll, what's in the fucked up weird tales section of your books? been looking for recs on what to read!

Right! Yes! Hello, friend! I meant to answer this days ago, but last week was deeply weird in several ways and then yesterday I fully spaced out. Anyway. The Weird Tales section!

First: here's the shelf! (It's the second one down, with all of the little whatsits on it.)

Mainly when I say "fucked up weird tales," I literally mean "authors who were published in the magazine Weird Tales in the early 20th century, and authors related to them." Mostly for my collection that's H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard--I have basically all of Lovecraft's work in two huge volumes, as well as The Lovecraft Lexicon, which is a reference book that I mostly use when I want to drop a random name into a story as a background gag. For Howard I have these story collections:

Horror stories

the complete Conan the Barbarian

Kull the Atlantean (who was sort of a proto-Conan)

Solomon Kane (also horror stories, but about a specific guy)

I also have a book of Clark Ashton Smith stories, he was another contemporary and friend of Lovecraft and Howard, but I'm not sure where it's gotten to. On the shelf above (which is all mass-market/small format paperbacks) I have two collections of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber, the other great pioneer of sword-and-sorcery fiction along with Howard.

Past that, in Authors Related To Them, we've got:

Michael Moorcock (influenced by them)--most of my Moorcock is on the next shelf up, because I have all of the original Elric novels in cute little mass-market paperbacks, but I have an Elric collection on the Weird Tales shelf proper

Arthur Machen (influence on Lovecraft)--one book, a combined edition of The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams. I'd recommend The Great God Pan as a great example of late 19th century horror fiction, keeping mind that it is of course tremendously racist and misogynist, as is...a lot of this stuff, unfortunately.

The King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers--late 19th century supernatural and horror fiction, which the Weird Tales crew read

The King of Elfland's Daughter, Wonder Tales, and The Complete Pegana, by Lord Dunsany (influence on Lovecraft)--lovely, slightly stuffy Irish fantasy. The King of Elfland's Daughter is beautiful and I highly recommend it.

Past them, we have other horror and horror-tinged science fiction and fantasy which seemed, by my highly scientific Vibes-Based Judgement, to belong on the same shelf:

Magic for Liars and The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey (here on Tumblr at @gaileyfrey)--two truly astonishing modern novels, both of which made me cry hysterically at least once. Magic for Liars is a murder-investigation detective story set at a private magic school in California; The Echo Wife is a horror-ish science fiction story about cloning and spousal abuse. As you might be able to guess, there are some for real trigger warnings here--these books are both extraordinarily good, and I highly recommend them, but if you've got concerns shoot me a follow-up ask and I'll give you the TWs I remember. I also very much recommend their novella collection American Hippo, which is maybe my favorite alternate history of all time.

The Iron Dragon's Daughter, The Dragons of Babel, and The Iron Dragon's Mother, by Michael Swanwick--I read The Iron Dragon's Daughter for the first time at an inappropriately young age, and have reread it every few years since then. I ought to give it another reread, actually, and properly reread the sequels at the same time. Really they're all standalone novels in the same deeply weird, scary Fairyland, and, as with the Gailey novels, are hip-deep in TWs, but they're so good.

The Lottery and Other Stories, Hangsaman, and The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson--Hi! Shirley Jackson is my favorite horror author ever! Please read The Haunting of Hill House, and also We Have Always Lived In The Castle, which I don't have on the shelf because I own it in digital! I haven't finished her other books, so I can't recommend them yet, but I love her so much, please read Shirley Jackson novels.

Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir--gory horror sci-fi with an absolutely wild sense of humor and the toxic necromancy lesbians that a lot of folks on Tumblr have been talking about. (There's a third book, Nona the Ninth, which I have in digital and haven't read yet.) I think these books are excellent, but they're definitely not to everyone's tastes--give yourself a couple of chapters of Gideon to see if you like it, and then if you read the whole thing take a deep breath, because Harrow will definitely throw you for a loop anyway.

There are a few more books behind Dr. Lambshead, the plague doctor, but they're not actually on theme, I just needed to find a spot where they fit.

I would recommend literally any of these books, although pretty much all of them come with caveats of some kind--the older books and stories are often, as I said before, dreadfully racist and otherwise unpleasantly messy, and many of the more modern novels come with serious trigger warnings attached.

I also read a lot of books in digital and thus can't shelve them with the others, and some books fit better in other sections (such as large collections of books by a single author), so here are some other recommendations:

For an incredibly beautiful and moving feminist take on Lovecraft's fantasy work, read The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson

For a very intense retelling of Lovecraft's wildly racist story "The Horror at Red Hook" from a Black perspective, read The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle

For a series of interlinked Lovecraft pastiches set in the mid-20th century and addressing, again, a lot of the racism issues, read Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff (there's also a sequel that just came out, but I haven't read it yet)

For a moving, complex take on sword-and-sorcery fantasy, with lots of discussion of power dynamics, slavery, racism, feminism, sexuality, economics, bouncy balls, and kinky gay sex, read the Nevèrÿon stories, by Samuel R. Delany, collected in Tales of Nevèrÿon, Neveryóna, Flight from Nevèrÿon, and Return to Nevèrÿon. Then, if you're as in love with his writing as I am, read Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, or Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. I mean I love almost everything of his that I've read but those are good starting points.

If you were looking at the top shelf in the photo and wondering if any of those books might be a slightly trashy, extremely horny fantasy romance novel set in an alternate universe where men are few and far between and thus groups of sisters all marry one guy and share him, read A Brother's Price, by Wen Spencer.

[not-souleaterpost]

Lord Dunsany and the broken telephone of "fantasy"

So for my weekly post that nobody will care for, I'll again squeeze out some shit related to a topic I researched for the iceberg, but that doesnt really have anything to do with Soul Eater:

Lord Dunsany is often quted in some "deeplore" "well akshually" stuff to be the father of "modern fantasy", but did all the people who read him miss the point?

So I'll start by saying I wasnt ever into fantasy, it allways seemed kinda corny, only stuff I cared was LoTR cause I kinda grew up and around people were obssesed with it and DQ, cause of the DBZ bleed over and because I just like the slimes lol.

That may makes me disqualified about commenting, but eh, I dunno, I think my point will still stand, cause I will bring it back to Tolkien now:

Some people say he was inspired by Dunsanys "word building" to make his own overly convoluted mythology, but here lies my objection:

The two books I read of Dunsany about "the gods of Pegana" seem not really care about the "lore"

They seem to be written in the style as if they were some holy book, yet the names seem deliberately random and often the storys are either contradictory or mix up the details to make a point and to reflect that feeling of myths that arent organized by some obsessive nerd wiki for logical consistency.

Because in the end the books arent about "fantasy" (atleast the ones I have read), but as kinda didactic laments about the authors perceived nihilism and meaninglessnes/cruelty of the world.

Ok that may be reductive, cause there are many vivid and even beautiful or fascinating things described, but in the end you feel that tone of "Oh that is like fanfiction from the Bible book about how everythings is just meaningles vapor" tone.

Like in "the gods and time" there is a great short story about a prophet who sees the "true gods" and abondons the old ones for them with his followers, only to repeatedly then see even greater gods, only to lose more and more of his acolytes with each subsequent trip and in the end arive back at the old gods he rejected at the star - basically a commentary at the foly for the strive of knowledge or about how things are more simple at the end of it all than one trys to think.

But the important thing is that the "gods" of this short story dont really matter more than for the point they make in it - I would be surprised that for example the "mocking gods" have some specific lore, events and super powers etc like shit in Tolkiens stuff has, or in modern generic fantasy, where everyone is some world or warcraft charachter shooting magical auras.

Still, maybe Im ignorant, and in all the other storys there actually is that feeling of a shared mythology and "wordbuilding" besides the tone of "life's a bitch and then you die"

Anyways, what was the point of this all? I guess to say that it is kinda sad that an innovatitive form of literature gets reduced into the current state of "top ten word building tips!" videos on youtube.

Ok maybe thats to harsh, even I know how fun it is to come up with a setting and its own intrincitys, but still, I think one shouldnt limit oneself to that - its like watching DBZ for the power levels - when the point is that they dont matter.

But in the end, maybe this post just shows my own ignorance - maybe most fantasy does that already. Yet when I allways hear everybody praise some Brandon Sanderson guy, who seems to only care about "magic systems being consistent" and literally color codes his creatures to match emotions or some shit idk😂

And also, I wonder if Tolkien had actually finished more books if he hadnt noodled around with his silly lore matching, especially when it in the end still is contradictory😂🤷‍♂️

Anyways, sorry this kinda sounds more spitful than I wanted, guess its cause I saw some video where they talked about these books as if they were all about just creating some wacky fantasy world, which seemed strange to me after having read even just a small part of his whole work.

So: Yeah...Sorry

[nothingofvaluewaslost]

STORY: Of Marr the Unbeliever

A short fantasy story, inspired by the mythical stories of Lord Dunsany (in The Gods of Pegana, for example). An agnostic sets out in search for incontrovertible truth.

Of Marr the Unbeliever, by Christina Nordlander

At that time lived Marr, who since his youth had had no reverence for the gods or time for their worship. When he grew to a man he learned not to show it when it would have led to punishment; yet all his friends and loved ones knew.

“Look upon the starry sky,” said Skund, his schoolmaster. “It turns its mosaic above us each night and is far more complex than any tool that men can make – does it not indicate that there is some great intelligence ruling the world?”

“We know nothing of the stars,” Marr replied. “Perhaps it is in their nature to form an eternally recurring pattern, as it is in the nature of grains of sand to fall randomly.”

“Look upon yourself, or our son,” said Milty, his wife. “Are not our souls too singular and beautiful to have arisen from nothing, and must they not expect a better fate than nothing?”

“If only men, of all the beings of the earth, have souls, I do not believe that it is a sign of divine origin,” Marr replied, “any more than the cicada on that stone is a sign of the rule of chance. And what you say of the fate of the soul at the end of this life is only a desire, not a conclusion, for across the dark river none has returned.”

“Beyond the eastern desert stands a carven image that is taller than any tower,” said Balka, the oracle. “So far has no man reached, and it follows that it must have been erected by the gods.”

“That the image exists is no proof that the gods made it,” Marr replied. “If it even is real and not a tale, it is equally likely that men once dwelt there and erected it.”

Yet the oracle’s words stayed with him, and he felt the excitement that would move him to set out, because as little as his interlocutors did he know, and in one way or another, the journey would give him clarity.

So he equipped himself for travelling and turned his course towards the desert, which widens in the east and stretches so far that some say it is the land where the morning sun is born.

The first day he travelled through barren land and thorns. The second day he travelled through a desert of sand that shone soft as gold dust. The third day he remembered nothing of the world around him, for the sun breathed on his head and disordered his senses, so that he saw his shadow grow into something else and dark long shapes wriggle across his track, and sometimes he did not know whether something had stung him, and sometimes he hoped that it had. The fourth day he travelled through a landscape that was terrible, because it resembled nothing more than the skeleton of a world, where weather might never come and all that remained was chemistry.

The fifth day he travelled through a desert of grey dust that here and there retained the shapes of bone fragments, and then he knew that he had reached the parts whence he could no longer return, and that fearing was now bootless. The image was the only thing upright here, so he wandered towards it.

It seemed human of form, but perhaps that was only a function of its height compared to its width. Its head was just an eye. An eagle’s beak jutted out below it, as though a symbol of the sharpness of the gaze. While Marr looked at the image it seemed to him no larger than some nobleman’s colossal statue, and that was when he realised the abyss of distance between them. Then did he take his gaze from it, and saw that before him was no longer a smooth desert of bones, but a depth where the ground turned downward and night rested at the bottom, and down there he saw the stars. There was no longer any doubt about the image’s builders.

As it was, he returned to his homeland, because a caravan found him where he wandered in the desert of sand, so bewildered that they first thought there was little hope of him recovering. However, his health returned, and by the time he saw his native land in the distance, he was his old self again.

In fact more of it had returned than one might have expected. He told those who wished to hear about the statue in the desert, for his travails had not blotted out the memory. A change had taken place in him, but those who knew him had expected a greater one. For the holy days came, and Marr neither sacrificed nor went to the temple, so that his wife and son had to go alone.

“Why?” Milty asked later and put a whole question into the broken word.

And Marr replied:

“Now that I know, I no longer need to pray.”

[lightdancer1]

Thanks to Lovecraft being public domain:

One of the bits I use to integrate both my original and my fanfiction work is my take on the Necronomicon/Al-Azif. I usually refer to it with the Arabic name, and since the original Cthulhu mythos referred to volumes I give it 99 volumes. In my stories one of the volumes refers to the Oathkeepers/Kelzhandari, aka the Urhalzantrani....and one of them, even if not by name or more than veiled allusions, is all about the seven Endless who in my own cosmology have a mirror with the Seven Outer Gods.

Abdul Hazred is one of the Riddah prophets in my particular history, and essentially an archetypal evil sorcerer in a specifically Levantine/Hijazi/Arabic context.

As the in-universe ur-example of the Lovecraftian main character, Hazred was a celibate nerd who deciphered the deep truths of the universe, including the Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth cycles and various spells that can actually do measurable damage to various eldritch entities or summon them with a guaranteed result.....though if the person who does the summoning forgets not to call up what they can't put down it's on them when whatever they summon invariably turns on them.

The great lords of Urhalzan/the Kelzhandari are volume 91, the Endless are volume 49 (seven times seven, natchurly).

Those are the only set of volumes that I have with specific numbers, while the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles dominate a much larger portion of the narrative, along with various myths and couplets of the Dreamlands. And as far as it goes, Lovecraft did the 'collective unconsciousness of sapient life manifests as dreams and dreaming as fantasy' thing more successfully in the long term than his predecessor Dunsany and both predate Gaiman's Sandman mythology.

I do integrate aspects of Pegana and the Lovecraft Dreamlands as a part of the Dreaming in the Sandman-centric tales. Celephais and Sarnath and Kadath in the Cold Waste and the various monsters of Lovecraft's dreamlands, as well as the Gods of Pegana (Mung is Death, the figure who has a book that holds the future of the world and when the future ends the world ends with it is Destiny and that one in particular is so close to Destiny that if Gaiman didn't riff on that for his cosmology it is an identical concept, at least).

[thebookwormdaydreamer]

I’ll read LOTR after finishing Lord of Chaos and honestly, I’m a little excited to read it after reading Lord Dunsany’s short stories and The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Older, classic fantasy has such a different feel compared to modern fantasy- more wistful, mysterious, plus the old-timey prose contributes to the feel of classic fantasy. I’ve heard that Lord Dunsany has influenced Tolkien and I loved TKoED so let’s see if I enjoy LOTR too. 

Come to think of it, why hasn’t anyone made adaptations of The King of Elfland’s Daughter or the Pegana stories? 

[onceuponatimeaw]

H.P.Lovecraft’s inspiration

Both of Lovecraft's parents died in a mental hospital, and some critics believe that a concern with having inherited a propensity for physical and mental degeneration is reflected in the plot of The Shadow over Innsmouth. It also shares some themes with his earlier story, "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family". Cthulhu, an entity from previous Lovecraft stories, is the overlord of the sea creatures. The mind of the narrator deteriorates when he is afforded a glimpse of what exists outside his perceived reality. This is a central tenet of Cosmicism, which Lovecraft emphasizes in the opening sentence of "The Call of Cthulhu": "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

Lovecraft based the town of Innsmouth on his impressions of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which he had visited in 1923 and fall 1931. The real Newburyport features as a neighboring town in the narrative. A likely influence on the plot is Lovecraft's horror of miscegenation, which is documented by Lovecraft biographer L. Sprague de Camp and others.

Robert M. Price cites two works as literary sources for The Shadow over Innsmouth: Robert W. Chambers' "The Harbor-Master" and Irvin S. Cobb's "Fishhead". Chambers' story concerns the discovery of "the remnants of the last race of amphibious human beings," living in a five-mile deep chasm just off the Atlantic coast. The creature of the title is described as "a man with round, fixed, fishy eyes, and soft, slaty skin. But the horror of the thing were the two gills that swelled and relaxed spasmodically." Lovecraft was evidently impressed by this tale, writing in a letter to Frank Belknap Long: "God! The Harbour-Master!!!" "Fishhead" is the story of a "human monstrosity" with an uncanny resemblance to a fish: his skull sloped back so abruptly that he could hardly be said to have a forehead at all; his chin slanted off right into nothing. His eyes were small and round with shallow, glazed, pink-yellow pupils, and they were set wide apart on his head, and they were unwinking and staring, like a fish's eyes. Lovecraft, in "Supernatural Horror in Literature," called Cobb's story "banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake". Price notes that Fishhead, as the "son of a Negro father and a half-breed Indian mother," "embodies unambiguously the basic premise of The Shadow over Innsmouth.... This, of course, is really what Lovecraft found revolting in the idea of interracial marriage...the subtextual hook of different ethnic races mating and 'polluting' the gene pool." Price points out the resemblance in names between the Deep One city of Y'ha-nthlei and Yoharneth-Lahai, a fictional deity in Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana, who "sendeth little dreams out of Pegana to please the people of Earth"—a precursor to Lovecraft's fictional deity Cthulhu, who sends less pleasant dreams from R'lyeh.

The description of the Deep Ones has similarities to the sea creature described in H.G. Wells' short story "In the Abyss" (1896):

Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils. In the position of the ears were two huge gill-covers, and out of these floated a branching tree of coralline filaments, almost like the tree-like gills that very young rays and sharks possess. But the humanity of the face was not the most extraordinary thing about the creature. It was a biped; its almost globular body was poised on a tripod of two frog-like legs and a long, thick tail, and its fore limbs, which grotesquely caricatured the human hand, much as a frog’s do, carried a long shaft of bone, tipped with copper. The colour of the creature was variegated; its head, hands, and legs were purple; but its skin, which hung loosely upon it, even as clothes might do, was a phosphorescent grey.

[vintagerpg]

This is the original H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands box set (1986), a sort of expansion of Call of Cthulhu. It can be used as a unique campaign setting in its own right, or can be bolted on to any existing Call of Cthulhu campaign since, as the name applies, it can be accessed by sleeping.

The world of Earth’s Dreamlands is based on a suite of Lovecraft’s early, pre-Cthulhu stories, inspired largely by Lord Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana. There are quite a few of them, but the most important for our purposes is “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” which serves as a sort of gazetteer upon which the game world is based. It is a weird, semi-medieval place that effecitvely mixes the dreamy with the horrific (You get to ride zebras! You could get sold into slavery and fed to giant spiders!). The place is often pastoral, but there are plenty of awful monsters, like gugs (those hairy critters with the vertical mouths and four arms). You can also go to the moon.  Oh, and every world has cats. You don’t want to meet the cats from Saturn though.

Everything is described with just enough detail to seem familiar and, well, dreamy. The late Kevin Ramos’ art does a lot to sell it for me. That gug, man.

The rules have been issued several times over the year, but not a lot of Dreamlands specific scenarios aside of the (very good) Dreaming Stone campaign, though many regular CoC scenarios incorporate aspects of the the Dreamlands. As much as I love this box – and I do, I firmly believe it is the best of the non-1920s Call of Cthulhu setting supplements by a large margin – I think there is a ton of untapped potential here. Still, it does an excellent job of converting a strange and melancholy literary world into an interesting and accessible roleplaying world.

Join us on Patreon!

[tomtefairytaleblog]

The thing that fascinates me the most about The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus is that L. Frank Baum created an entire pantheon of gods just for the story. And this would be years before J.R.R. Tolkien would do the same in his Middle-Earth stories, and even a couple years before Lord Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana. 

The text insists on referring to them as “Immortals,” and later on states that they answer to an unseen “Supreme Master,” which sounds suspiciously like the Christian God, but there’s really no other way to take their appearances and roles in tending to nature and mankind. In fact, if you want to get meta, the text comes off like the children’s version of various mythologies that try to downplay various elements of a mythos for censorship reasons (think the mythology books written by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’s friend Roger Lancelyn Green in the Mid-20th Century). The meta angle works if one remembers that Baum would later link his fantasy books together into one universe, and that he also wrote his Oz books as if he were getting information from Dorothy herself.

This use of mythic archetypes also extends to the Awgwas, the demonic spirits that oppose Santa Claus and the Immortals. They’re vaguely described as gigantic and having scowling faces, and delight in spreading chaos throughout the world (specifically, the text says they like to inspire wicked thoughts in children, which naturally puts them on a narrative collision course with Claus, who wants to bring happiness to the children of the world). In many aspects they’re like the kind of primordial, chaotic beings one would read about in world mythologies, like the Jotuns, especially in how they oppose god-like beings.

[what-mad-universe]

http://neversleepsnetwork.com/podcast/chapter-twelve-all-the-gods-save-one/ In the lost lands of the central sea, a place beyond time, perhaps even existing only in dreams, there is a place where the people have a god they do not worship, lest his waking end the world. Their faith was described in two books and several stories written at the turn of the century by an Irish nobleman that have left a deep mark on the modern fantasy genre, even though he remains obscure outside of genre circles. But Lord Dunsany is likely “your favourite fantasy author’s favourite fantasy author”. Join us as we explore his Pegana mythos.

[paraphernaliawagon]

the current Lord Dunsany, Randall Plunkett, has been getting a lot of media attention for his campaign to rewild his estate. but oddly, these articles and videos never mention his great- (or great-great?)grandfather being one of the most influential fantasy authors of the 20th century. you’d think that would the first thing they’d mention.

you hardly ever see anyone talk about Lord Dunsany these days except about his influence on Lovecraft. a sort of recursive fandom. like “oh i read all of lovecraft’s stuff, might as well read the guy he got some of his best ideas from”

my opinion on Dunsany? he’s a mixed bag. his stories exist on a sliding scale from “nearly unreadable, overwrought ultra-victorian orientalist bullshit” to “pretty damn good.” but he was so prolific there’s probably at least one story he wrote to please any reader. my favorites include “idle days on the Yann” and the one about a guy who buys a magic window that looks out on another world. most of “time and the gods” and “the gods of pegana” are good. dude fucking loved making up gods.

[meatthawsmoth]

What are some of your favorite short or short-ish works of fiction?

HP Lovecraft, Robert Howard’s Conan stories, Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana.

[mongoose-bite]

2017 Reading List

Here it is! The books I’ve read this year. If you want to see my complete collection of reading lists I have them here.

41 books this year, which is the most since I started recording them. I read a lot of shorter novels this year though and I tend to get through genre novels a lot faster than literary ones. I’ll bold the ones I really liked.

First Snow on Fuji – Yasunari Kawabata Pereira Maintains – Antionio Tabucchi Her Smoke Rose Up Forever – James Tiptree Jr. Love in a Fallen City – Eileen Chang The Dressmaker – Rosalie Ham The Accursed – Joyce Carol Oates The Butterfly Man – Heather Rose Hello America – J G Ballard Burial Rites – Hannah Kent A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle The Detour – Gerbrand Bakker Paris Nocturne – Patrick Modiano A Dreamer's Tales and Other Stories – Lord Dunsany Gods of Pegana – Lord Dunsany The Thing About Thugs – Tabish Khair The Tremor of Forgery – Patricia Highsmith His Bloody Project - Graeme Macrae Burnet Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie Men Without Women – Haruki Murakami Out – Natsuo Kirino Moshi Moshi – Banana Yoshimoto Hard Luck and Hardboiled – Banana Yoshimoto Let the Right One In – John Ajvide Lindqvist Hard Times – Charles Dickens When We Were Orphans – Kazuo Ishiguro Lizard – Banana Yoshimoto The Gift of Rain – Tan Twan Eng White is for Witching – Helen Oyeyemi The Invention of Hugo Cabret – Brian Selznick The Fall of the Stone City – Ismail Kadare Book of Wonder  - Lord Dunsany The Blessing of Pan – Lord Dunsany The Curse of the Wise Woman – Lord Dunsany The Black-Eyed Blonde – Benjamin Black (John Banville) The Moving Target – Ross Macdonald White Teeth – Zadie Smith Blind Willow Sleeping Woman – Haruki Murakami Annihilation – Jeff VanderMeer The Game – Diana Wynne Jones The Golden House – Salman Rushdie To The Letter – Simon Garfield

This year I felt I really discovered Banana Yoshimoto. I’ve read a few of her books over the years and generally liked them, but this year they struck me much more deeply and I was reluctant to let them go as I finished them.

What have you folks been reading?

[igotopinions]

Books I Read in 2019

* = Re-read Check out past years: 2012, 2013 (skipped), 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Follow me on Goodreads to get these reviews as they happen. 1) The Right To Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet by Sheila Watt-Cloutier 2) Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire by Emily Witt 3) The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi 4) My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh Reads like a more mature Chuck Palahniuk. 5) Of Dice and Men by ME I won't be a dink and give myself a star rating or glowing review, but I gotta get that credit for my annual reading challenge! I'll also say it's a richly rewarding experience to, after all the work of writing & editing & publishing & promoting, to re-read something you wrote and still feel all the strong, positive feelings it gave as you figured out the first draft. 6) Lagos Noir, edited by Chris Abani 7) The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St. Clair 8) The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi A really fun, cleverly written coming-of-age story with just the right period touches to it. I gobbled this thing down in a couple of days, having no problem seeing why Zadie Smith spoke highly of it in her latest book of essays. 9) Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice 10) America: The Farewell Tour  by Chris Hedges   TL:DR This book is not toilet paper, but it sure is shit-adjacent. It gave me strong feelings, which you can read on Goodreads. 11) The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic by Joanna Ebenstein Great introduction to the subject with fantastic photos & illustrations. My only frustration was the layout, which frequently breaks up the main text mid-sentence for two or even four pages of images with details captions to read or full page quotes, so it takes a bit more effort to read linearly. 12) The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany I found this through the ol' Appendix N reading list and it's not hard to see how this influenced D&D in many ways, but it has value well beyond that novelty. This is a wonderful fantasy tale in the vein of classic fairy tales, a welcome break from the kind of epics we mostly associate with the genre these days. By the final run up to the ending I was really immersed in what I was reading and I know I'll be looking up more of his books. 13) The Worst Is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide by Peter Fleming *14) A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.   The first third remains perfect. The middle third is better than I remember, which is to say very good indeed, despite the feeling of inevitability running through it. The final third remains a pretty obvious punchline stretched out over too many pages, something basically predicted by the ending of the middle story. But! Ah! That first third! 15) The Gods of Pegana by Edward John Moreton Dunsany In theory this was an influence on Lovecraft's Dreamlands cycle books. 16) Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution by Amber Tamblyn 17) Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa 18) 1985 by Anthony Burgess 19) Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan 20) Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler,  Kevin Vennemann (Afterword), Katy Derbyshire (Translation) 21) Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport 22) How To Write Adventure Modules That Don't Suck Edited by Jobe Bittman 23) The Immortal of World's End by Lin Carter 24) This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life by David Foster Wallace 25) My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite *26) Idoru by Oliver Brackenbury 27) Conan by Robert E. Howard,  L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter 28) Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan by Robert E. Howard 29) The Postman by David Brin Yes, this is that “The Postman”, the one which was adapted into a universally reviled Kevin Costner film in the mid-to-late nineties. It is, however, significantly different and far more enjoyable. It is an extremely White Straight Guy book with some curious ideas about gender in the back end, a "Rah rah, America!" through-line, and an obsession with describing horses as "steaming". It is also a well-crafted, clear, concise, quickly-moving story that avoids several obvious turns most authors would have plowed right into, and overall serves as a great exploration of the power of lies & myths. Plus, yeah, it is kind of heartwarming to imagine the concept of snail mail & the people who deliver it serving to re-unite us in the post-apocalypse. Unlike the movie, I'd honestly recommend this. Heck, I'm thinking I'll start exploring the rest of his catalog. 30) Beastie Boys Book by Michael Diamond  & Adam Horowitz If you're a fan, then you'll like this. If not? I dunno man! The whole thing feels like hearing stories from your favourite old high school buddies when they're at their most honest and interesting. Great stuff. 31) Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Raftery 32) Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Michael Shea 33) Conan of Cimmeria by Robert E. Howard,  L. Sprague De Camp, and Lin Carter. As tends to be the case, the pure Howard stories are best. Carter and De Camp are mostly interested in arranging Howard's work into a larger, more coherent universe...which is fine, I guess, but it has a way of making Conan feel less a legend striding in and out of fantastic situations, more a man - a strong, interesting man, sure, yet still just a man. *34) The Hunter by Richard Stark *35) Beast by Paul Kingsnorth 36) The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline 37) It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office by Dale Beran 38) Planetes, Vol. 1-4 by Makoto Yukimura 39) The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan 40) Reawakening Our Ancestors' Lines: Revitalizing Inuit Traditional Tattooing by Angela Hovak Johnston 41) Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq 42) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott Part life-as-a-writer therapy, part craft, this leans more toward the latter than Stephen King's ON WRITING and that's plenty fine.  A nice, light read that holds value for writers at all stages of their career, I reckon. 43) Conan The Freebooter by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp As tends to be the case with these collections, the pure Howard stories are best. That said, Lin Carter carries himself much better here than in some of the earlier volumes. There are no magical abstractions of good and evil arm-wrestling each other while Conan just stares at them... 44) The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie 45) The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft Pretty good stuff but, as was pointed out on the excellent Appendix N Podcast, this story would have been really something had it been edited down a bit. RACISM METER: Honestly, pretty okay, which is saying something for Lovecraft! No cats with awful names or race theory or any of that. Just a good wholesome story of madness and history. 46) Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin 47) Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber 48) The Enchantress of World's End by Lin Carter 49) The Barbarian of World's End by Lin Carter These are not terribly good books....but I keep reading them for the goofy ideas and setting. Averaging 180 pages, they're not a big investment so hey why not? 50) The Giant of World’s End by Lin Carter The first is the best. I think because it was written as a complete story, not the literary equivalent of another episode of a Saturday morning cartoon, as the other World's End books read. As with the rest of the series it is enjoyed more on the merits of the wacky ideas than the quality of prose, including a part near the end who may well have been a source of inspiration for the Emperor of Mankind in the Warhammer 40K universe. Its main drawback is the classic scifi/fantasy failing of providing multiple asides to historical background meant to add depth to the world but which is ultimately meaningless to the reader as it has little if anything to do with the story - nevermind the characters! Heck, it's only 140 pages. It's fun. The ending actually got to me a little. It's a good place to pluck out ideas for tabletop roleplaying, if you're into that. Yup! 51) Wonder Tales: The Book of Wonder and Tales of Wonder by Lord Dunsany 52) Outcast of Redwall by Brian Jacques It's a fun little story, clearly intended for younger audiences, and I've no regrets having bought it second hand. BUT You could have clipped off nearly a hundred pages if the author didn't feel compelled to give you a highly detailed account of every single meal - including many feasts - had by characters big and small. Holy mother of God do you come out of this knowing a lot about the diets of the various woodland creatures, with their meadowberry pies and etc. 53) Björk's Homogenic by Emily MacKay 54) DCC RPG Annual Vol 1 by Steve Bean, Julian Bernick, Daniel Bishop, Jobe Bittman, Tim Callahan, Colin Chapman, Michael Curtis, Edgar Johnson, Brendan LaSalle, Stephen Newton, Terry Olson, and Harley Stroh 55) Conan the Avenger by Robert Howrd & L Sprague De Camp This is one of the better collections. Only the third story is a reconstruction from one of Howard's outlines, the rest are undiluted and glorious.That said, the back two stories are a bit cringey re: race, *especially* the reconstruction I mentioned. I'd say I don't know who looks at a Howard story and thinks "Ah, this needs more complex racial hierarchy nonsense!" but I do and that man's name is L. Sprague De Camp, apparently!The important thing is now I'm all caught up for the next episode of The Appendix N podcast, which I heartily recommend. 56) Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms by John Hodgman 57) Grand Union: Stories by Zadie Smith 58) The Singing Citadel by Michael Moorcock 59) White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo 60) The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson *61) Virtual Light by William Gibson 62) The Dragon Masters by Jack Vance *63) Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Ursula K. Le Guin (Foreword), Olena Bormashenko (Translator) *64) Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison A fun little dunk on Heinlein and his ilk. Very slapstick. 65) Gonzo by Hunter S. Thompson *66) McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh

STATS Non-Fiction: 23 Fiction: 42 Poetry Collections:0 Comic Trades: 0 Wrote Myself: 1

[cmplus-me]

Demoni, uomini e dei

New Post has been published on https://ebook-mania.net/demoni-uomini-e-dei/

Demoni, uomini e dei

C’è un mondo, lontano dal nostro eppure vicino, dove la magia e i sortilegi sono ancora possibili, dove l’avventura si unisce al mistero, dove il tempo non scorre soli in avanti ma indietro e di lato. E’ il mondo della fantasy. Lord Dunsany è innanzitutto un sognatore: da un’immaginazione vividissima trasse il materiale che gli avrebbe permesso di creare la short-story di fantasy, il racconto breve in cui prende vita un mondo magico e lontano dal nostro o addirittura un pantheon di divinità immaginarie. La sua penna d’oca ci ha lasciato una formidabile galleria di re e principesse, guerrieri e demoni, mostri e dei; Everett F. Blair, uno dei maggiori esperti americani del genere, ha scelto dalle più celebri antologia dunsaniane (The Gods of Pegana, Time and the Gods, The Sword of Welleran, The Book of Wonder, la serie di Jorkens) il meglio delle sue storie meravigliose. Questo libro è un appuntamento classico – e in molti casi una scoperta – per vecchi e nuovi lettori fantasy.

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[yellingmetatron]

What Has Influenced You?

As a creator, which is what you are, what has influenced your writing/characterization/etc? What brought you to this point in the way you create things? We all start from somewhere and we also take influence from other works (which isn’t bad at all it’s INSPIRATION) Name ten things (general or specific) that have influenced your style today.

Tagged by: nobody, i just saw it around​

Tagging: Do it if’n ya wanna.  Doesn’t even have to be ten, lots of people have done more or fewer.

Note: These are in the order they occurred to me.

1. Sir Terry Pratchett.   Discovering him was nothing short of life-changing.  To this day I can’t read Discworld fanfiction because a little voice in my head screams “IT’S NOT TERRY PRATCHETT IT’S AN IMPOSTOR REEEEEEEEEE.”  Even when I depart from his style, he’s at the back of my mind.  And I have yet to read his very last books.  I can’t bring myself to, because then... well, I’d have read them all.  And knowing that I’d read all there is to read of him hurts.  He’s that special to me.

2. My parents.  Yeah, this may sound a little cheesy, but they really did shape and nurture my imagination.  I get my love of irony and black comedy from them, as well as the understanding that mythology is something fluid and universal, not limited to one culture or time.

3. Lord Dunsany.  He’s not that well-known, Stateside, more’s the pity.  The first story of his I remember reading involved a fae-creature who decided she wanted a soul, so her people made her one out of a bedewed spiderweb.  It ends up being very poignant.  His The Gods of Pegana is possibly the best mythology to be constructed in the 20th century.  And of course there’s not a bad line in The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

4. Diana Wynne-Jones.  Yep, yet another Brit. Anyway, her feet-solidly-on-the-ground brand of fantasy remains immensely refreshing.  And she experimented a lot more than most writers do, in terms of tone, setting, and underlying ideas.

5. Susan Cooper.  I swear to God I am not actually one of those sadweird Americans who obsesses unduly with Britain and tries to pass themselves off as a native.  But The Dark is Rising series really influenced my conception of otherworldly beings, and the nature of destiny.

6. Madeleine L’Engle.  Really mostly A Wrinkle in Time, because if I’m honest a lot of her later stuff kind of lost me.  Still, I like her genuine curiosity and flexibility of thought as it’s expressed in her writing.  Another work that really influenced the way I think about cosmic entities.

7. C. S. Lewis.  And I’m talking about his apologetics here as much as I am his fiction.  I’m not a Christian, and I very much doubt I’ll ever really be religious, but he presented his own worldview in a very coherent way.  Both Metatron and Bee Anon, who are much more spiritual than I am, take considerable cues from Lewis’s justifications.  Also, he was much more understanding and respectful of paganism than a lot of Christian writers (look up Till We Have Faces to see what I mean).

8.  My sibling.  Don’t wanna get overly specific here.

9. Videogames and other interactive media.  Yeah, I’m generalizing because we’re getting to the end of the list and I’m running out of steam.  Paradox Interactive games and stuff like Planescape: Torment are up there.

10. My public speaking teachers.  Yes, I had ‘em.  I am very, very lucky that my school had a public speaking club.  I essentially got four years of coaching for free.  Guess I’ll throw in everybody in Drama Club while I’m at it.  OH MY GOD I JUST ADMITTED I LEARNED SOMETHING IN SCHOOL at least it’s totally unrelated to regimented classes.

11. Lots of other stuff but I’ve already been verbose and rambley enough, and you can always message me for specifics if you want.