Lord Dunsany 2 hr 2 min read

Sixteen jewelled fantasies from the man who taught modern fantasy how to dream.

Lord Dunsany's 1910 collection wanders through invented lands of impossible beauty and melancholy, the mountain Poltarnees that beholds the sea, the idle days on the river Yann, the doomed city of Bethmoora. Dunsany's prose, incantatory and strange, invented much of the vocabulary later fantasy would live on, and directly shaped Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Le Guin. Read it for the pure, founding music of imaginative fantasy, from one of its indispensable originators.

In its time

Published in 1910, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

2 hr 2 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Sidney Herbert Sime