Karen Anderson 7 min read

The edge of the world is fenced off stoutly, but no fence ever built will stop a boy, so Johnny tosses his pack over the barbed wire and climbs after it, out past the boundary of the known.

Karen Anderson's 1962 story is a charming, incisive cameo of pure fantasy. Lyrical, delightful, gem-like. Read it for a jewel of a fairy tale, a boy who climbs over the edge of the world and tames the piebald hippogriff, in a brief, beautifully wrought flight of the imagination.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

7 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).