Peter S. Beagle has a long and celebrated writing career, and his most recent novel, Summerlong, is the latest well-received addition to his extensive body of work. Today Mr. Beagle stopped by Fantasy Literature to discuss mythology, fantastical realism, and good dark beer.
One random commenter with a U.S. mailing address will win a signed copy of Summerlong!
Jana Nyman: Classic myths, along with their various heroes and gods, seem to be back in vogue right now.
A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle
Peter S. Beagle is a well-known author of many fantasy novels, including the classic The Last Unicorn. However, I don’t often hear mention of his debut novel, A Fine and Private Place (1960), written when he was only 19 years old. Given his age it’s a phenomenal achievement — the prose is polished, filled with pathos and humor, and the characters’ relationships are deftly described. And yet I couldn’t get into the story at all,
I See By My Outfit by Peter S. Beagle
Published in 1965, Peter S. Beagle’s I See By My Outfit is an American motorscooter travelogue. Beagle and his friend, Phil, ride from New York to St. Louis and then head west to San Francisco.
I was often struck by how different the world was in the 1960s. In many ways, the absence of mass media and the Internet makes America seem smaller, like you truly could find people who would wonder about the mysteries of New York City.
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Peter S. Beagle’s classic The Last Unicorn (1968) turns fifty years old this year, and it’s remained in the public eye and continues to capture hearts like very few fantasies of its age. Like a fine tapestry, this gorgeous fairy tale weaves together unicorns and harpies, wizards and witches, dark-hearted kings and brave heroes. Its lyrical language is embellished with whimsical humor and given heft by bittersweet life lessons.
A shy unicorn keeps to herself in her lilac wood,
The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey by Peter S. Beagle
Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Peter S. Beagle‘s gorgeous, iconic fantasy The Last Unicorn, he unearthed this long-buried first version of that novel, written one memorable summer in 1962 when twenty-three year old Beagle was renting a cabin in the Berkshires with an artistic friend, Phil, and working on his writing craft. The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey (2018) starts off nearly identical to the novel,
The Way Home by Peter S. Beagle
This is a glorious month for Peter S. Beagle fans, with The Way Home (2023) offering up two novellas set in the same world as The Last Unicorn, and not one but two retrospective collections of stories: The Essential Peter S. Beagle: Volumes I and II. Even better, one of those two novellas is brand new and serves to show that Beagle remains one of our most elegant of fantasists.
The Innkeeper’s Song by Peter S. Beagle
The Innkeeper’s Songis a one-volume fantasy for mature readers that is by turns (or even simultaneously) lyrical and maddening. Lyrical because much of its language is, in contemporary fantasy, on par with only Patricia McKillip and Guy Gavriel Kay. Maddening because — despite the full-throttle beginning, intricately woven characters and a world made wondrous without a map or long descriptions but simply by names and prosaic brushstrokes — the promise of the beginning and middle absolutely fizzles to a all-but-incomprehensible anti-climax in which none of the characters’
We Never Talk About My Brother by Peter S. Beagle
We Never Talk About My Brother, published by the small but estimable Tachyon Press, is a collection of ten of Peter S. Beagle’s recent stories. Eight were previously published from 2007 through 2009, demonstrating that Beagle has been as productive in his late 60s as he was at the age of 19, when he wrote A Fine and Private Place. Certainly his late work shows a mature intellect and imagination,
Return: An Innkeeper’s World Story by Peter S. Beagle
Return: An Innkeeper’s World Story was my first Peter S. Beagle read, but it certainly won’t be my last. I’ve just put his The Innkeeper’s Song on my TBR list.
Return is a slim novella (only 104 pages) which tells the story of Soukyan’s return to that place where he was raised and from which he’s been running for years. He’s ready to put an end to those who’ve been hunting him,
Sleight of Hand by Peter S. Beagle
Peter S. Beagle will probably always be best known for The Last Unicorn, the 1968 fantasy novel many consider his masterpiece, but the author has assembled a long and impressive bibliography since this perennial classic, including several excellent short story collections. The most recent of these is Sleight of Hand, recently released by Tachyon. If all you know of Peter S. Beagle is The Last Unicorn,
The Urban Fantasy Anthology edited by Peter S. Beagle & Joe R. Lansdale
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of most urban fantasy. I tend to find problems with almost every urban fantasy book I’ve tried to read. When I got this book in the mail, I kind of rolled my eyes and shot it to the top of my “to be read” pile so I could get it over with fast. I didn’t expect to actually enjoy this book. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d open this anthology and think,
Summerlong is the latest stand-alone work by Peter S. Beagle, an author widely lauded and respected for his skillful turns of phrase, complicated characters, and his ability to credibly blend the fantastic into the mundane. In Summerlong, Beagle turns his gaze on Puget Sound and a small island off Seattle’s coast, an unremarkable little place which undergoes a transformation over the course of just a few months, changing the lives of its residents in profound and irrevocable ways.
The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle
It must be hard to be a literary icon, late in your career. You’ve ascended the literary heights and amassed an adoring following who still expect you never to repeat, and even improve upon your previous genius with each new work. But I’m not sorry for Peter S. Beagle, nor his latest short story collection The Overneath, which came out in November of 2017.
Most striking, to me, is that Beagle manages each new tale with a distinct,
The Essential Peter S. Beagle: Volumes I and II by Peter S. Beagle
It’s a good time to be a Peter S. Beagle fan. In short order this mid-year, we’ve been gifted The Way Home — two novellas set in the world of the beloved classic The Last Unicorn — and two collections of Beagle’s short stories: The Essential Peter S. Beagle: Volumes I and II. And true gifts they are. You can see my review of the novellas here,
The March/April issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction is worth its cover price for the new Peter S. Beagle novelet all by itself. In “Olfert Dapper’s Day,” Beagle demonstrates that there are still new tales to tell about unicorns if you’re a master of the short fantasy tale. Dr. Olfert Dapper was a seventeenth century conman who wrote books about the strange creatures to be found all over the world, even though he never left Holland – that is, the actual historical figure never left Holland.
Lightspeed Magazine is edited by the formidable John Joseph Adams, who has produced a long series of wonderful anthologies and is soon to launch a new horror magazine. One might be concerned that such a busy schedule would mean that something would get short shrift, but if that is the case, it certainly isn’t Issue 26 of Lightspeed.
About half of the content of this magazine, which is produced in electronic format only, consists of interviews, novel excerpts, an artist gallery and spotlight,
There is so much free or inexpensive short fiction available on the internet these days. Here are a few stories we read this week that we wanted you to know about.
“Das Steingeschöpf” by G.V. Anderson (Dec. 2016, free at Strange Horizons)
“Das Steingeschöpf,” or the “Stone Creation (or Creature),” is set in Europe in 1928, where the aftermath of WWI mingles with foreshadowings of the Holocaust. A young German, Herr Hertzel, tells of his trip from Berlin to Bavaria, on his first assignment as a journeyman to repair a living,
Today’s SHORTS column features all of the 2018 Locus Award finalists for short fiction. The Locus Award winners will be announced by Connie Willis during Locus Award weekend, June 22 – June 24, 2018.
NOVELLAS:
In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle (2017)
Claudio, a middle-aged curmudgeonly farmer living in a remote area of the Italian countryside, has been a standoffish loner since his wife left him decades ago. He’s satisfied with his current lifestyle,
Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling are the two greatest short fiction editors of fantasy and horror of our time. Their annual collections of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror provided us, for 16 straight years, with the best short genre and slipstream fiction from all sources. Their anthologies have defined cutting edge fantasy.
Salon Fantastique is more uneven than most of Datlow and Windling’s collections.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume One edited by Jonathan Strahan
My first and foremost complaint — and this is really a quibble more than anything else — is that the title doesn’t tell you what year this anthology belongs to. Which isn’t really a problem if you bought it recently but in case you find in the bookstore bin several years down the line, it’s nice to know what era this collection represents (in case you don’t know the answer, the book was printed in 2007). With that out of the way,
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Two edited by Jonathan Strahan
The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Two is one of several anthologies that collects the best science fiction and fantasy of 2007. I’ve read many of the stories included, yet revisiting them actually made me appreciate them more rather than feel exhausted. One thing I noticed is that there’s a stronger science fiction balance in this anthology compared to the previous volume, although that might also be because the lines between science fiction and fantasy easily get blurry.
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology by Gordon Van Gelder (ed.)
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology is an excellent collection of 23 stories picked from the treasure trove of short fiction that’s been published in the eponymous magazine over the past 60 years. Editor Gordon Van Gelder — also the editor of the magazine since 1997 — has done an admirable job, picking stories that illustrate the diversity of both the genre and the magazine.
Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
Fairy tales were my first love when I was a child. My mother introduced me to the joys of stories with The Golden Book of Fairy Tales long before I learned how to read. My early reading included the first three volumes of The Junior Classics and Andrew Lang’s colorful fairy tale books. When Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling started editing anthologies of new takes on the old tales for adults with Snow White,
Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy 3 edited by Kevin Brockmeier
On a hypothetical chart, with high epic fantasy in the vein of J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen Donaldson on one end and (for want of a better term) the magical realism of Gabriel García Marquez and Graham Joyce on the other, the twenty stories in the excellent Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy 3 fall, for the most part, close to or smack on the latter extreme of the scale.
Warriors edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois
FORMAT/INFO: Warriors is 736 pages long divided over twenty short stories and an Introduction by George R.R. Martin. Each short story is preceded by biographical information about the author and a short description of their contribution to the anthology. March 16, 2010 marks the North American Hardcover publication of Warriors via Tor.
ANALYSIS:
Wings of Fire edited by Jonathan Strahan & Marianne S. Jablon
This is probably not the first sentence you’d expect to find in a review of Wings of Fire, an anthology devoted exclusively to dragon stories, but I thought it best to get it out of the way right from the start.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with dragons. They’re just terribly overused, one of those tired genre mainstays that people who typically don’t read a lot of fantasy will expect in a fantasy novel because they were practically unavoidable for a long time.
Songs of Love and Death edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois
Songs of Love and Death is the third anthology that George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois have edited together. Like Warriors and Songs of the Dying Earth, Songs of Love and Death brings together some of the biggest names that SFF has to offer and they set these authors to work on a common theme.
Martin and Dozois offer a cross-genre anthology that ranges from Robin Hobb’s epic fantasy “Blue Boots,” which tells the story of a romance between a young serving girl and a silver-tongued minstrel,
The Secret History of Fantasy edited by Peter S. Beagle
The basic premise of the SECRET HISTORY anthologies (there’s also a science fiction one, The Secret History of Science Fiction, which I haven’t read) is that there’s a type of writing that got missed or buried because other things were more popular, more commercial, or dodged the spec-fic labeling. Certainly that’s the thrust of Peter S. Beagle‘s introduction, and the two other non-fiction pieces by Ursula K. Le Guin and editor David G.
The New Voices of Fantasy edited by Peter Beagle
This collection of nineteen fantasy short works, edited by Peter Beagle, is definitely worthwhile if you like speculative short fiction. Many of them left an impact on me, and a few are true standouts. These stories are by relatively new authors in the speculative fiction genre and are all fantasy; otherwise there’s no discernable overarching theme.
These stories have almost all been published previously over the last seven years, and several of them are Hugo or Nebula winners or nominees.
“Sailing the Seas of Imagination” is the theme of World Fantasy Convention 2011 here in sunny, temperate San Diego, so you don’t go too long without someone issuing an “Arrrh!” or a panel about what happens under the sea. It’s a great group of people: fans, writers, critics, all people who read with passion and heart. And I’m here and get to blog about it!
Once registered for the convention, I trudged directly over to pick up my goodie bag. World Fantasy is famous for these bags: sturdy canvas totes jammed with enough reading material to last at least a month.
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That was my view as well, as you'll see in my soon-to-post review