The Phoenix and the Mirror
10 best books like The Phoenix and the Mirror (Avram Davidson): Silverlock, The Complete Compleat Enchanter, The Circus of Dr. Lao, Aegypt, A Fish Dinner in Memison, The Well of the Unicorn, The Conan Chronicles: Volume 2: The Hour of the Dragon, The Dragon Griaule, A Storm of Wings, The Green Pearl and Madouc
| Author | John Myers Myers |
| ISBN | 0441012477 |
I have been reading the comments made by other GoodReads members on Silverlock, by John Myers Myers. I am sympathetic with those who feel that a lack of familiarity with classics of literature an culture leave one on the outside. I do not agree, however, with those who claim that the book is pointless and...
| Author | L. Sprague de Camp |
| ISBN | 0671698095 |
This omnibus volume brings all five of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's "Compleat Enchanter" tales together in one nearly 500 page volume -- a good thing or bad thing depending on one's perspective, since each one of them is short, and really, light enough, to tempt one towards perusing on into...
| Author | Charles G. Finney |
| ISBN | 0803269072 |
Abalone, Arizona, is a sleepy southwestern town whose chief concerns are boredom and surviving the Great Depression. That is, until the circus of Dr. Lao arrives and immensely and irrevocably changes the lives of everyone drawn to its tents. Expecting a sideshow spectacle, the citizens of Abalone...
| Author | John Crowley |
| ISBN | 0553051946 |
Does the world have a secret history, encoded in myth and legend, reflected in the very windings of our brains? Born with the talents to be a real historian, but clinging to a minor teaching job, Pierce Moffett watches the great Parade of the ’60s go by him, and wonders. He’s still wondering years later...
| Author | E.R. Eddison |
| ISBN | 0345278534 |
OK, this gets a bit … complicated …
The previous book in the series, Mistress of Mistresses, opened in our own world with the funeral of Lessingham, an older gentleman who’d apparently done great things in his youth. The scene then shifted to Zimiamvia where the death of King Mezentius...
| Author | Fletcher Pratt |
| ISBN | 0345297296 |
Robbed of lands and heritage by the rapacious Vulkings, young Airar Alvarson had only his limited gift for sorcery to aid him against a world of savage intrigues. Then he met a mysterious sorcerer and was given a strange iron ring -- a ring that led him into a futile conspiracy and soon had him fleeing for...
| Author | Robert E. Howard |
| ISBN | 1857987470 |
Conan the Cimmerian: he rose from boy-thief and mercenary to become king of Aquilonia. Neither supernatural fiends nor demonic sorcery could oppose the barbarian warrior as he wielded his mighty sword and dispatched his enemies to a bloody doom on the battlefields of the legendary Hyborian Age. Collected...
| Author | Lucius Shepard |
| ISBN | 1596064560 |
More than twenty-five years ago, Lucius Shepard introduced us to a remarkable fictional world, a world separated from our own “by the thinnest margin of possibility.” There, in the mythical Carbonales Valley, Shepard found the setting for “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” the classic...
| Author | M. John Harrison |
| ISBN | 0722144423 |
IN THE WASTELANDS OF A FUTURE WORLD, THE PASTEL CITY STRUGGLES IN THE GRIP OF THE SIGN OF THE LOCUST...
Viriconium: The Pastel City was the last bastion of the civilized world where Queen Methvet Nian ruled supreme. Now she watched, helpless, as the Time of the Locust became a monstrous reality,...
| Author | Jack Vance |
| ISBN | 0575075171 |
In Lyonesse: The Green Pearl and Madouc the magical lands of high enchantment - the Elder Isles, the land, long-vanished beneath the ocean, from which King Arthur's ancestors fled to Britain - come to brilliant life again. In this ancient land the realm of chivalry and the world of faerie exist side by...
| Author | C.L. Moore |
| ISBN | 0575074175 |
Jirel of Joiry, the first of the great female warriors, the beautiful commander of the strongest fortress in the kingdom, would face any danger to defend her beloved country. She wielded her bright sword against mighty armies, the sinister magic of evil sorcerers and fearsome castles guarded by the...
| Author | William Hope Hodgson |
| ISBN | 0575073721 |
The House on the Borderland and Other Novels is a collection of short novels by author William Hope Hodgson. It was published by Arkham House in 1946 in an edition of 3,014 copies. The collection was reprinted by Gollancz in 2002, with a new introduction by China Miéville, as volume 33 of their Fantasy...
| Author | Lisa Goldstein |
| ISBN | 0553050907 |
I can’t remember how I found out about this novel, presumably a list of recommendations somewhere? The combination of surrealists, dreams, time travel, and revolution had obvious appeal and the library didn't have it, so I bought a cheap copy off eBay. Unfortunately I think it had been stored in a...
| Author | R.A. Lafferty |
| ISBN | 0441245900 |
Fourth Mansions was inspired by Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle, & contains quotations from the book, which quotations Lafferty uses as chapter headings. The Interior Castle is a metaphor for an individual's soul; its different rooms, different states of the soul. In the middle of the Castle...
| Author | Fritz Leiber |
| ISBN | 0575073586 |
Las espadas de Lankhmar (3/5): un comienzo prometedor a bordo de un barco, con bastante humor y situaciones de pura fantasía. Y tras llegar a la ciudad la fantasía no para, pues un ejército de ratas (de ratas tal como las conocemos) armadas, quiere hacerse con el poder. Me ha recordado mucho a Gotreh...
| Author | Jack Williamson |
| ISBN | 0312869924 |
Who is the child of the night? That's what small-town reporter Will Barbee must find out. Inexorably drawn into investigating a rash of grisly deaths, he soon finds himself embroiled in something far beyond mortal understanding.
Doggedly pursuing his investigations, he meets the mysterious...
The Mark of the Beast and Other Horror Tales (Dover Horror Classics)
| Author | Rudyard Kipling |
| ISBN | 0486414299 |
I'm not quite sure if it happened only once, but I seem to have the memory in my mind of the blind Jorge Luis Borges, whenever an English-speaking visitor came to interview him, asking the visitor to read out loud to him from the work of Rudyard Kipling. As for myself, it has been some years since I've read...
| Author | Lord Dunsany |
| ISBN | 1857989899 |
I can scarcely say how much I admire the way Lord Dunsany distills the seizing (and subsequent paralysis) of the mind by an idea, then assaults that hold with some stark realisation. But the characters are never aware of the ironies, they simply play out in the narrative, which is what so successfully...
| Author | Jonathan Carroll |
| ISBN | 0575073675 |
For Joe Lennox, successful young writer, Vienna provides a refuge from the tragedy of his brother's death, until he starts up a friendship with the eccentric India Tate and her magician husband Paul. Gradually Joe falls in love with India, but Paul finds out - before he suddenly drops dread. And now Joe...
| Author | John James |
| ISBN | 0575105508 |
Neil Gaiman introduces three classic novels of modern fantasy
In the second century AD, a Greek nobleman is traveling and living abroad in Germany while carrying on an affair with a military man's wife. When discovered, he takes an emergency business trip to save his life and packs among his...
| Author | Thomas Burnett Swann |
| ISBN | 0583123945 |
Lost Monsters
Thea watched their torch-bearing captors recede into the distance and leave them to the cave's darkness. Her brother Icarus whispered "forgive me - I wanted to come to the Country of the Beasts, not to the Cave of the Minotaur".
Then they heard the soft padding of feet...
| Author | Brian Moore |
| ISBN | 0452278678 |
When an appalling boating accident off the coast of Nice allegedly kills Dr. Alex Davenport, his attractive young wife Marie finds herself in the ironic position of widow of a husband she had been planning to leave for another man. But Alex's body suddenly disappears from the morgue, and his plane ticket...
| Author | Brian W. Aldiss |
| ISBN | 0061000639 |
Charmed Malacia! In the wilderness beyond its fortress walls, in dreary chasm, tangled forest, or endless mountainside, the forces of many kinds of evil struggled for supremacy. Within our winding streets serenity seemed to prevail.
"seemed" is the key word in this brief introduction...
Perhaps I should say why I have read this book in the first place: Rudy Rucker is a mathematician, a set theorist to be precise, and this book, his opera prima, was written around a central theme: infinity. To write fiction trying to convey Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers is no minor feat, and that...
