High Literary Fantasy

Top 10 High Literary Fantasy : The Shadow of the Torturer, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Gormenghast Novels, Little, Big, The Last Unicorn, Perdido Street Station, Titus Groan, Soldier of the Mist, The Dying Earth, Riddle-Master

The Shadow of the Torturer
AuthorGene Wolfe
ISBN0671540661
Wolfe has an almost legendary status amongst fellow authors; Gaiman called him 'a ferocious intellect', Swanwick said he's "the greatest writer in the English language alive today", and Disch called this series "a tetralogy of couth, intelligence, and suavity".

You can rarely trust the...
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
AuthorSusanna Clarke
Librarian note: Alternate cover edition of 9780765356154.

Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred...
AuthorMervyn Peake
ISBN0879516283
A doomed lord, an emergent hero, and a dazzling array of bizarre creatures inhabit the magical world of the Gormenghast novels which, along with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, reign as one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time. At the center of it all is the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, who...
Little, Big
AuthorJohn Crowley
ISBN0061120057
John Crowley's masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood—not found on any map—to marry Daily Alice Drinkwater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in...
The Last Unicorn
AuthorPeter S. Beagle
ISBN0451450523
alternate cover editions can be found here, here and here

She was magical, beautiful beyond belief—and completely alone...

The unicorn had lived since before memory in a forest where death could touch nothing. Maidens who caught a glimpse of her glory were blessed by enchantment...
Perdido Street Station
AuthorChina Miéville
ISBN0345459407
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies the city of New Crobuzon, where the unsavory deal is stranger to no one--not even to Isaac, a gifted and eccentric scientist who has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known...
Titus Groan
AuthorMervyn Peake
ISBN0879514256

What an odd fantasy! No swords, no sorcery, no elves, no thieves, no imaginary beasts, no multiple planes of existence . . . nothing but a cavernous castle peopled by eccentrics with Dickensian names (Sepulchrave, Prunesquallor, Swelter, Flay) whose lives are determined by centuries--perhaps...
AuthorGene Wolfe
ISBN0812558154
Gene Wolfe has turned to the fantastic historical world of Greece, in 479 B.C., when the gods walked the Earth. Latro, a mercenary soldier from the north, has suffered a head wound in battle and has been separated from his compatriots. He has not only lost the memory of who he is and where he is from, he has...
The Dying Earth
AuthorJack Vance
ISBN0671831526

I did not like this book much the first time I read it, but after reading it a second time while visualizing its characters as puppets, I found I liked it much more.

This book—particularly the first three stories—irritated me. I found its wizards to be contemptible creatures, morally...
Riddle-Master
AuthorPatricia A. McKillip
ISBN0441005969
For over twenty years, Patricia A. McKillip has captured the hearts and imaginations of thousands of readers. And although her renowned Riddle-Master trilogy--The Riddle-Master of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire, and Harpist in the Wind--has been long out of print, it is considered her most enduring and...
AuthorLord Dunsany
ISBN0345431928
Do not let the uninspired (and uninspiring) cover of the Del Rey edition to keep you away from this masterpiece, an exquisite counterpart for the first Shadow Valley chronicle.
This time the protagonist follows not the ways of the sword, as Don Rodriguez did in the first chronicle, but the ways of...
Gormenghast
AuthorMervyn Peake
Titus Groan is seven years old. Lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. A gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight...
The Scar
AuthorChina Miéville
ISBN0345460014
Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to the fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city....
AuthorJeff VanderMeer
ISBN0765314657
An epic yet personal look at several decades of life, love, and death in the imaginary city of Ambergris--previously chronicled in Jeff VanderMeer's acclaimed City of Saints & Madmen--Shriek: An Afterword relates the scandalous, heartbreaking, and horrifying secret history of two squabbling...
AuthorCatherynne M. Valente
ISBN0553385763
In the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger’s...
Till We Have Faces
AuthorC.S. Lewis
In this timeless tale of two mortal princesses- one beautiful and one unattractive- C.S. Lewis reworks the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche into an enduring piece of contemporary fiction. This is the story of Orual, Psyche's embittered and ugly older sister, who posessively and harmfully loves...
AuthorSamuel R. Delany
ISBN0819562718
In his four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon, Hugo and Nebula award-winner Samuel R. Delany appropriated the conceits of sword-and-sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. Wesleyan University Press has reissued the long-unavailable...
AuthorJack Vance
ISBN0312874561
Earth is on its last leg. The sun is a red giant, the moon has vanished, and magic has returned.

This omnibus includes the following four books:
The Dying Earth: The Dying Earth is a collection of linked short stories. And here they are:
Turjan of Miir: Turjan, a wizard, seeks the help...
The Book of Atrix Wolfe
AuthorPatricia A. McKillip
ISBN0441003613
Twenty years ago, the powerful mage Atrix Wolfe unleashed an uncontrollable force that killed his beloved king. Now, the Queen of the Wood has offered him one last chance for redemption. She asks him to find her daughter, who vanished into the human world during the massacre he caused. No one has seen...
Tigana
AuthorGuy Gavriel Kay
ISBN0451457765
A masterful epic of magic, politics, war, and the power of love and hate—from the renowned author of The Fionavar Tapestry and Children of Earth and Sky.

Tigana is the magical story of a beleaguered land struggling to be free. It is the tale of a people so cursed by the black sorcery of a cruel...
A Song for Arbonne
AuthorGuy Gavriel Kay
ISBN0451458974
Based on the troubadour culture that rose in Provence during the High Middle Ages, this panoramic, absorbing novel beautifully creates an alternate version of the medieval world.

The matriarchal, cultured land of Arbonne is rent by a feud between its two most powerful dukes, the noble troubador...
Sign of the Unicorn
AuthorRoger Zelazny
ISBN0380008319
He who rules Amber rules the one true world. He who thwarts Amber invites the wrath of Amber betrayed.

An unseen enemy of immense strength has seized a Prince of the Blood, and now threatens the perfect kingdom by striking at the very core of its power - the secret knowledge of Shadow.

When...
AuthorMichael Shea
ISBN0879977833
Come then, Mortal. We Will Seek Her Soul:
At the behest of an apparition, Nifft and Haldar kidnap a disgraced warrior and take him to the land of the dead to be reunited with her in exchange for the Wizard's Key. Only things don't go as planned...

The first Nifft story was quite good, a trip to...
AuthorEvangeline Walton
ISBN1585675040
The retelling of the epic Welsh myth that is "certainly among the top 5 fantasy series of the twentieth century" (sfsite.com).

The Mabinogion is to Welsh mythology what the tales of Zeus, Hera, and Apollo are to Greek myth. these tales constitute a powerful work of the imagination, ranking...
The 13 Clocks
AuthorJames Thurber
ISBN0440405823
How can anyone describe this book? It isn't a parable, a fairy story, or a poem, but rather a mixture of all three. It is beautiful and it is comic. It is philosophical and it is cheery. What we suppose we are trying fumblingly to say is, in a word, that it is Thurber.

There are only a few reasons why...
AuthorGene Wolfe
ISBN0812550684
If Nightside The Long Sun was about the protagonist’s self discovery, this second book in the series is about Patera Silk slowly discovering the true nature of his world.

The 4 volumes of The Book Of The Long Sun are set on a multigenerational starship – a fact that Tor reveals on the back cover,...
AuthorTanith Lee
ISBN0879974419
"The soul is a magician. Only living flesh hampers it." -- from Death's MasterDeath's Master, winner of the August Derleth Award for Fantasy, is the second book of the stunning arabesque high fantasy series Tales from the Flat Earth, which, in the manner of the One Thousand and One Nights, portrays...
AuthorGene Wolfe
ISBN0765302942
A distinguished compilation of two classic fantasy novels, Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Areté, in one volume

This omnibus of two acclaimed novels is the story of Latro, a Roman mercenary who while fighting in Greece received a head injury that deprived him of his short-term memory but...
Le Grand Meaulnes
AuthorAlain-Fournier
ISBN0140182829
Dear Henri Alain-Fournier,

Some people claim you had great talent as a novelist. Many more would claim I don't. Is it fair that you died in World War I while I live, free to write this review and feeling like I'm having a bad morning because I didn't have all the usual ingredients for my breakfast...
AuthorGene Wolfe
ISBN0765316641
Latro forgets everything when he sleeps. Writing down his experiences every day and reading his journal anew each morning gives him a poignantly tenuous hold on himself, but his story's hold on readers is powerful indeed. The two previous novels, combined in Latro in the Mist (Soldier of the Mist and...
City of Saints and Madmen
AuthorJeff VanderMeer
ISBN0553383574
In City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer has reinvented the literature of the fantastic. You hold in your hands an invitation to a place unlike any you’ve ever visited–an invitation delivered by one of our most audacious and astonishing literary magicians.

City of elegance and squalor....
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
AuthorG.K. Chesterton
ISBN0375757910
G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately,...
AuthorCatherynne M. Valente
Catherynne M. Valente enchanted readers with her spellbinding In the Night Garden. Now she continues to weave her storytelling magic in a new book of Orphan’s Tales—an epic of the fantastic and the exotic, the monstrous and mysterious, that will transport you far away from the everyday….
...
AuthorDavid Lindsay
ISBN0803280041
A stunning achievement in speculative fiction, A Voyage to Arcturus has inspired, enchanted, and unsettled readers for decades. It is simultaneously an epic quest across one of the most unusual and brilliantly depicted alien worlds ever conceived, a profoundly moving journey of discovery into...
AuthorStorm Constantine
ISBN0312873654
When Shan was fifteen years old, dark soldiers came out of the west, like a cloud of evil boiling over the soft hills of his homeland. They commanded terrible beasts, which killed with hook claws like scythes and cold eyes that dripped icy fire. The soldiers wore helmets that looked like fiends, tusked...
AuthorClark Ashton Smith
ISBN0345219384
Tales of Zothique is a collection of fantasy short stories by Clark Ashton Smith, and edited by Lin Carter. It was first published in paperback by Ballantine Books as the sixteenth volume of its celebrated Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in June 1970. It was the first themed collection of Smith's works...
AuthorAngélica Gorodischer
ISBN1931520054
This is the first of Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer's nineteen award-winning books to be translated into English. In eleven chapters, Kalpa Imperial's multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times. Fairy tales, oral...
Lord of Emperors
AuthorGuy Gavriel Kay
ISBN0061020028
The Thrilling Sequel To Sailing To Sarantium

Beckoned by the Emperor Valerius, Crispin, a renowned mosaicist, has arrived in the fabled city of Sarantium. Here he seeks to fulfill his artistic ambitions and his destiny high upon a dome that will become the emerror's magnificent sanctuary...
AuthorChina Miéville
ISBN0345458427
Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar, acclaimed author China Miéville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey hardcover debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon—this time, decades later.

It is a...
The Courts of Chaos
AuthorRoger Zelazny
ISBN9993911550
Amber, the one real world of which all others – including our own Earth – are but Shadows...

For untold millennia, the cosmic Pattern sustained order in Amber and all the known worlds. But now the forces of Chaos have succeeded in disrupting the Pattern, unleashing destructive forces beyond...
Trumps of Doom
AuthorRoger Zelazny
Alternate cover for ISBN 0380896354 / 9780380896356

Merle Corey is a brilliant young computer designer in San Francisco, but, he is also Merlin, son of Corwin, vanished prince of Amber, and heir to his father's wonderous powers. And, someone is determined to kill him. Now he will begin a desperate...
Blood of Amber
AuthorRoger Zelazny
Alternate cover for ISBN 0380896362 / 9780380896363

Pursued by a fiendish enemy, Merle must battle through an intricate web of vengeance and murder that threatens more than the San Francisco Bay area. For Merle Corey of California is also Merlin, son of Corwin, vanished Prince of Amber; and...
AuthorRoger Zelazny
ISBN1857987268
Amber is the one real world, casting infinite reflections of itself - shadow worlds, which can be manipulated by those of royal Amberite blood. But the royal family is torn apart by jealousies and suspicion; the disappearance of the patriarch Oberon has intensified the internal conflict by leaving...
The City & the City
AuthorChina Miéville
ISBN0345497511
When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

Borlú...
AuthorGordon Dahlquist
ISBN0553385860
A mystery as dazziling as a hall of mirrors.

A seductive, terrifying, all-too-real world.

A beguiling, erotic literary adventure.

Discover why readers everywhere are enthralled by this “marvelous confection of a book.”*

In which the astonishing adventure...
AuthorGene Wolfe
ISBN0312872577
On Blue's Waters is the start of a major new work by Gene Wolfe, the first of three volumes that comprise The Book of the Short Sun, which takes place in the years after Wolfe's four-volume Book of the Long Sun. Horn, the narrator of the earlier work, now tells his own story. Though life is hard on the newly...
AuthorLord Dunsany
In fantasy, I've seen magic used in many ways: as plot device, curio, religious allegory, and the personification of morals, but rarely do I find a book where magic is truly magical. Too often, it's a convenience, a cliche, but for Dunsany, magic is pervasive, mysterious, unknowable, and lovely. He...
Exodus from the Long Sun
AuthorGene Wolfe
ISBN0812539052
Wolfe's recent multi-volume novels have invited interpretation as religious allegory. In the "Book of the Long Sun," the fourth volume of which is Exodus from the Long Sun, religion is at least an inspirational starting point. This book is set on a starship, the Whorl, whose inhabitants have lost track...
AuthorCatherynne M. Valente
ISBN1597801992
This is the story of a place that never was: the kingdom of Prester John, the utopia described by an anonymous, twelfth-century document which captured the imagination of the medieval world and drove hundreds of lost souls to seek out its secrets, inspiring explorers, missionaries, and kings for centuries....
A Darker Shade of Magic
AuthorV.E. Schwab
ISBN0765376458
Kell is one of the last Antari—magicians with a rare, coveted ability to travel between parallel Londons; Red, Grey, White, and, once upon a time, Black.

Kell was raised in Arnes—Red London—and officially serves the Maresh Empire as an ambassador, traveling between the frequent bloody...
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