The Unicorn Books
The Unicorn Books — (1968-2017) Young adult. Publisher: is one of the great fantasy novels of the 20th Century. Since its publication in 1968 it has never been out of print, with 6 million-plus copies sold around the world, and it has been translated into more than 20 languages. The animated movie, version released in 1982, has been seen by hundreds of millions of people, and after 25 years is still showing regularly on cable and satellite. In 2005, author Peter S. Beagle finally returned to his classic characters Shmendrick the Magician, Molly Grue, King Lir, and the unicorn herself in a coda story called Two Hearts. Readers everywhere were thrilled, and Two Hearts went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novelette of the Year. This Deluxe Edition of The Last Unicorn brings the original classic tale and its extraordinary sequel together in one volume for the first time.
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The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Some of the most difficult books to review are old novels — especially the ones that have been deemed classics. The Last Unicorn is one of the novels that I fondly remember from my childhood, thanks to the cartoon.
Suffice to say, the book is just as good. Peter S. Beagle's sentences are long and the paragraphs tend to be blocky, but the language is easy enough to comprehend and he injects some of the tropes of high fantasy such as poetry and riddles.
The narrative itself follows the quest formula but The Last Unicorn has an atmosphere of meta-fiction, so it works. The highlight of the book is easily the characters, everything from the unicorn itself to Schmendrick and Molly and Prince Lir.
The Last Unicorn (originally published in 1968) is a classic t... Read More
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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, because there was almost no dramatic tension of any kind — just two central romantic relations, one between two people lonely and disconnected in the living world, and one between two recently deceased spirits not ready to let go of life.
The story bears remarkable sim... Read More
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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' skills, virtues or flaws seem to matter. It's the equivalent of dreaming oneself into a world of rich and dread beauty, flying over tha... Read More
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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, as well as a perspective on his youth, that flavors his fiction with nostalgia, regret and a deep appreciation for life.
The title story is told by the narrator to a reporter who comes searching for news about the narrator’s brother, who used to be a famous news anchor. Esau Robbins, the news anchor, disappeared entirely from t... Read More
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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, but he'll have to face them, and the strange power behind them, before he can be free.
Peter S. Beagle writes lively clear prose that's passionate, beautiful, smart, and occasionally dryly humorous. His plot is purposeful and tight with a hint of mystery and horror. Beagle's characters are intelligent and full of life — even those who are referred to but not ... Read More
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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, this is as good an opportunity as any to jump in and explore the author’s shorter works.
Sleight of Hand offers thirteen stories that stretch to the far corners of the fantasy field, from cute children’s tales to ghost and werewolf stories, from traditional, straightforward narratives to more challenging fiction, and... Read More
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Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle
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 greatest changes come to Joanna Delvecchio and Abe Aronson, a late-middle-aged couple who have settled into a comfortable routine over their two decades of coupleship: she’s a flight attendant and basketball fanatic, he’s a history... Read More
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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. In Beagle’s imagination, though, Dapper flees Utrecht just in time to avoid arrest, taking flight for the New World. He winds up in in No Popery, in the “vaguely delineated colony” of Maine. There, he is more or less forced to become the medical docto... Read More
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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, and author spotlights. In addition, roughly half of the fiction offered is original; the rest is reprinted, though the choices are inspired. Th... Read More
Short Fiction Monday: 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, moving statue. All Steingeschöpfe are made of a magical stone called Queckstein (“mercury-stone”) that absorbs some part of the energy and memories of its creator to become animated. When Hertzel arrives in Bavaria, he’s deeply concerned to find that the statue, a massive man-beast called Ambro... Read More
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Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy by Ellen Datlow and 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. This themeless anthology, containing stories intended, as the introduction states, "to evoke the liberating, creative spirit of a literary salon," contains some very fine stories. It also, oddly enough, contains some very bad stories.
Delia Sherma... Read More
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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 One is a good collection that draws from both the fantasy and science fiction genres, and I'm really looking forward to the sequel.
Personally, however, because I read a large number of anthologies in 2007, I’ve seen many of these stories before because they’ve been reprinted in numerous ... Read More
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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 opening piece, Ted Chiang's "The Merchant and The Alchemist's Gate," is a good example. This is easily my favorite story and arguably Chiang's most accessible piece. The physics of time travel is narrated with an ... Read More
Other books by Peter S. Beagle
The Folk of the Air — (1986) Publisher: While attending the revels of the League for Archaic Pleasurs, a group dedicated to the pleasures of the medieval period, Joe Farrell comes face-to-face with Nicholas Bonner, a spirit from the past and an ancient evil.
The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances — (1997) Publisher: This overview of Peter Beagle’s extraordinary career as a fantasist contains seven short stories and three essays as well as a new preface by the author. It also features the original whimsical Chesley Award-winning cover illustration by talented Bay Area artist Michael Dashow. “The Last Unicorn, Beagle’s most beloved novel, was an underground bestseller in the late 1960s and 1970s. This collection includes two of Beagle’s popular unicorn stories, “Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros” and “Julei’s Unicorn,” as well as “Lila the Werewolf,” which is anthologized in the “Oxford Book of Fantasy, and a tribute to J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Naga.”
Tamsin — (1999) Publisher: Arriving in the English countryside to live with her mother and new stepfather, Jenny has no interest in her surroundings until she meets Tamsin. Since her death over 300 years ago, Tamsin has haunted the lonely estate without rest, trapped by a hidden trauma she can’t remember, and a powerful evil even the spirits of night cannot name. To help her, Jenny must delve deeper into the dark world than any human has in hundreds of years, and face danger that will change her life forever… 
A Dance for Emilia — (2000) Publisher: Even lifelong friendships can’t outlast death… or can they? Award-winning author Peter S. Beagle presents a deeply personal story of dreams abandoned and recovered, friends loved and lost, and the strength it takes to let go…
Giant Bones — (1996) Young adult. Nominated for the World Fantasy Award, The Mythopoeic Awards, 1998 Best Books for the Teen Age. Six breathtaking stories set in the bestselling world of The Inkeeper’s Song.
I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons — (2007) Ages 9-12. Publisher: Dragons are common in the back water kingdom of bellemontagne, coming in sizes from mouse-like vermin all the way up to castle-smashing monsters. Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus thrax (who would much rather people just call him robert) has recently inherited his deceased dad’s job as a dragon catcher/exterminator, a career he detests with all his heart — in part because he likes dragons, feeling an odd kinship with them, but mainly because his dream has always been the impossible one of transcending his humble origin to someday become a prince’s valet. Needless to say, fate has something rather different in mind…
Mirror Kingdoms — (2010) Publisher: When New York Times Bestselling writer Tad Williams described Peter S. Beagle as a ‘bandit prince out to steal reader’s hearts’ he touched on a truth that readers have known for fifty years. Beagle, whose work has touched generations of readers around the world, has spun rich, romantic and very funny tales that have beguiled and enchanted readers of all ages. Undeniably, his most famous work is the much loved classic, The Last Unicorn, which tells of unicorn who sets off on quest to discover whether she is the last of her kind, and of the people she meets on her journey. Never prolific, The Last Unicorn is one of only five novels Beagle has published since A Fine and Private Place appeared in 1960, and was followed by The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin. During the first forty years of his career Beagle also wrote a small handful, scarcely a dozen, short stories. Classics like ‘Come Lady Death,’ ‘Lila and the Werewolf,’ ‘Julie’s Unicorn,’ ‘Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros,’ and the tales that make up Giant Bones. And then, starting just five years ago, he turned his attention to short fiction in earnest, and produced a stunning array of new stories including the Hugo and Nebula Award winning follow up to The Last Unicorn, ‘Two Hearts,’ WSFA Small Press Award winner ‘El Regalo,’ and wonderful stories like the surrealist ‘The Last and Only,’ the haunting ‘The Rabbi s Hobby’ and others. Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle collects the very best of these stories, over 200,000 words worth, ranging across 45 years of his career from early stories to freshly minted tales that will surprise and amaze readers. It’s a book which shows, more than any other, just how successful this bandit prince from the streets of New York has been at stealing our hearts and underscores how much we hope he ll keep on doing so.
The First Last Unicorn — (2012) Publisher: Featuring previously unpublished and uncollected treasures from a much-beloved fantasy icon, this lovingly curated collection is a hoard of riches and surprises. A romp through the filing cabinet of Peter S. Beagle’s imagination, it is an unexpected glimpse into the curios, curiosities, and capstones of his later fiction. Included is a novella-length adventure of the last unicorn, in which she bands together with a duo of ambivalent demons to seek out her lost brethren. Additional chapters from A Fine & Private Place, from the unpublished novel Mirror Kingdoms, and even snippets from Beagle’s childhood and teenaged years are included. Correspondence, running commentary, and interviews give delightful insight into the creative process of this beloved master of the genre.
“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. I returned a number of the books to the Book Swap table because I already owned them, but I’ve still got 10 new books (and I’ve already tasted A Darkness Forged in Fire by Chris Evans, which I’ve b... Read More
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. Why do you think they have such an enduring charm throughout the ages? What is the appeal to you, personally?
Peter S. Beagle: When I was ten or eleven years old, my father gave me a copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology, which I s... Read More
(1939- )
