Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Dolphin and the Deep (1968) is the author's first story collection, bringing together three of his earlier (and uneven but ambitious) works of short fiction from 1963–1966.
Category: Reading…
Reading “Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time” by James Gurney (Dinotopia 1)
James Gurney's Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time (1992) is an incredible illustrated utopian novel of an adventurer's arrival and education in a land where dinosaurs and humans live side-by-side in harmony. And it fucking rules!
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: Reading “The King of Elfland’s Daughter” by Lord Dunsany
The thirteenth essay in my Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series, which looks at Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924), a fairy tale mixed with a heroic romance that offers a cautionary tale of what happens when you invite magic in.
Reading “Cry Silver Bells” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Cry Silver Bells (1977), the author's sixteenth and final novel, returns to the Country of the Beasts on Crete and tells the tragic story of the Minotaur Silver Bells.
Reading “Queens Walk in the Dusk” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Queens Walk in the Dusk (1976) is the author's fifteenth and only hardcover novel, which retells the melancholy, tragic story of Aeneas and Dido's ill-timed love.
Reading “The Gods Abide” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Gods Abide (1976) is the author's fourteenth novel and explores the violence of the rise of Christianity in Roman Italia and Britannia.
Reading “The Minikins of Yam” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Minkins of Yam (1976) is the author's eleventh novel, is set four thousand years ago in pharaonic Egypt, and is one of his weaker novels charting the "secret history" of the prehumans.
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: Reading “The Blue Star” by Fletcher Pratt
The twelfth essay in my Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series, which looks at Fletcher Pratt's The Blue Star (1952), an impressive, short novel of "rational" fantasy about power, gender, and why you should not cheat on your witch girlfriend.
Reading “Will-O-the-Wisp” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Will-O-the-Wisp (1976) is the author's tenth novel and is set in seventeenth-century Devon. It is a critique of Puritan moralizing against love, sexuality, and the body, and is surprisingly good!
Reading “The Not-World” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Not-World (1975) is the author's ninth novel and is set in eighteenth-century Bristol. It's not very good but articulates Swann's typical themes nicely in the context of the rise of capitalist, colonialist modernity.
Genre Fantasies 