Fifty One Tales, Lord Dunsany
Fifty One Tales, Lord Dunsany
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Fifty One Tales
A collection of short, strange, and often dark stories from the world’s first and greatest fantasy writer

Author: Lord Dunsany

Series: The Birth Of Fantasy: Lord Dunsany's Seminal Work

Narrator: Chirag Patel

Unabridged: 2 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Lamplight

Published: 10/10/2024


Synopsis

Fifty-One Tales is a collection of fantasy short stories by Irish writer Lord Dunsany, a major influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin and others. Each story is a short vignette, a single moment of strangeness or horror in the face of death.
11. DEATH AND THE ORANGE
Two dark young men in a foreign southern land sat at a restaurant table with one woman.
And on the woman's plate was a small orange which had an evil laughter in its heart.
And both of the men would be looking at the woman all the time, and they ate little and they drank much.
And the woman was smiling equally at each.
Then the small orange that had the laughter in its heart rolled slowly off the plate on to the floor. And the dark young men both sought for it at once, and they met suddenly beneath the table, and soon they were speaking swift words to one another, and a horror and an impotence came over the Reason of each as she sat helpless at the back of the mind, and the heart of the orange laughed and the woman went on smiling; and Death, who was sitting at another table, tete-a-tete with an old man, rose and came over to listen to the quarrel.

About Lord Dunsany

Lord Dunsany was born in London in 1878, the scion of an Anglo-Irish family that could trace its ancestry to the twelfth century. In 1905 he self-published The Gods of Pegana, and its critical and popular success impelled the publication of numerous other collections of short stories, including A Dreamer's Tales, The Book of Wonder, and The Last Book of Wonder. Dunsany also distinguished himself as a dramatist, and his early plays-collected in Five Plays and Plays of Gods and Men-were successful in Ireland, England, and the United States. Dunsany was seriously injured during the Dublin riots of 1916, and he also saw action in World War I as a member of the Coldstream Guards.

In the 1920s Dunsany began writing novels, among them The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Blessing of Pan. He also wrote many tales of the loquacious clubman Joseph Jorkens, eventually collected in five volumes. His later plays include If, Plays of Near and Far, Seven Modern Comedies, and Plays for Earth and Air. By the 1930s, encouraged by W. B. Yeats and others to write about his native Ireland, he produced The Curse of the Wise Woman, The Story of Mona Sheehy, and other novels. His later tales were gathered in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix and The Little Tales of Smethers, but many works remain uncollected. Lord Dunsany died at Dunsany Castle in County Meath, Ireland, in 1957. He is recognized as a leading figure in the development of modern fantasy literature, influencing such writers as J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ursula K. Le Guin.


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