Showing results by author "Avram Davidson" in All Categories

The Phoenix and the Mirror: or, The Enigmatic Speculum by Avram Davidson is a fantasy novel that tells the story of a sorcerer named Vergil Magus. This sorcerer was named for Virgil (or Publius Vergilius Maro), poet and author of The Aeneid. In an introduction to The Phoenix and the Mirror, Davidson claims that during the Dark Ages, people tended to forget that Virgil was a poet and instead believed he was a sorcerer. The Phoenix and the Mirror was the first book in which Davidson attempted to retell the legend of this mysterious sorcerer.

Avram Davidson was one of the great original American writers of this century. He was erudite, cranky, Jewish, wildly creative, and sold most of his wonderful stories to pulp magazines. Now, his estate and his friends have brought together a definitive collection of his finest work, each story introduced by an SF luminary: writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe, Guy Davenport, Peter S. Beagle, Gregory Benford, Thomas M. Disch, and dozens of others. This is a volume every lover of fantasy will need to own.

Avram Davidson's six Jack Limekiller stories create a rich and colorful world where the magical and inexplicable coexist with the outboard motor and the escalation of the American war in Vietnam. British Hidalgo is "a place that you can put your arms around" - welcoming and friendly to the visitor, but uncanny beings dwell in the bush and roam along its coast.

Fictional? Authoritative? Fantastic? Deadpan? Investigations into the real, the true...and the things that should be true....

The Maze is a pathway between worlds and times. Its Masters know the secret but decline to interfere. Its Guardians at different levels prevent invasion of one world by the inhabitants of another. But the alien hive-creatures called Chulpex mean to find their way past the Guardians to colonize a new world, and one ordinary, untrained Earthman is catapulted into wild adventure in his determination to stop them.

Professor Vlad Smith is on a terrifying quest, one that will take him from the halls of our most hallowed institutions to the most run-down of old houses in blighted neighborhoods. A mysterious committee, shredded yellowed newspapers, a daguerreotype of a Confederate soldier, a headless corpse, and a corpseless head.... These are the clues that Smith must piece together to save his sanity and his daughter and uncover the terrible secret of the Boss in the Wall.

This invaluable collection of Avram Davidson's resonant, witty short stories describes some incidents in the career of many-times-Doctor Engelbert Eszterhazy, loyal subject of the Triune Monarchy of Scythia- Pannonia-Transbalkania, located in a 19th-century Europe whose political landscape will be, after a little reflection, familiar to most fantasy listeners. Enquire with Doctor Eszterhazy into curious matters: the lurley, the old woman who lived with a bear, gingerbread men, dancing goats, and more.

In 1962, Avram wrote Beer Like Water, which was part of a book of Davidson’s true short stories titled Crimes & Chaos. In this audiobook, in Avram’s typical fashion, he plays with the setting such that it’s a bit more special than reality. Beer! Beer! Beer! exists at the intersection of magical realism (just a hint) and historical fiction, with the streets of Yokums representing the Yonkers of his youth in the 1920s and 1930s much in the way that the British Hidalgo of Limekiller! parallels Belize.

Jon-Joras had come to Earth simply to oversee arrangements for a dragon hunt to amuse the king. These hunts were as much pageantry as sport - the dragons, brought to Earth centuries before as pets of an alien race, were powerful but slow-witted....

Peregrine, bastard son of King Paladrine, thought he had trouble when he was transformed by a sorcerer into a falcon. In fact, his real troubles began when the prepubescent princess Ruby changed him back into...well, almost a prince. A bastard. Whereupon he found himself dragged off by a dyspeptic dragon, smooched by a sphinx, wooed by the weefolk, and finally appointed Sub-Imperial-sub-Legate, which is still not quite a prince, but somewhat more elegant than a bastard.

Avram Davidson was widely regarded as one of the most outstanding authors of short fantasy fiction in our time. This collection comprises his distinctive historical fantasies - tales of strange Mitteleurpoas, of magic in Victorian England, and on the American frontier. Here are "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire", "Traveller from an Antique Land", and "What Strange Stars and Skies"; here are dragons, cameras, and "The Singular Incident of the Dog on the Beach".

Ready for a story? Here's a selection of some of the finest science fiction shorts of recent years, including stories from Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, Robert Sheckley, Terry Bisson, Avram Davidson, and Philip K. Dick.

This is a classic collection of short stories written by Avram Davidson, one of the most acclaimed fantasists of the 20th Century. It includes his best-known short story, "Or All the Seas with Oysters", and more.

Earth was old, her riches gone. Her children too had left her, all but a few who lived peacefully off the land. And then came the Kar-Chee, to crack Earth open and suck out what remained of her richness, threatening the twilight of the old planet with an evil beyond anything that had gone before. With them they brought their servants, beasts so cruel and horrible that men could recall their like only from ancestral nightmares, and named them "dragons"....

In his science fiction novel Rork!, Ran Loman wants only to be left alone, to get away from it all. That's why he volunteers for duty on Pia 2, the most remote, isolated world in the Galaxy. The problem on Pia 2 is redwing, a plant used throughout the galaxy as a medical fixative. Redwing grows ony on Pia 2. And lately, less and less is being harvested. Lomar's assignment: find out why, and do something about it.

Inspired by medieval legends about the poet Vergil, who was revered not only as the author of the Aeneid but also as a powerful necromancer, Davidson embarked on his Vergil Magus series in the '60s with the intriguing novel The Phoenix and the Mirror. In this sequel, Vergil answers a magical summons from Averno, both the wealthiest and the filthiest of cities. The magnates there are worried about the waning and shifting of the natural fires that have fueled their industries and fouled their air.

Like Malamud and Jackson, Avram Davidson brought a unique level of charm, wit, and intrigue to the short story form. Collected here for the first time are his remarkable mystery tales, including the 1815 investigations of New York's Chief Constable; a sinister lesson in New England thrift; New Amsterdam river pirates versus the KGB; treachery in nursing home; and expatriates who will kill for a little peace and quiet.

Peregrine was the bastard son of the King of Sapodilla, the last Pagan kingdom in the world to resist Christianity. Accompanied by his page and the rather time-worn sorcerer, Appledore, the prince sallies forth into the Dark Ages to find his fortune. What he finds instead is: dragons, whores, Huns, Roman legions, emperors, and a most fantastic collection of mysteries and adventures.

Set during the reign of the Aztecs in Mexico, two alien forces, dormant for centuries, enter a confrontation on a remote mountain that will decide Earth's fate. The great old ones benevolently ruled before the cruel Aztecs were shaped by the Huitzil, who came from the evil stars and taught the Aztecs how to conquer and demanded endless human sacrifice.

Avram Davidson's final Vergil Magus novel, The Scarlet Fig, continues the adventures of the wandering mage through an alternate ancient world filled with exotic landscapes, populated by creatures of myth and legend.