Edward John Morton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, published as Lord Dunsany, is a famous author of numerous novels, plays, and literary tales, who was at the origins of the fantasy genre itself. He was virtually the first in European literature to create an entire "secondary world" — with its own cosmology, mythology, history, and geography. His mythology influenced Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Borges, while his paradoxical humor and constant play with reader expectations impacted Neil Gaiman and all modern ironic fantasy. This book offers you three collections by the master — "Fifty-One Stories," "Tales of Three Hemispheres," "The Man Who Ate the Phoenix" — as well as four novels: the duology "Chronicles of the Shaded Valley" ("Don Rodriguez, or Chronicles of the Shaded Valley," "The Shadow of the Handmaid"), "The Blessing of Pan," "The Curse of the Sorceress." Here, an Irish youth who eats an immortal phoenix begins to see the magical reverse side of the world, a quiet village in the English countryside succumbs to the charms of the ancient god Pan, and a hereditary witch casts a curse on a peat-processing syndicate...
Some of the works are published in Russian for the first time or in new translations, while others are presented in a new edition. The publication is accompanied by illustrations by the famous fairy-tale artist Sidney Sime, made for the first publications of Dunsany's books.
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