Showing results by author "Avram Davidson" in All Categories

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ten years in the service of Kublai Kahn...Marco, Niccolo, and Maffeo Polo have seen magic and miracles, and accumulated riches beyond their dreaming. But now all they want is to return to their beloved Venice. Alas - as the only Westerners in the glittering Mongol court, they are high favourites with the Khan of Khans. And before he will allow them to leave, they must undertake one strange, final quest.

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.

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"....

The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy is a collection of historical mystery fantasy short stories by Avram Davidson, featuring his scholarly detective character Doctor Eszterhazy and set in an imaginary European country. It never got better than this - short stories set in the "triune monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania" in the decades before the World Wars.

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.

Swarthy, hairy, ostracized by others of his tribe, Arnten set off to lead a life of proud and lonely independence in his primitive world of Thule - Ultima Thule - where men huddled in animal skins against the arctic cold and used crude clubs and spears to kill the giant prehistoric animals that roamed the land. But Arnten - "The Bear" - was quicker of body and sharper of mind than his fellow men, and he had a special destiny: a path beset with mortal danges and evil witchery he must overcome to save himself, his world, and his woman, from the evil one called "The Wolf"!

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.

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.

A world of living legend, peopled by centaurs, golems, harpies, and primitive but shrewd humans - all this in a mysterious realm of Starflux and Earthflux, closer to the primordial chaos than the world we know and told in a style at once familiar and fantastic, homely and horrific.

In this collection of stories from 1959 to 1961, Avram treats us to pieces on maritime tragedies, Prohibition-era gangsters, forgotten Americans, the Triangle Shirt Co. tragedy, and the Crimean Light Brigade blunder. He also has an intriguing theory about Jack the Ripper.

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