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This book features stories from acclaimed fantasists, such as Lynn Abbey (Co-writer of Sanctuary), Alan Garner, Ursula K. Le Guin (creator of the Earthsea Quartet) and Elizabeth A. Lynn.
Contents: Introduction: The bonnie road / Ellen Kushner — The hunt of the unicorn / Joan D. Vinge — The man who sold magic / Nicholas Stuart Gray — Peter Kagan and the wind / Gordon Bok — The forty-seventh island / R. A. Lafferty — The Lamia and Lord Cromis / M. John Harrison — War wounds / Lynn Abbey — Feel free / Alan Garner — The word of unbinding / Ursula K. Le Guin — Dream poems / Gordon Grant — The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia / Michael Bishop — Wizard’s domain / Elizabeth A. Lynn
Contents: Introduction: The bonnie road / Ellen Kushner — The hunt of the unicorn / Joan D. Vinge — The man who sold magic / Nicholas Stuart Gray — Peter Kagan and the wind / Gordon Bok — The forty-seventh island / R. A. Lafferty — The Lamia and Lord Cromis / M. John Harrison — War wounds / Lynn Abbey — Feel free / Alan Garner — The word of unbinding / Ursula K. Le Guin — Dream poems / Gordon Grant — The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia / Michael Bishop — Wizard’s domain / Elizabeth A. Lynn
244 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published August 1, 1980
3 people are currently reading
109 people want to read
About the author
Ellen Kushner
139 books607 followersEllen Kushner weaves together multiple careers as a writer, radio host, teacher, performer and public speaker.
A graduate of Barnard College, she also attended Bryn Mawr College, and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She began her career in publishing as a fiction editor in New York City, but left to write her first novel Swordspoint, which has become a cult classic, hailed as the progenitor of the “mannerpunk” (or “Fantasy of Manners”) school of urban fantasy. Swordspoint was followed by Thomas the Rhymer (World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award), and two more novels in her “Riverside” series. In 2015, Thomas the Rhymer was published in the UK as part of the Gollancz “Fantasy Masterworks” line.
In addition, her short fiction appears regularly in numerous anthologies. Her stories have been translated into a wide variety of languages, including Japanese, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Latvian and Finnish.
Upon moving to Boston, she became a radio host for WGBH-FM. In 1996, she created Sound & Spirit, PRI’s award-winning national public radio series. With Ellen as host and writer, the program aired nationally until 2010; many of the original shows can now be heard archived online.
As a live stage performer, her solo spoken word works include Esther: the Feast of Masks, and The Golden Dreydl: a Klezmer ‘Nutcracker’ for Chanukah (with Shirim Klezmer Orchestra). In 2008, Vital Theatre commissioned her to script a full-scale theatrical version. The Klezmer Nutcracker played to sold-out audiences in New York City, with Kushner in the role of the magical Tante Miriam.
In 2012, Kushner entered the world of audiobooks, narrating and co-producing “illuminated” versions of all three of the “Riverside” novels with SueMedia Productions for Neil Gaiman Presents at Audible.com—and winning a 2013 Audie Award for Swordspoint.
Other recent projects include the urban fantasy anthology Welcome to Bordertown (co-edited with Holly Black), and The Witches of Lublin, a musical audio drama written with Elizabeth Schwartz and Yale Strom (which one Gabriel, Gracie and Wilbur Awards in 2012). In 2015 she contributed to and oversaw the creation of the online Riverside series prequel Tremontaine for Serial Box with collaborators Joel Derfner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Racheline Maltese and Patty Bryant.
A dauntless traveler, Ellen Kushner has been a guest of honor at conventions all over the world. She regularly teaches writing at the prestigious Clarion Workshop and the Hollins University Graduate Program in Children’s Literature.
Ellen Kushner is a co-founder and past president of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, an organization supporting work that falls between genre categories. She lives in New York City with author and educator Delia Sherman, a lot of books, airplane and theater ticket stubs, and no cats whatsoever.
A graduate of Barnard College, she also attended Bryn Mawr College, and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She began her career in publishing as a fiction editor in New York City, but left to write her first novel Swordspoint, which has become a cult classic, hailed as the progenitor of the “mannerpunk” (or “Fantasy of Manners”) school of urban fantasy. Swordspoint was followed by Thomas the Rhymer (World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award), and two more novels in her “Riverside” series. In 2015, Thomas the Rhymer was published in the UK as part of the Gollancz “Fantasy Masterworks” line.
In addition, her short fiction appears regularly in numerous anthologies. Her stories have been translated into a wide variety of languages, including Japanese, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Latvian and Finnish.
Upon moving to Boston, she became a radio host for WGBH-FM. In 1996, she created Sound & Spirit, PRI’s award-winning national public radio series. With Ellen as host and writer, the program aired nationally until 2010; many of the original shows can now be heard archived online.
As a live stage performer, her solo spoken word works include Esther: the Feast of Masks, and The Golden Dreydl: a Klezmer ‘Nutcracker’ for Chanukah (with Shirim Klezmer Orchestra). In 2008, Vital Theatre commissioned her to script a full-scale theatrical version. The Klezmer Nutcracker played to sold-out audiences in New York City, with Kushner in the role of the magical Tante Miriam.
In 2012, Kushner entered the world of audiobooks, narrating and co-producing “illuminated” versions of all three of the “Riverside” novels with SueMedia Productions for Neil Gaiman Presents at Audible.com—and winning a 2013 Audie Award for Swordspoint.
Other recent projects include the urban fantasy anthology Welcome to Bordertown (co-edited with Holly Black), and The Witches of Lublin, a musical audio drama written with Elizabeth Schwartz and Yale Strom (which one Gabriel, Gracie and Wilbur Awards in 2012). In 2015 she contributed to and oversaw the creation of the online Riverside series prequel Tremontaine for Serial Box with collaborators Joel Derfner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Racheline Maltese and Patty Bryant.
A dauntless traveler, Ellen Kushner has been a guest of honor at conventions all over the world. She regularly teaches writing at the prestigious Clarion Workshop and the Hollins University Graduate Program in Children’s Literature.
Ellen Kushner is a co-founder and past president of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, an organization supporting work that falls between genre categories. She lives in New York City with author and educator Delia Sherman, a lot of books, airplane and theater ticket stubs, and no cats whatsoever.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 21, 2018
-Bastante variedad, con independencia de la calidad intrínseca.-
Género.Relatos.
Lo que nos cuenta. El libro Los mejores relatos de fantasía II (publicación original: Basilisk, 1980) es una antología, seleccionada por Ellen Kushner, con distintos tipos de relatos de fantasía que nos llevaran a conocer, entre otros, la caza de un ser sobrenatural y la huida de otro, el suicidio como protesta en asuntos “curiosos” o, por ejemplo, un parque temático muy particular.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Género.Relatos.
Lo que nos cuenta. El libro Los mejores relatos de fantasía II (publicación original: Basilisk, 1980) es una antología, seleccionada por Ellen Kushner, con distintos tipos de relatos de fantasía que nos llevaran a conocer, entre otros, la caza de un ser sobrenatural y la huida de otro, el suicidio como protesta en asuntos “curiosos” o, por ejemplo, un parque temático muy particular.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
January 20, 2017
curiously unfocused collection of new and previously published work, ranging from classic to mediocre worth. and not a single basilisk. really nice illustrations by Terri Windling, though.
July 22, 2022
Fantasy anthology (with arguably one science fiction story) published in 1980. Most of the stories are copyright 1980 (six out of eleven stories), with the oldest going back to 1956. Each story is accompanied by a black and white illustration by T. Windling at the beginning of the story. There is also an editor’s introduction and a closing two page select bibliography. There is no story about a basilisk in the book.
There doesn’t seem to be any unity of theme in this anthology in terms of style or subject matter, with everything from epic high fantasy to modern urban fantasy to poetry and the stories for me vary a bit in quality. A couple I would barely even call fantasy at all (or even genre fiction), while others were filled with wizards and magic and trolls. The opening story “The Hunt of the Unicorn” by Joan D. Vinge, I thought had a bit much exposition but once I was a little way into it found it a good story about basically a were-unicorn and his sibling who is trapped in the form of a raven. If it were a novel I would have definitely kept reading. A rather sad tale, some good worldbuilding though. “The Man Who Sold Magic” by Nicholas Stuart Gray might have been my favorite tale, very nicely written and it felt like a story that should already exist, that it should exist alongside other well known fairy tales. Really good writing. “The Lamia and Lord Cromis” by M. John Harrison was an odd tale and had me break out the dictionary for words like albescent, permanganate, mazarine, and writhe. Not sure I understood it but it had some vivid imagery and secondary characters. “War Wounds” by Lynn Abbey was a middle tale set between two novels about the priestess/warrior woman Rifkind. I think having read the first novel might have helped me a lot before reading this tale, though the introduction by the editor does provide some useful information. It felt like a Red Sonja tale and that was fine by me. There is an Earthsea story by Ursula K. Le Guin (“The Word of Unbinding”) that was odd and dreamlike but really engaging and also there was a story that felt like something out of the Twilight Zone (“The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia” by Michael Bishop). These aren’t all the stories, but these are the most notable ones to me. I will admit to skimming two of them as I just couldn’t get into them.
There doesn’t seem to be any unity of theme in this anthology in terms of style or subject matter, with everything from epic high fantasy to modern urban fantasy to poetry and the stories for me vary a bit in quality. A couple I would barely even call fantasy at all (or even genre fiction), while others were filled with wizards and magic and trolls. The opening story “The Hunt of the Unicorn” by Joan D. Vinge, I thought had a bit much exposition but once I was a little way into it found it a good story about basically a were-unicorn and his sibling who is trapped in the form of a raven. If it were a novel I would have definitely kept reading. A rather sad tale, some good worldbuilding though. “The Man Who Sold Magic” by Nicholas Stuart Gray might have been my favorite tale, very nicely written and it felt like a story that should already exist, that it should exist alongside other well known fairy tales. Really good writing. “The Lamia and Lord Cromis” by M. John Harrison was an odd tale and had me break out the dictionary for words like albescent, permanganate, mazarine, and writhe. Not sure I understood it but it had some vivid imagery and secondary characters. “War Wounds” by Lynn Abbey was a middle tale set between two novels about the priestess/warrior woman Rifkind. I think having read the first novel might have helped me a lot before reading this tale, though the introduction by the editor does provide some useful information. It felt like a Red Sonja tale and that was fine by me. There is an Earthsea story by Ursula K. Le Guin (“The Word of Unbinding”) that was odd and dreamlike but really engaging and also there was a story that felt like something out of the Twilight Zone (“The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia” by Michael Bishop). These aren’t all the stories, but these are the most notable ones to me. I will admit to skimming two of them as I just couldn’t get into them.
November 8, 2013
A collection of stories
March 15, 2025
Introduction: The Bonnie Road - Ellen Kushner
•The Hunt of the Unicorn- Joan D. Vinge ⭐⭐
•The Man who sold Magic - Nicholas Stuart Gray ⭐⭐⭐
• Peter Kagan and the Wind - Gordon Bok ⭐⭐
•The Forty-Seventh island - R. A. Lafferty ⭐
• The Lamia and Lord Cromis - M. John Harrison ⭐⭐⭐
• War Wounds - Lynn Abbey ⭐⭐
•Feel Free - Alan Garner ⭐⭐
• The Word of Unbinding - Ursula K. Le Guin ⭐⭐⭐
•Dream Poems - Gordon Grant ⭐
• The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia - Michael Bishop ⭐⭐⭐
•Wizard’s domain - Elizabeth A. Lynn ⭐⭐
•The Hunt of the Unicorn- Joan D. Vinge ⭐⭐
•The Man who sold Magic - Nicholas Stuart Gray ⭐⭐⭐
• Peter Kagan and the Wind - Gordon Bok ⭐⭐
•The Forty-Seventh island - R. A. Lafferty ⭐
• The Lamia and Lord Cromis - M. John Harrison ⭐⭐⭐
• War Wounds - Lynn Abbey ⭐⭐
•Feel Free - Alan Garner ⭐⭐
• The Word of Unbinding - Ursula K. Le Guin ⭐⭐⭐
•Dream Poems - Gordon Grant ⭐
• The Yukio Mishima Cultural Association of Kudzu Valley, Georgia - Michael Bishop ⭐⭐⭐
•Wizard’s domain - Elizabeth A. Lynn ⭐⭐
January 19, 2022
Two or three short stories that I really enjoyed in here.
November 4, 2022
Above-average group of stories.
Though oddly, there are zero basilisks.
Though oddly, there are zero basilisks.
July 14, 2012
[2010-01-22] Intended to do a full review, but still too sore from the fall. Here's what I'd already written. Note -- contents include Alan Garner's short "Feel Free", which covers some of the same themes as "Red Shift", and the Earthsea short "The Word of Unbinding"[return][return]Anthology of fantasy short stories, first published in 1980. Going by the copyright page, this is a mix of reprints and new stories, originally published from 1956 to 1980. There's a good mix of styles here. A couple of the pieces didn't work for me, but this anthology had a very high hit rate for me.[return][return]http://julesjones.livejournal.com/362...
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews