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The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collection
'THE AVRAM DAVIDSON TREASURY' may be the most satisfying short-story collection of the decade. Davidson (1923-1993), one of science fiction and fantasy's greatest writers, was "a master shaper of small stories," writes Alan Dean Foster in his introduction to "Or the Grasses Grow." Foster is joined in introducing the stories by dozens of extraordinary authors, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, William Gibson, Poul Anderson, and many others. Davidson was clearly adored, and often emulated, despite his reputation for being somewhat curmudgeonly. His mastery of language was exquisite, and his stories glittered like diamonds. Each of the 38 tales in this collection spanning five decades is a self-contained wonderland. One of the most famous (and most often plagiarized) short stories in science fiction appears here: "Or All the Seas with Oysters," tells of slightly sinister safety pin pupae, coat hanger larvae, and bicycle adults in a world where machines are more than they seem.
Of "Dagon," John Clute writes, "It is as vicious as the world of a fish, and wise. It is masterly.... it cannot be read. It can only be re-read." On the surface, this is the story of an American military officer in Peking in 1945, but lurking underneath are ancient gods, Chinese magicians, and the obscene torpor of hell. As Ray Bradbury writes in his afterword, "Many of these stories are complete mysteries, puzzles. Avram Davidson starts us in a fog and lets us orient ourselves slowly.... His knack for a proper pace is that of a true teller of tales." But all of Davidson's stories aren't dark--far from it. He was a satirical genius, able to poke fun at sacred cows and turn a comic phrase with the best of them. Some of these stories will make you laugh out loud.
To the fan of great literary short fiction: Don't skip over this deeply fulfilling treasury because Avram Davidson was "only" a science fiction author. He's been compared to Rudyard Kipling, Saki, John Collier, and G.K. Chesterton, if you need a literary excuse.
And to the science fiction or fantasy fan: This amazing and creative Hugo, Edgar, and World Fantasy Award winner, nominated for seven Nebula Awards by his fellow writers, will astound and amaze you. (Therese Littleton)
RUNNING TIME ➥ 16hrs.
©2011 Skyboat Media, Inc. (P)2020 Skyboat Media, Inc.
453 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 15, 1998
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459 people want to read
About the author
Avram Davidson
431 books95 followersAvram Davidson was an American Jewish writer of fantasy fiction, science fiction, and crime fiction, as well as the author of many stories that do not fit into a genre niche. He won a Hugo Award and three World Fantasy Awards in the science fiction and fantasy genre, a World Fantasy Life Achievement award, and a Queen's Award and an Edgar Award in the mystery genre. Davidson edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1962 to 1964. His last novel The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil was completed by Grania Davis and was a Nebula Award finalist in 1998. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says "he is perhaps sf's most explicitly literary author".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
February 27, 2023
Avram Davidson is fairly obscure to modern readers but was extremely well regarded and influential among his peers, which include many of the greats of both American SFF and mystery fiction that emerged in the 50's and 60's. This collection won the Locus Award for Best Collection (1999) and represents some of his best work. Most of his writings are short stories, published in the pulp publications of the day, but seem an odd fit for those audiences as there are no swashbuckling heroes, laser guns, rocket ships, or scantily clad damsels in distress to be found. To say that he's got a quirky style, rife with digressions and non sequiturs, is an understatement, and it's clear why he's considered a writer's writer and saw only limited commercial success.
The stories in this collection, each picked and introduced by a who's who of master authors including Robert Silverberg Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe and many more aren't easily classified. There are elements of sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, horror and what these days would be called magical realism. They represent a varied and odd assortment, but most are wry, curious affairs that are wonderfully evocative and have a unique charm, wit and perspective. Some are ridiculous and farcical, some dark and haunting, others weighty and reflective. Few offer clear resolutions, rather Davidson's stories give readers parts of a strange puzzle and focus on the journey of discovery. All are wonderfully entertaining, intelligent and full of surprise, puzzlement and wonder.
The stories in this collection, each picked and introduced by a who's who of master authors including Robert Silverberg Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe and many more aren't easily classified. There are elements of sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, horror and what these days would be called magical realism. They represent a varied and odd assortment, but most are wry, curious affairs that are wonderfully evocative and have a unique charm, wit and perspective. Some are ridiculous and farcical, some dark and haunting, others weighty and reflective. Few offer clear resolutions, rather Davidson's stories give readers parts of a strange puzzle and focus on the journey of discovery. All are wonderfully entertaining, intelligent and full of surprise, puzzlement and wonder.
July 26, 2007
Suppose you are the insomniac son of the world's funniest, smartest rabbi, who tells you bed time stories to get you to go to sleep, except they are so good, you never do. (And if that's not your idea of the best possible collection of American science fiction and fantasy short stories, I don't know how to help you.)
March 28, 2017
Five hundred pages of stories from some writer that we've barely heard of? How good can this be? As it turns out, not bad at all and oftentimes verging on the excellent, as a host of other writers do their best to resurrect their old friend and make him famous in a way he was never in life (unfortunately, this book is out of print and Davidson is still far from a household name so it perhaps didn't work as well as they'd hoped). Its a journey through the literary life of a talented author and a sort of Irish wake, as his colleagues (and ex-wife, who helped edit the collection with Robert Silverberg) gather to give introductions to each story, not only explaining why they wanted the tale to be included but also dispensing with some amusing anecdotes about their cantankerous old buddy (and trust me, he must have been because almost every personal anecdote has some synonym for that or "cranky" included in there somewhere).
SF as a genre is seemingly littered with writers who were excellent in their time but never quite got their due despite being well regarded by their peers and fans. Davidson probably remains the epitome of those forgotten tale-spinners, possessing arguably the most raw talent and imagination of his generation of writers, as well as the ability to spin out tightly knotted tale after tightly knotted tale that had no real preference for genre. Sometimes he would write strange SF, sometimes it would be off-kilter fantasy, other times he would write these erudite and coiled mysteries. He worked steadily over the years of his life but never really hit the big time and over the years became crankier and more insular, eventually dying in a small apartment in Washington state without a great deal of money to his name and almost entirely forgotten by the general public and especially by SF fans.
This book was an attempt to rectify that injustice and it does make a good case that Davidson deserved far more accolades than he received when he was alive, cherry picking the cream of his stories and presenting them chronologically over the course of his career. As I mentioned each story is introduced by one of his author friends and one thing that struck me about those tidbits is how honest the writers were about their old friend, not at all sugarcoating how difficult he could be to deal with or how bitter and cranky he got later in life (Silverberg especially refers to the "shroud of rancor that we wove around [his works] in his later years"). At times it feels like the book is a mass apology of sorts, from his friends to Davidson, asking for forgiveness that he wasn't as popular as he perhaps should have been or expressing sorrow that he had struggled so much economically in his life when a lot of them ultimately did much better (Harlan Ellison's afterword, despite being taken from a "Best American Short Stories" note and thus weirdly coming across as being mostly about himself, perhaps best describes the strange unfairness that makes some people household names and leaves others to wallow in obscurity).
Reading through the stories its not difficult at times to see why he never caught on or sold in huge numbers despite his obvious talent with the short story, bordering on genius. His tales are by and large esoteric things, sometimes quick stories that set up a strange situation that is capped off with an eerie punchline, other times his stories are more immersive, drowning themselves in pure description while he conjures a world made of what feels like a million moving parts and somehow allows a great and subtle drama to occur underneath all the verbiage. But its definitely not for everyone and people looking for more straightforward spaceships and aliens stuff might find themselves scratching their heads looking for a way into his stories, which in the more opaque tales often leave you with the impression of a glittering jewel in a glass case . . . its brilliant to look at and you can certainly appreciate it but it doesn't exactly light any fires in your heart.
As it turns out, selection is key with Davidson. The previous collection of his stories that I read "The Other Nineteenth Century" was by and large a gathering of stories that to me felt more hermetic than anything else, gleefully detached from anything resembling modern tradition but also extremely difficult to get into as most of them turn on weird quirks of history or assume you have the same level of obscure esoteric knowledge Davidson does (which is nice of him to assume that of me but unfortunately a public school education and a science degree doesn't make me anywhere near the kind of guy who is going to win "Boer War Trivia Night"). That problem does crop up here and there (literally in the case of "The Price of a Charm" which was repeated in the other collection and requires you to have some knowledge of the causes of World War One) but more often as you get to the later stories where his more knotted style starts to overtake his storytelling abilities and he clearly seems to be writing for the pure joy of writing, delighting in choosing words that no one besides linguistic scholars would have even considered. It makes for dense, sometimes detached reading, like a genius explaining gleefully how quantum physics works while you just nod and hope some recognizable phrase comes your way soon.
But the earlier, shorter tales are remarkably in how concisely he can create a world sideways to ours, lay out the rules, then present us with a strange situation before turning the whole notion on its head with a chilling twist at the end. Whether its the gently savage "Now Let Us Sleep" or the truly weird "Or All the Seas With Oysters" or the unclassifiable "Dagon" (where John Clute says it best "it cannot be read, only reread") he churns out story after story in those early year that bristles with a unique sensibility and an untethered imagination. He plays with form and language (he's got a heck of an ear for accents and how it affects the rhythm of speech, the closest modern equivalent I can think of is Dave Sim of the comic "Cerebus") like a superhero discovering day in and day out the full extent of his powers. And even if some of the stories hit harder than others, he never puts a foot wrong.
Later when he fleshes out this style more he begins to get results that border on the amazing. "The Sources of the Nile" trades in the same cynical territory that Kornbluth and Pohl mapped out so well but still manages to conjure some optimism for the poor main character. "Sacheverell" distills pain and absurdity and humor into a story that feels about five pages long and wastes nothing. "The House the Blakeneys Built" has to rank among some of the weirdest stories I've ever read, toying with notions of language drift and yet keeping its ultimate meaning right on the periphery, tapping into an uneasiness in how its hard to tell if civilization erodes when understanding does, or if its the other way around.
Even further on he has tales that strike out for magical realism territory, the most successful of which is probably "Manatee Gal, Won't You Come Out Tonight" (an earlier story "The Power of Every Root" suffers a little too much from that opacity he was prone to at times) which presents a world where you can't know the rules and yet have to figure them out if you want the story to make sense. Davidson gives you all the clues you might need, even if he hides them very cleverly, in offhand descriptions and the space between what people say and what they mean. He stayed good right up to the very end, with stories like "The Slovo Stove" striking a poignant note about how society changes and the old ways slowly get worn away, centering all those emotions around the mystery of an impossible stove and a world that we hardly know is going until its gone.
Any one of these could have made him a household name and the fact that one man wrote all of these is astounding in itself. For all the wonders these stories contain Davidson rarely repeats himself . . . even when he returns to the same themes he manages to find a new and different way of stating those old truths. If he could be cranky and isolated and perhaps increasingly obsessed with the past toward the end, the stories themselves don't reflect that as much as a searching curiosity, an endless need to know . . . not to explain, mind you, Davidson sure seemed to like his mysteries but sometimes being able to describe the shape of the unknown is just as important as delving into the sources of knowledge. Reading these stories its clear that Davidson was too singular a writer to achieve mass popularity and yet was too distinct to be forgotten. He wrote because he had to and he wrote the only way he knew how and its telling that of all the friends and admirers that pepper the introductions and story notes, its telling that none of them wish for any of his skill or ability . . . rather they wish that he was still here to use his own skills and give us more of whatever wonder he had lurking inside his brain. That he can't anymore is a tragedy of the ordinary kind, the fate that perhaps waits any writer who takes the craft seriously. Despite our best efforts there will always be a story left unfinished, or nestled solely in the mind. What the editors and writers try to do here is reverse a travesty, even in a small fashion and for that they deserve our thanks and perhaps the modest hope that they succeeded in making his name grace a few more bookshelves than he did in life.
SF as a genre is seemingly littered with writers who were excellent in their time but never quite got their due despite being well regarded by their peers and fans. Davidson probably remains the epitome of those forgotten tale-spinners, possessing arguably the most raw talent and imagination of his generation of writers, as well as the ability to spin out tightly knotted tale after tightly knotted tale that had no real preference for genre. Sometimes he would write strange SF, sometimes it would be off-kilter fantasy, other times he would write these erudite and coiled mysteries. He worked steadily over the years of his life but never really hit the big time and over the years became crankier and more insular, eventually dying in a small apartment in Washington state without a great deal of money to his name and almost entirely forgotten by the general public and especially by SF fans.
This book was an attempt to rectify that injustice and it does make a good case that Davidson deserved far more accolades than he received when he was alive, cherry picking the cream of his stories and presenting them chronologically over the course of his career. As I mentioned each story is introduced by one of his author friends and one thing that struck me about those tidbits is how honest the writers were about their old friend, not at all sugarcoating how difficult he could be to deal with or how bitter and cranky he got later in life (Silverberg especially refers to the "shroud of rancor that we wove around [his works] in his later years"). At times it feels like the book is a mass apology of sorts, from his friends to Davidson, asking for forgiveness that he wasn't as popular as he perhaps should have been or expressing sorrow that he had struggled so much economically in his life when a lot of them ultimately did much better (Harlan Ellison's afterword, despite being taken from a "Best American Short Stories" note and thus weirdly coming across as being mostly about himself, perhaps best describes the strange unfairness that makes some people household names and leaves others to wallow in obscurity).
Reading through the stories its not difficult at times to see why he never caught on or sold in huge numbers despite his obvious talent with the short story, bordering on genius. His tales are by and large esoteric things, sometimes quick stories that set up a strange situation that is capped off with an eerie punchline, other times his stories are more immersive, drowning themselves in pure description while he conjures a world made of what feels like a million moving parts and somehow allows a great and subtle drama to occur underneath all the verbiage. But its definitely not for everyone and people looking for more straightforward spaceships and aliens stuff might find themselves scratching their heads looking for a way into his stories, which in the more opaque tales often leave you with the impression of a glittering jewel in a glass case . . . its brilliant to look at and you can certainly appreciate it but it doesn't exactly light any fires in your heart.
As it turns out, selection is key with Davidson. The previous collection of his stories that I read "The Other Nineteenth Century" was by and large a gathering of stories that to me felt more hermetic than anything else, gleefully detached from anything resembling modern tradition but also extremely difficult to get into as most of them turn on weird quirks of history or assume you have the same level of obscure esoteric knowledge Davidson does (which is nice of him to assume that of me but unfortunately a public school education and a science degree doesn't make me anywhere near the kind of guy who is going to win "Boer War Trivia Night"). That problem does crop up here and there (literally in the case of "The Price of a Charm" which was repeated in the other collection and requires you to have some knowledge of the causes of World War One) but more often as you get to the later stories where his more knotted style starts to overtake his storytelling abilities and he clearly seems to be writing for the pure joy of writing, delighting in choosing words that no one besides linguistic scholars would have even considered. It makes for dense, sometimes detached reading, like a genius explaining gleefully how quantum physics works while you just nod and hope some recognizable phrase comes your way soon.
But the earlier, shorter tales are remarkably in how concisely he can create a world sideways to ours, lay out the rules, then present us with a strange situation before turning the whole notion on its head with a chilling twist at the end. Whether its the gently savage "Now Let Us Sleep" or the truly weird "Or All the Seas With Oysters" or the unclassifiable "Dagon" (where John Clute says it best "it cannot be read, only reread") he churns out story after story in those early year that bristles with a unique sensibility and an untethered imagination. He plays with form and language (he's got a heck of an ear for accents and how it affects the rhythm of speech, the closest modern equivalent I can think of is Dave Sim of the comic "Cerebus") like a superhero discovering day in and day out the full extent of his powers. And even if some of the stories hit harder than others, he never puts a foot wrong.
Later when he fleshes out this style more he begins to get results that border on the amazing. "The Sources of the Nile" trades in the same cynical territory that Kornbluth and Pohl mapped out so well but still manages to conjure some optimism for the poor main character. "Sacheverell" distills pain and absurdity and humor into a story that feels about five pages long and wastes nothing. "The House the Blakeneys Built" has to rank among some of the weirdest stories I've ever read, toying with notions of language drift and yet keeping its ultimate meaning right on the periphery, tapping into an uneasiness in how its hard to tell if civilization erodes when understanding does, or if its the other way around.
Even further on he has tales that strike out for magical realism territory, the most successful of which is probably "Manatee Gal, Won't You Come Out Tonight" (an earlier story "The Power of Every Root" suffers a little too much from that opacity he was prone to at times) which presents a world where you can't know the rules and yet have to figure them out if you want the story to make sense. Davidson gives you all the clues you might need, even if he hides them very cleverly, in offhand descriptions and the space between what people say and what they mean. He stayed good right up to the very end, with stories like "The Slovo Stove" striking a poignant note about how society changes and the old ways slowly get worn away, centering all those emotions around the mystery of an impossible stove and a world that we hardly know is going until its gone.
Any one of these could have made him a household name and the fact that one man wrote all of these is astounding in itself. For all the wonders these stories contain Davidson rarely repeats himself . . . even when he returns to the same themes he manages to find a new and different way of stating those old truths. If he could be cranky and isolated and perhaps increasingly obsessed with the past toward the end, the stories themselves don't reflect that as much as a searching curiosity, an endless need to know . . . not to explain, mind you, Davidson sure seemed to like his mysteries but sometimes being able to describe the shape of the unknown is just as important as delving into the sources of knowledge. Reading these stories its clear that Davidson was too singular a writer to achieve mass popularity and yet was too distinct to be forgotten. He wrote because he had to and he wrote the only way he knew how and its telling that of all the friends and admirers that pepper the introductions and story notes, its telling that none of them wish for any of his skill or ability . . . rather they wish that he was still here to use his own skills and give us more of whatever wonder he had lurking inside his brain. That he can't anymore is a tragedy of the ordinary kind, the fate that perhaps waits any writer who takes the craft seriously. Despite our best efforts there will always be a story left unfinished, or nestled solely in the mind. What the editors and writers try to do here is reverse a travesty, even in a small fashion and for that they deserve our thanks and perhaps the modest hope that they succeeded in making his name grace a few more bookshelves than he did in life.
February 20, 2016
This is one of the finest short fiction collections I have ever read. Avram Davidson is another of the great writers who are criminally overlooked. He was at one time the editor for "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction". His absolute genius is apparent in almost every story contained within.
If you have never read or even heard of Avram Davidson, now is the time to repair that deficiency. If you like Gene Wolfe, Algis Budrys, Philip K. Dick, etc., you will love AD. You can thank me later.
If you have never read or even heard of Avram Davidson, now is the time to repair that deficiency. If you like Gene Wolfe, Algis Budrys, Philip K. Dick, etc., you will love AD. You can thank me later.
March 29, 2023
I've been slowly picking my way through this for months and have been talking about it era by era on my blog as I finish each section.
Now it's finally done. I say that not in a bad way but I can only read so much of a thing like this by one author and it became a struggle by the end. I also liked the earlier stories much more than the later ones (many of which just went straight over my head) and that didn't contribute to my finishing it any faster
I think he's got some classic stories that everyone should read, but a lot of this went figuratively into one ear and out the other. He's a great writer at times even though he makes us WAIT for the punch lines. Many of the stories were pretty funny. I think I got a lot more out of the author intros than the stories themselves due to the obscure references that I wouldn't have understood had they not been pointed out.
I'd like to try one of his novels
Now it's finally done. I say that not in a bad way but I can only read so much of a thing like this by one author and it became a struggle by the end. I also liked the earlier stories much more than the later ones (many of which just went straight over my head) and that didn't contribute to my finishing it any faster
I think he's got some classic stories that everyone should read, but a lot of this went figuratively into one ear and out the other. He's a great writer at times even though he makes us WAIT for the punch lines. Many of the stories were pretty funny. I think I got a lot more out of the author intros than the stories themselves due to the obscure references that I wouldn't have understood had they not been pointed out.
I'd like to try one of his novels
Read
December 22, 2008Davidson wrote some of the richest and most satisfying stories I’ve ever read. It’s shameful that he’s not given the renown he deserves, probably because of the science fiction elements that season his stories. It’s a short-sighted bias, as his stories are far more mature & witty & intelligent than most of the output by mainstream authors.
April 21, 2016
Avram Davidson was one of at the distinct voices in science fiction and fantasy. He was also one of the best short story writers of the twentieth century -- not only in the fantasy field but overall. His prose is rich and because of it I find his stories to be slow reading -- I want to slow down to appreciate the flow of the words. Not all good or even great writers share this trait. Many writers I like quite a bit -- Robert Heinlein and Lois McMaster Bujold, jut to name two -- don't write prose to linger over. Their strength is in story and in character. Davidson also tells stories, and many of his characters are great, but it's his prose, added on top of that which makes him unique and such a treasure.
The Avram Davidson Treasury is a collection of his best works. It includes his one Hugo winner, "Or All the Sea With Oysters (also probably his most remembered story, in which safety pins are the larval stage of bicycles -- not all bicycles as a character assures us, but some). It also includes "The Golem," in which a couple stops the plans of an powerful android, mostly by not paying attention to what it's saying and talking around it. The story also showcases Davidson's ear for speech patterns and dialect, something that merits comparison to Kipling.
Most of the stories are gems, in may different ways. "The Slovo Stove" probes how ethnic groups in America lose their identity, even as some maintain old hatreds. "The Sources of the Nile" tells of a writer and ad man who discovers where innovation comes from, only to lose it. "The Afair at Lahore Cantonment" tells the story behind Kipling's poem "Danny Deever." "The House that the Blakeneys Built" takes a starkly realistic view of what might happen when a small group of space travelers, survivors of a space crash, discover a colony lost for several hundred years. "Revolver" is a wry, intricately plotted crime story.
And of course several of the stories feature Davidson' continuing characters. "Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman" is perhaps the most famous Doctor Esterhazy story. "Manatee Gal, Won't You Come Out Tonight," likewise, is perhaps the most famous and best of the atmospheric Limekiller stories. And "Yellow Rome; or, Vergil and the Vestal Virgin" is the first part of what would have been Davidson's third Vergil Magus novels, baed on the medieval legend that Virgil didn't just write The Aeneid but was a magician.
This is a book to be savored, a few stories at a time. Davidson deserved far more recognition in his lifetime, but this collection stands as a fitting memorial.
The Avram Davidson Treasury is a collection of his best works. It includes his one Hugo winner, "Or All the Sea With Oysters (also probably his most remembered story, in which safety pins are the larval stage of bicycles -- not all bicycles as a character assures us, but some). It also includes "The Golem," in which a couple stops the plans of an powerful android, mostly by not paying attention to what it's saying and talking around it. The story also showcases Davidson's ear for speech patterns and dialect, something that merits comparison to Kipling.
Most of the stories are gems, in may different ways. "The Slovo Stove" probes how ethnic groups in America lose their identity, even as some maintain old hatreds. "The Sources of the Nile" tells of a writer and ad man who discovers where innovation comes from, only to lose it. "The Afair at Lahore Cantonment" tells the story behind Kipling's poem "Danny Deever." "The House that the Blakeneys Built" takes a starkly realistic view of what might happen when a small group of space travelers, survivors of a space crash, discover a colony lost for several hundred years. "Revolver" is a wry, intricately plotted crime story.
And of course several of the stories feature Davidson' continuing characters. "Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman" is perhaps the most famous Doctor Esterhazy story. "Manatee Gal, Won't You Come Out Tonight," likewise, is perhaps the most famous and best of the atmospheric Limekiller stories. And "Yellow Rome; or, Vergil and the Vestal Virgin" is the first part of what would have been Davidson's third Vergil Magus novels, baed on the medieval legend that Virgil didn't just write The Aeneid but was a magician.
This is a book to be savored, a few stories at a time. Davidson deserved far more recognition in his lifetime, but this collection stands as a fitting memorial.
December 4, 2020
Avram Davidson is a jewel. Nearly every story is a masterclass in the Gene Wolfe definition of literature: "that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure."
Excellent prose, pitch perfect ear for speech. Layers to unpeel and consider. Unlike some authors (CA Smith, Lovecraft) who hit a formula and stuck with it, Davidson is endlessly inventive. He has a voice for sure, but there's no formula, and his work as a whole defies easy characterization. Mystery, magical realism, sci-fi, fantasy, weird fiction, crime stories.
Also I love reading authors whose work reveals great learning beyond the narrow scope necessary to write what's at hand. Davidson had a commanding level of knowledge in a vast breadth of subjects. Should be better known than he is.
Two favorites were Dagon and Naples.
Excellent prose, pitch perfect ear for speech. Layers to unpeel and consider. Unlike some authors (CA Smith, Lovecraft) who hit a formula and stuck with it, Davidson is endlessly inventive. He has a voice for sure, but there's no formula, and his work as a whole defies easy characterization. Mystery, magical realism, sci-fi, fantasy, weird fiction, crime stories.
Also I love reading authors whose work reveals great learning beyond the narrow scope necessary to write what's at hand. Davidson had a commanding level of knowledge in a vast breadth of subjects. Should be better known than he is.
Two favorites were Dagon and Naples.
August 27, 2012
An excellent collection of short stories, of which even the ones which aren't very compelling are always well-written. Davidson has a great range, and can go from Wodehousian parodies to respectable sci-fi seemingly effortlessly. Each story is preceded by a brief note from a staggering range of influential authors (Silverberg, Gibson, LeGuin, Bradbury, Ellison...); he was admired by what seems like half the world. While a bunch of the encomia don't offer much insight, a fair number help provide context for the genre-hopping stories within. I don't think all were successful, but Davidson was a heck of a writer and even the merely okay ones will still typically have some good dialog or characterization.
March 4, 2016
As far as I know, very few people ever really knew about Avram Davidson. Which is a shame, because his stories are so amazing, and so varied, it's hard to believe they all came from the same person. You read one story, wondering where in the world he's going with it, and you end up astonished by its artistry. A master of language, of character, of plot, just wonderful stuff. I'm so bummed that he never really got traction, I'm convinced that some of his stories would have been absolutely amazing.
May 7, 2022
It's true, every single story is an absolute gem, but it's really saying something when it was the second-last story in the collection, his last story published while alive, whose cumulative build-up and unexpected catharsis of denoument left me utterly disembodied for a few seconds. A writer of deep, hidden power under layers of casual learning, natural dialogue and seeming digressions.
June 17, 2022
I have never read anything by Avram Davidson, but I am now an instant fan! Wonderfully imaginative and captivating. These short stories by Avram are marvelously descriptive, his mastery over words and the English language take you on a poetic and fantastical journey that you will never forget Avram’s places and characters.
May 9, 2012
Science Fiction (and fantasy, and horror, and ....) can encompass several kinds of work, and that becomes evident if one takes a long look at the oeuvre of an author spanning decades. This book takes such a long look, and shows a great writer who started with lots of brightness, but eventually succumbed to darkness & pain. Not all of these stories were to my liking, but that must not stop you from reading these lost & forgotten works.
May 5, 2019
Davidson produced some very uniquely written, uniquely voiced stories. I would have *never* found out about him if it weren't, I think, for Gardner Dozois mentioning the Limekiller series at some point in the distant past. This retrospective collection runs from his very first published work to the last few pieces he was working on when he passed. Davidson only got better with time and now that I've read a slew of his short stories I realize what I really need is a novel length version of some of them.
Some of the works in here were too subtle for me to draw out his true intentions, others were amusingly direct, and others were perfect, allowing me to discern the whole tapestry on my own (or at least that's what it felt like).
As many of the authors wrote in their forewords to this collection, Davidson passed away in relative obscurity, unappreciated and mostly forgotten except for those who were touched by the witty magic of his words. That's a sad thing, but I'm glad I'm one of the lucky few who has gotten their hands on some of Avram Davidson's gems. I will continue my quest to find more.
Recommended.
Some of the works in here were too subtle for me to draw out his true intentions, others were amusingly direct, and others were perfect, allowing me to discern the whole tapestry on my own (or at least that's what it felt like).
As many of the authors wrote in their forewords to this collection, Davidson passed away in relative obscurity, unappreciated and mostly forgotten except for those who were touched by the witty magic of his words. That's a sad thing, but I'm glad I'm one of the lucky few who has gotten their hands on some of Avram Davidson's gems. I will continue my quest to find more.
Recommended.
August 30, 2022
I was blown away when I read Avram Davidson's short story, "The Last Wizard", in an old issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science. I was so taken with that story that I felt that if there was a collection of short stories of his available in hardcover book format that I would purchase it. Well there was and I did and I just finished reading it.
Treasury. Preceding each story is praise by a noted author. There's also praise at each end of the book. Me? The only story in the book that I enjoyed was the one that drew me in, "The Last Wizard". For me, story after story, "Really? That's time in my life that I will never have to live over."
As to "The Last Wizard", I think it could be better written, but it is very clever.
Given another chance with another author's tasty morsel, I will look into other ways to explore their work further than a purchase or if I am confronted with a similar collection be ready to bail if it doesn't live up to the first experience.
Disappointed in the extreme and wondering how he garnered so much praise by his contemporaries. Approach with great caution.
Treasury. Preceding each story is praise by a noted author. There's also praise at each end of the book. Me? The only story in the book that I enjoyed was the one that drew me in, "The Last Wizard". For me, story after story, "Really? That's time in my life that I will never have to live over."
As to "The Last Wizard", I think it could be better written, but it is very clever.
Given another chance with another author's tasty morsel, I will look into other ways to explore their work further than a purchase or if I am confronted with a similar collection be ready to bail if it doesn't live up to the first experience.
Disappointed in the extreme and wondering how he garnered so much praise by his contemporaries. Approach with great caution.
August 11, 2024
This is a big collection of short SF and Fantasy/Spec (and one crime) stories by one of the less well-remembered authors of SF. This collection put together by his friends after his death. It’s full of stories of all kinds, mostly what you might call speculative fiction rather than hard SF or space opera, and almost all of it is set on earth. There are some real gems in this collection, and I especially liked the Limekiller story (one of several he set in his magico version of Belize). He also wrote a lot of stories about lonely and under appreciated people - which I gather was what he himself was. A talent who just never got a break.
What struck me the most was how lovingly each story was introduced (and sometimes after-worded) by his many peers. He was a master of the short story, and really admired for his craft. A real writer’s writer. He has a few novels as well, and of these I’ve only read Masters of the Maze, which I was only meh on despite some great aliens. But now I’d like to go back and re-read it.
Contributing to this book are Robert Silverberg, Grania Davis, Damon Knight, Poul Anderson, Gregory Benford, Alan Dean Foster, John Clute, Peter S. Beagle, Kate Wilhelm, Spider Robinson, Frederik Pohl, Ursula Le Guin, Thomas Disch, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison - and many more. See the full list of ISFDB.
What struck me the most was how lovingly each story was introduced (and sometimes after-worded) by his many peers. He was a master of the short story, and really admired for his craft. A real writer’s writer. He has a few novels as well, and of these I’ve only read Masters of the Maze, which I was only meh on despite some great aliens. But now I’d like to go back and re-read it.
Contributing to this book are Robert Silverberg, Grania Davis, Damon Knight, Poul Anderson, Gregory Benford, Alan Dean Foster, John Clute, Peter S. Beagle, Kate Wilhelm, Spider Robinson, Frederik Pohl, Ursula Le Guin, Thomas Disch, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison - and many more. See the full list of ISFDB.
July 9, 2019
I have to simply assume it was a magnificently well done job by the people responsible for curating this because no other author I have ever read has presented such variety in their short stories. I really didn't know what I was getting into and couldn't wait to find out. The stories are mostly fantastically weird wind ups to strange curveball ideas that somehow work because they are so well crafted. And Davidson shows that he can do that in 4 pages or over 20 just the same.
I walked away from this very, very impressed and I think he may have been one of the best short story writers of all time.
I walked away from this very, very impressed and I think he may have been one of the best short story writers of all time.
May 24, 2020
It’s depressing reading the tributes to Mr Davidson in this book as many of them are coming from people who have also passed away in the 22 years since this was published. It’s hard to review a volume of short stories because the temptation is to feel guilty if you don’t examine every single one. So I’m just going to point out that Davidson was a highly original writer with a loquacious and wry style that is totally in my wheelhouse. I was, however, occasionally stymied by the jarring differences in theme and content and voice from story to story, which is completely my own problem and not that of the editors and definitely not of Davidson himself.
June 25, 2024
Gratitude to Michael Dirda for recommending this book by a little-known, though highly respected, author of science fiction short stories. Among my favorites: “the last wizard,” “revenge of the cat lady,” “the woman who thought she could read,” and “crazy old lady.” Highly flavored with Slavic, old-world Yiddish, and old-Brooklyn flavor, some of these reminded me of Terry Pratchett and Ray Bradbury.
This tribute volume needed some extra-careful editing for spelling (not intended by the author himself), chapter breaks, etc.
This tribute volume needed some extra-careful editing for spelling (not intended by the author himself), chapter breaks, etc.
September 26, 2020
I wish I could like this book more, but I just couldn't get into the stories that well. He writes in a way that I really like, but the stories were just not very compelling. He is often slated as a sci-fi writer, though I don't find any of these stories to be in that direction. These are more in the mystery vein.
December 28, 2024
some stories i liked more than others, but the biggest problem with a collection like this is it's so massive, made out of so many pieces, that, after a while, it feels a bit tedious and repetitive. it was great to have each story with a short introduction by another known science fiction writer though, it does emphasise the impact this writer had over so many others.
August 27, 2025
Wonderful collection of short stories (mostly fanatasy/sci-fi/magical realism) by obscure author Avram Davidson. He is masterful at painting a picture in a fairly few number of words. He should be better known.
The stories all have forwards by other friend-authors, attempting to pay him tribute and help cement his legacy.
The stories all have forwards by other friend-authors, attempting to pay him tribute and help cement his legacy.
February 8, 2021
There is, simply, no one like Avram Davidson.
He is one of the finest writers I've ever read. Yes, his style takes a little getting used to, just because it's like nothing else. But it's worth it, I promise you.
He is one of the finest writers I've ever read. Yes, his style takes a little getting used to, just because it's like nothing else. But it's worth it, I promise you.
January 19, 2022
For me some good, bad and rather strange.
Interesting style, still perplexed how unknown to me.
Short stories in collections should maybe be dipped into then put down, reading continuously maybe loses something that was originally there.
Interesting style, still perplexed how unknown to me.
Short stories in collections should maybe be dipped into then put down, reading continuously maybe loses something that was originally there.
September 12, 2023
8 I think the trouble with this is that Mr Davidson is a writer’s writer which doesn’t make the stories he writes of great enjoyment for the average Joe. As with any anthology, there are good, better and best but none really floated my boat.
July 14, 2025
"Recondite" is a word only used by intellectuals. And even they frequently mispronounce it. It is "reh CON diit". Accent on the penultimate. It is an ambiguous word. As a negative it can mean too esoteric or complicated to understand. As a positive it can mean uncovering little known or obscure things.
Avram Davidson (1923-1993) is recondite in the most entertaining and amusing way.
This is a magnificent 1998 collection of his short stories. It has 38 stories in 443 pages. Each story has an introduction by a successful science fiction or mystery author. The stories were published from 1954 to 1993. Davidson published hundreds of stories. He won all of the major awards for science fiction and mystery stories, including a Hugo, an Edgar, and a World Fantasy Award. Most of the award-winning stories are in this collection.
Avram filled his stories with stuff. One story gives a lesson in how to carve a wooden Indian. He gives detail description of middle European cooking in another. He casually throws in a "freemartin" (google it) in the middle of a far space science fiction story. Another story lets him explain the evolution of clothing fashions.
The real trick is that he tells serious and moving stories about complicated people. "The Slovo Stove" is, at times, a very funny story about a stove. By the end, it is a razor-sharp story about losing an ethnic identity. "The Affair at Lahore Cantonment" is a clever story within a story with a convincing picture of British imperialism in India, with an excellent surprise ending.
There is no typical Davidson story. He varies tone, style, viewpoint and setting but the fullness of the world in each story is a constant. At times he gets carried away with background and it buries the plot.
In a well-run country there would be no need for me to bang the drum for Avram Davidson
Avram Davidson (1923-1993) is recondite in the most entertaining and amusing way.
This is a magnificent 1998 collection of his short stories. It has 38 stories in 443 pages. Each story has an introduction by a successful science fiction or mystery author. The stories were published from 1954 to 1993. Davidson published hundreds of stories. He won all of the major awards for science fiction and mystery stories, including a Hugo, an Edgar, and a World Fantasy Award. Most of the award-winning stories are in this collection.
Avram filled his stories with stuff. One story gives a lesson in how to carve a wooden Indian. He gives detail description of middle European cooking in another. He casually throws in a "freemartin" (google it) in the middle of a far space science fiction story. Another story lets him explain the evolution of clothing fashions.
The real trick is that he tells serious and moving stories about complicated people. "The Slovo Stove" is, at times, a very funny story about a stove. By the end, it is a razor-sharp story about losing an ethnic identity. "The Affair at Lahore Cantonment" is a clever story within a story with a convincing picture of British imperialism in India, with an excellent surprise ending.
There is no typical Davidson story. He varies tone, style, viewpoint and setting but the fullness of the world in each story is a constant. At times he gets carried away with background and it buries the plot.
In a well-run country there would be no need for me to bang the drum for Avram Davidson
February 6, 2021
Premier fantasist short story collection by editor, Robert Silverberg. He is bizarre, strange, and funny, proud of his Jewish heritage. His allusions are difficult and obscure, Davidson will not explain them nor spoon feed. You either get them, or don't. He is original - imagine coat hangers as embryos for bicycles in unknown reproductive cycle? Discovery is fatal and unexpected.
Davidson does not disappoint.
Davidson does not disappoint.
Want to read
May 20, 2012I have to admit, I don't understand the few stories in this book that I chose to read, at random. It's disappointing. I bought this book because Davidson wrote one of my favorite stories ever: "Or All the Seas With Oysters."
For example I don't understand these stories: "Sacheverell," or "The Tail-Tied Kings."
Someone, please explain them to me!
For example I don't understand these stories: "Sacheverell," or "The Tail-Tied Kings."
Someone, please explain them to me!
September 3, 2011
More clever and witty than profound or speculative. Prefer my science fiction and fantasy a bit more serious. Very stylish writer, which I suppose is why so many fellow writers shower him with praise.
December 14, 2015
I didn't finish it, but I'd like to go back and pick out a few more stories. Some of them were delightful in their creepy whimsy, but some I just couldn't get rolling with. I'm sure there's more to this author, but it's back to the library for him for now.
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