What do you think?
Rate this book
Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle
When New York Times Bestselling writer Tad Williams described Peter S. Beagle as a 'bandit prince out to steal reader's hearts' he touched on a truth that readers have known for fifty years. Beagle, whose work has touched generations of readers around the world, has spun rich, romantic and very funny tales that have beguiled and enchanted readers of all ages.
Undeniably, his most famous work is the much loved classic, The Last Unicorn, which tells of unicorn who sets off on quest to discover whether she is the last of her kind, and of the people she meets on her journey. Never prolific, The Last Unicorn is one of only five novels Beagle has published since A Fine and Private Place appeared in 1960, and was followed by The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper's Song, and Tamsin.
During the first forty years of his career Beagle also wrote a small handful, scarcely a dozen, short stories. Classics like 'Come Lady Death,' 'Lila and the Werewolf,' 'Julie's Unicorn,' 'Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros,' and the tales that make up Giant Bones. And then, starting just five years ago, he turned his attention to short fiction in earnest, and produced a stunning array of new stories including the Hugo and Nebula Award winning follow up to The Last Unicorn, 'Two Hearts,' WSFA Small Press Award winner 'El Regalo,' and wonderful stories like the surrealist 'The Last and Only,' the haunting 'The Rabbi s Hobby' and others.
Mirror The Best of Peter S. Beagle collects the very best of these stories, over 200,000 words worth, ranging across 45 years of his career from early stories to freshly minted tales that will surprise and amaze readers. It's a book which shows, more than any other, just how successful this bandit prince from the streets of New York has been at stealing our hearts and underscores how much we hope he ll keep on doing so.
Undeniably, his most famous work is the much loved classic, The Last Unicorn, which tells of unicorn who sets off on quest to discover whether she is the last of her kind, and of the people she meets on her journey. Never prolific, The Last Unicorn is one of only five novels Beagle has published since A Fine and Private Place appeared in 1960, and was followed by The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper's Song, and Tamsin.
During the first forty years of his career Beagle also wrote a small handful, scarcely a dozen, short stories. Classics like 'Come Lady Death,' 'Lila and the Werewolf,' 'Julie's Unicorn,' 'Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros,' and the tales that make up Giant Bones. And then, starting just five years ago, he turned his attention to short fiction in earnest, and produced a stunning array of new stories including the Hugo and Nebula Award winning follow up to The Last Unicorn, 'Two Hearts,' WSFA Small Press Award winner 'El Regalo,' and wonderful stories like the surrealist 'The Last and Only,' the haunting 'The Rabbi s Hobby' and others.
Mirror The Best of Peter S. Beagle collects the very best of these stories, over 200,000 words worth, ranging across 45 years of his career from early stories to freshly minted tales that will surprise and amaze readers. It's a book which shows, more than any other, just how successful this bandit prince from the streets of New York has been at stealing our hearts and underscores how much we hope he ll keep on doing so.
454 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2010
19 people are currently reading
515 people want to read
About the author
Peter S. Beagle
220 books3,891 followersPeter Soyer Beagle (born April 20, 1939) is an American fantasist and author of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays. He is also a talented guitarist and folk singer. He wrote his first novel, A Fine and Private Place , when he was only 19 years old. Today he is best known as the author of The Last Unicorn, which routinely polls as one of the top ten fantasy novels of all time, and at least two of his other books (A Fine and Private Place and I See By My Outfit) are considered modern classics.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
March 29, 2017
One of the very few complaints I have regarding Mr. Beagle is that his output is slight, taking years and even decades to come up with a new novel. He does though compensates for the penury of titles with the quality of his stories. The present collection is the finest example of his gemcutter patience and of his attention to detail that gives us such sparkling gems.
To me, short stories have always ranked with poetry as the most difficult of literary forms, primarily because the writer can’t afford to make a single mistake.
Mirror Kingdoms is a collection that spans the entire artistic career of the author, revisiting some of his best creations, introducing some autobiographical elements, exploring his beloved themes of sorrow and beauty walking hand in hand. Most of the stories included here are novella-length rather than the regular short form, and I for one am grateful for the chance to get deeper involved in the setting and in the characters. The fact that many of these characters and worlds are already familiar from the novels of Mr. Beagle is an added incentive to enjoy my return to his inimitable style.
From my earliest childhood, I have spent a great deal – perhaps a majority – of my time in this world in the company of imaginary friends. A lady once tapped my head and said, rather sadly, „All those people partying up in there, and I’m not invited”. I explained, as best I could, that I’m not always invited either, and that I often end up crashing the party, or eavesdropping through doors, walls, windows. They rarely confide in me, my characters, but they do leave trails of breadcrumbs for me to follow.
Let us begin the jurney then, and follow the breadcrumbs to the abode of unicorns, werewolves, rhinoceroses, mermaids, griffins, giants, centaurs, blue angels, minstrels, painters, rabbis and children eager to explore the unknown. Consider each of the stories included here as a five star and well worth re-reading from time to time. My map through the kingdoms comes from the songs of Sirit Byar:
Merchant, street girl, beggar, yeoman,
King or common, man or woman,
Only two things make us human –
Sorrow and love, sorrow and love ...
Songs and fame are vain endeavor –
Only two things fail us never,
Only two things last forever –
Sorrow and love, sorrow and love ...
>><<>><<>><<>><<
Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros is a charming fable about loneliness and the meaning of life. Gottesman is a Swiss-born philosophy teacher whose life is changed by a perky niece curious about tigers:
Professor Gustave Gottesman went to a zoo for the first time when he was thirty-four years old. [...] From an early age he had determined on the study of philosophy as his life’s work; and for any true philosopher this world is zoo enough, complete with cages, feeding times, breeding programs, and earnest docents, of which he was wise enough to know that he was one.
The professor is a good introduction to the sort of quiet, pensive, mostly sad, open minded and surprisingly funny protagonists that Beagle sketches so convincingly:
Even if he had admitted the term, he would surely have insisted that there was nothing necessarily wrong with loneliness, in and of itself. „I think,” he would have said – did often say, in fact, to Sally Lowry. „There are people, you know, for whom thinking is company, thinking is entertainment, parties, dancing even. The others, other people, they absolutely will not believe this.”
The Last and Only, or, Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French is an unusual (for Beagle) contemporary piece in that it flirts openly with politics, posing the question of what is a sensible man to do when he is disenchanted with the direction his country is heading.
The unconscious is ingenious at devising methods of withdrawal,” he explained, pulling at his fingertips as though milking a cow, „and national character is certainly no barrier to a mind so determined to get out from under the weight of being an American. It’s not as uncommon as you might think, these days.”
Mr. Moscowitz, a bourgeois librarian in an university town, is becoming more French than the natives of France, and becomes a celebrity overnight, a sort of Forest Gump that draws our attention to the foibles of the establishment.
The President shook his hand, and gave him a souvenir fountain pen and a flag lapel, and said that he regarded Mr. Moscowitz’s transformation as the ultimate expression of the American dream, for it surely proved to the world that any American could become whatever he wanted enough to be, even if what he wanted to be was a snail-eating French wimp.
Kudos to the author for managing to introduce a moving love story into this political satire.
Come Lady Death is a historical novella set in decadent England during the Regency, something half Fritz Leiber and half Neil Gaiman, horror and gods walking among us, but told in the signature gentle and slyly humorous style of Beagle.
The secret of my long life is that nothing has ever been dull for me. For all my life, I have been interested in everything I saw and been anxious to see more. But I cannot stand to be bored, and I will not go to parties at which I expect to be bored, especially if they are my own.
Flora, Lady Neville, is searching for new thrills at the end of a long and succesful life. Her salon is frequented by the best beaux and debutantes of the London society, including royalty, but she wants something more, something special ....
El Regalo is the first of three novellas set in Avicenna, the California university town of The Folk of the Air . This time the protagonists are teenager Angie and her annoying little brother Marvyn. The boy is playing with dangerous forces as he dabbles in magic spells and time travel, yet he might come in handy when Angie wants to deliver some billet-doux to her boy-crush from school. Love (sibling love) and danger/ sorrow are the main themes, with a climax in a familiar haunted house from the novel version.
Julie’s Unicorn brings back together in Avicenna two wanderers: Julie the graphic artist and Farrell the itinerant lute player. A visit to a local museum brings weird magic into their already weird relationship, but out of this weirdness a beautiful thing is released.
Hey, I’m sane. All things considered. Weird is not wacko, there’s a fine but definite line. And I’m stable as a damn lighthouse, or we’d never have stayed friends this long.
The Last Song of Sirit Byar would be a strong contender for the best of this collection, but I don’t want to sell any of the others short. The author is deeply interested in music and in graphic arts as a complement and enhancer of traditional storytelling. The tale of Sirit Byar is rich in themes and in emotional intensity, well beyond its limited wordcount.
Ah, the ports – the smell, salt and spice and tar, miles before you could even see the towns. The food waiting for us there in the stalls, on the barrows – fresh, fresh courel, jeniak, boreen soup with lots of catwort. Strings of little crackly jai-fish, two to a mouthful. And the light on the water, and children splashing in the shadows of the rotting pilings, and folk yelling welcome to their „white sheknath” in half a dozen tongues. The feeling that everything was possible, that you could go anywhere in the world from here...
Set in the same imaginary world as The Innkeeper’s Song , the tale follows the peregrinations of master singer Sirit Byar and of his apprentice – a tone deaf, big and ugly hill girl who ran away from her poor hamlet to live like a gypsy, always on the move from one place to another. The two first meet near a temple to Azdak : He is the god of wanderers. He knows his own.
Another tragic yet beautiful love story forms the backbone of the tale, with magic being created in this universe by songs, a skill in which Sirit Byar is a true master.
The singing is what matters, big girl. Not for whom. To do what I do, I have to walk the roads. I can’t ride. If I ride, the songs don’t come. That’s the way it is. [...]
Kings need jugglers, jugglers don’t need kings.
Lila the Werewolf is an original take on the myth of Frankenstein, as in creating monsters versus teaching tolerance. The setting is New York but the narrator is the same Farrell we met earlier in Avicenna, displaying the same live-and-let-live attitude that got him through so many rough patches in life.
The thing is, it’s only Lila, not Lon Chaney or somebody. Look, she goes to her psychiatrist three afternoons a week, and she’s got her guitar lesson one night a week, and she cooks eggplant maybe twice a week. She calls her mother every Friday night, and one night a month she turns into a wolf. You see what I’m getting at? It’s still Lila, whatever she does, and I just can’t get terribly shook about it.
What Tune the Enchantress Plays is another story set in the world of „The Innkeeper’s Song” , another exploration of the power of music to create magic. A young girl is born into a family of powerful magicians, but in order to reach her potential and to maintain the family tradition she must marry within the clan. When she falls in love with an outsider she sets in motion a powerful drama where good intentions and self-sacrifice lead to destruction from a scorned lover from a generation back. As Sirit Byar used to sing :
Only two things last forever –
Sorrow and love, sorrow and love ...
Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel is another favorite and is one of three novellas set in the author’s homeplace in Bronx, told through the eyes of a child. The premise is a painter visited by an uninvited muse, a beautiful blue lady with wings who claims to be an angel sent from above to inspire the slightly boozy and unambitious artist.
I got a very bad feeling that we’re both supposed to learn something from this. Bad, Bad feeling.
The humorous tone of the beginning masks the much more painful truths that Chaim is foreshadowing during his first sitting with the angel, but the real surprise comes from the young witness to the events, the boy who loved movies and music and who had to face daily bullying on the streets of Bronx for being Jewish and bookish. (‚I know all about not wanting to go outside.’)
My memory is that I regarded her as a nice-looking lady with wings, but not my type at all, I having just discovered Alice Faye. Lauren Bacall, Lizabeth Scott and Lena Horne came a bit later in my development.
Also,
I don’t know a thing about ten-year-olds today; but in those times one of the major functions of adults was to supply drama and mystery to our lives, and we took such things where we found them.
Equally important in the story are these adults and the lessons they teach: Aunt Rivke about being steadfast and about fighting for what you love, the reformist rabbi Shulevitz about tolerance (‚Forgiveness is everyone’s business. Even the dead. On this earth or under it, there is no peace without forgiveness.’) and Chaim about what it means being an artist:
Like that Chinese monkey trying to grab the moon in the water. That’s me, a Chinese monkey.
Salt Wine is another love and sorrow novella, told with part humour, part horror through the voice of a rough sailor who once saw a friend save a merman from a shark attack. Rewarded with the secret formula for magic vine, the friend becomes immensely rich, but can he also find love?
„Salt wine,” I says, and different this time, slowly. „Salt wine ... that’d be like pickled beer? Oysters in honey, that kind of thing, is it? How about bloody fried marmalade, then? Whale blubber curry? Boiled nor’easter?
Later,
The one thing I’ve got a good hold on, when I’m with her, it’s like coming home. First time I saw her, it came over me, I’ve been gone a long time, and now I’m home.
Two Hearts is the long awaited sequel to „The Last Unicorn” and it doesn’t disappoint when measured against the most popular story told by Beagle. The magic is still there, love and courage are pitted once again against terrible monsters, and old friends meet perhaps for the last bittersweet time in this world.
Two hearts, never forget that – many people do. Eagle heart, lion heart – eagle heart, lion heart. Never forget, little one.
A young girl and an old man ride together against a griffin, their hearts beating as one to save the kingdom from a child-eating monster. Schmendrick and his lover stand ready to offer assistance and somewhere, on another plane, the last unicorn might hear their cry for help. I dearly hope the author will return to this realm of wonder:
But the unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world I’m never going to see, but it doesn’t matter, because now I have seen it, and it’s beautiful, and I was in there too.
Giant Bones is a marvelous celebration of storytelling, a going back to basics as a busy, tired and cranky parent tries to tell a tall, truly scary tale to his child and get him to sleep. I loved every single word of it
And sometimes she’d start in really laughing, no warning. He said the ground would tremble, blossoms and leaves would be coming down everywhere, birds would pop right off their nests, and your bones would buzz for an hour afterward. That’s what it was like when Qu’alo laughed.
King Pelles the Sure is a bit shorter than the other novellas included in the collection, but, in its own way, it is just as important. Pelles is the ruler of a small yet prosperous little kingdom, but he wants glory and asks his Grand Vizier to arrange a little war to make him famous.
Nobody is ever remembered for living out a dull, placid, uneventful life.
Of course the plan ends up in tears, there are no big or little wars, no minor or major slaughters, just as the Grand Vizier tried to warn the reckless king
There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that needs heroes.
Out of the ashes though there is a path to redemption and it lies in the stories we tell to the next generation, in the ability to learn from our mistakes. The king hides for awhile on a small farm, where he enchants the local children with unusual fairytales:
On occasion grief flowed into overwhelming joy, though that outcome was never something you might want to bet on.
Vanishing is a story about ghosts, and like the previous one it is about learning from the mistakes of the past. Set in a dream space that reawakens the hidden killings committed at the Berlin Wall, the piece is showcasing an author more firmly engaged in current events than some of his imaginary worlds would let one to assume.
The Tale of Junko and Sayuri is a very good translation of the author’s themes into a Japanese setting, rivaling in here my previous favorites like Lian Hearn or Kij Johnson. Spirit animals and the medieval code of honor feature strongly in the plot, but the main ingredients remain love and sorrow, tragedy as the outcome of good intentions.
Often and often does evil result where nothing but good was meant. I am sure this is true in your case. I have many times thought that in this world far more harm is wrought by foolish men than by wicked ones. Perhaps you were foolish, my daughter. Are you also vain enough to imagine yourself the only one?
The Rock in the Park is the second autobiographical piece set in a Bronx where magic is just around the corner of your perception for those who care enough to look. Two thirteen year boys like spend their free time daydreaming, sprawled on the top of a boulder in the local park, and one day they see a family of centaurs asking for directions to a warmer climate (Florida )
If I were a tiger,
I would dance for you.
If I were a mouse,
I would dance for you.
If I were a whale,
I would dance for you ....
One of the boys is a budding poet, the other an aspiring painter. Together they might create a magic strong enough to save the centaur family. I like to see this story as a true confession, as the artistic credo of the author:
I’m an artist. Artists are always drawing people’s journeys.
I keep telling you, the artist isn’t the magic. The artist is the sight, the artist is someone who knows magic when he sees it. The magic doesn’t care whether it’s seen or not – that’s the artist’s business. My business. [...] And magic’s not an all-the-time thing, you’re not ever entitled to magic – not ever, no matter how good you are. Best you can do – all you can do – is make sure you’re ready when it happens. If.
We Never Talk About My Brother is a return to the weird / horror style of some earlier pieces. Magic in here is a dangerous weapon in the hands of the wrong people.
I read once, in India they’ve got gods that are also demons. Depends on their mood, I guess, or the time of year. Or maybe just their lunch.
The Rabbi’s Hobby is a fitting closing piece to the whole collection, another novella with autobiographical elements that reaffirms and underlines the links between love and sorrow, beauty and loss, kindness and forgiveness.
A thirteen year old boy is sent to a rabbi to be tutored for his upcoming coming-of-age ceremony (bar-mitzvah). The lessons are dealing less with religious dogma and more with human understanding and with the coming of wisdom. The hobby hinted at in the title is the collection of lost keys, useless pieces of metal without the locks they were supposed to open.
Well, you know, Joseph, those keys aren’t useless just because I don’t have the locks they fit. Whenever I find a lock that’s lost its key, I try a few of mine on it, on the chance that one of them might be the right one. God is like that for me – a lock none of my keys fit, and probably never will. But I keep at it, I keep picking different keys and trying them out, because you never know. Could happen.
The particular lock that Joseph needs to open comes to them in the form of a photograph from an old glossy magazine. On the cover, an incredibly beautiful, mysterious lady captures their imagination, and boy and rabbi spend many days trying to discover her identity.
We call them spirits, when we call them anything, and we imagine some of them to be malevolent, dangerous – demonic, if you like. But there are benign ones as well, and those are usually here for a specific reason. To help someone, to bring a message. To comfort.
A key without a lock, a restless spirit in need of release, a young boy learning about life – the final destination takes us back where we started, to a place that feels like coming home after a long and amazing journey through the imaginary kingdoms of Peter S Beagle.
Before that letter [‚Mirror Kingdoms’] I had no understanding of beauty, and no idea of what love is, or what can be borne out of love. And after it I knew enough at least to recognize these things when they came to me.
To me, short stories have always ranked with poetry as the most difficult of literary forms, primarily because the writer can’t afford to make a single mistake.
Mirror Kingdoms is a collection that spans the entire artistic career of the author, revisiting some of his best creations, introducing some autobiographical elements, exploring his beloved themes of sorrow and beauty walking hand in hand. Most of the stories included here are novella-length rather than the regular short form, and I for one am grateful for the chance to get deeper involved in the setting and in the characters. The fact that many of these characters and worlds are already familiar from the novels of Mr. Beagle is an added incentive to enjoy my return to his inimitable style.
From my earliest childhood, I have spent a great deal – perhaps a majority – of my time in this world in the company of imaginary friends. A lady once tapped my head and said, rather sadly, „All those people partying up in there, and I’m not invited”. I explained, as best I could, that I’m not always invited either, and that I often end up crashing the party, or eavesdropping through doors, walls, windows. They rarely confide in me, my characters, but they do leave trails of breadcrumbs for me to follow.
Let us begin the jurney then, and follow the breadcrumbs to the abode of unicorns, werewolves, rhinoceroses, mermaids, griffins, giants, centaurs, blue angels, minstrels, painters, rabbis and children eager to explore the unknown. Consider each of the stories included here as a five star and well worth re-reading from time to time. My map through the kingdoms comes from the songs of Sirit Byar:
Merchant, street girl, beggar, yeoman,
King or common, man or woman,
Only two things make us human –
Sorrow and love, sorrow and love ...
Songs and fame are vain endeavor –
Only two things fail us never,
Only two things last forever –
Sorrow and love, sorrow and love ...
>><<>><<>><<>><<
Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros is a charming fable about loneliness and the meaning of life. Gottesman is a Swiss-born philosophy teacher whose life is changed by a perky niece curious about tigers:
Professor Gustave Gottesman went to a zoo for the first time when he was thirty-four years old. [...] From an early age he had determined on the study of philosophy as his life’s work; and for any true philosopher this world is zoo enough, complete with cages, feeding times, breeding programs, and earnest docents, of which he was wise enough to know that he was one.
The professor is a good introduction to the sort of quiet, pensive, mostly sad, open minded and surprisingly funny protagonists that Beagle sketches so convincingly:
Even if he had admitted the term, he would surely have insisted that there was nothing necessarily wrong with loneliness, in and of itself. „I think,” he would have said – did often say, in fact, to Sally Lowry. „There are people, you know, for whom thinking is company, thinking is entertainment, parties, dancing even. The others, other people, they absolutely will not believe this.”
The Last and Only, or, Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French is an unusual (for Beagle) contemporary piece in that it flirts openly with politics, posing the question of what is a sensible man to do when he is disenchanted with the direction his country is heading.
The unconscious is ingenious at devising methods of withdrawal,” he explained, pulling at his fingertips as though milking a cow, „and national character is certainly no barrier to a mind so determined to get out from under the weight of being an American. It’s not as uncommon as you might think, these days.”
Mr. Moscowitz, a bourgeois librarian in an university town, is becoming more French than the natives of France, and becomes a celebrity overnight, a sort of Forest Gump that draws our attention to the foibles of the establishment.
The President shook his hand, and gave him a souvenir fountain pen and a flag lapel, and said that he regarded Mr. Moscowitz’s transformation as the ultimate expression of the American dream, for it surely proved to the world that any American could become whatever he wanted enough to be, even if what he wanted to be was a snail-eating French wimp.
Kudos to the author for managing to introduce a moving love story into this political satire.
Come Lady Death is a historical novella set in decadent England during the Regency, something half Fritz Leiber and half Neil Gaiman, horror and gods walking among us, but told in the signature gentle and slyly humorous style of Beagle.
The secret of my long life is that nothing has ever been dull for me. For all my life, I have been interested in everything I saw and been anxious to see more. But I cannot stand to be bored, and I will not go to parties at which I expect to be bored, especially if they are my own.
Flora, Lady Neville, is searching for new thrills at the end of a long and succesful life. Her salon is frequented by the best beaux and debutantes of the London society, including royalty, but she wants something more, something special ....
El Regalo is the first of three novellas set in Avicenna, the California university town of The Folk of the Air . This time the protagonists are teenager Angie and her annoying little brother Marvyn. The boy is playing with dangerous forces as he dabbles in magic spells and time travel, yet he might come in handy when Angie wants to deliver some billet-doux to her boy-crush from school. Love (sibling love) and danger/ sorrow are the main themes, with a climax in a familiar haunted house from the novel version.
Julie’s Unicorn brings back together in Avicenna two wanderers: Julie the graphic artist and Farrell the itinerant lute player. A visit to a local museum brings weird magic into their already weird relationship, but out of this weirdness a beautiful thing is released.
Hey, I’m sane. All things considered. Weird is not wacko, there’s a fine but definite line. And I’m stable as a damn lighthouse, or we’d never have stayed friends this long.
The Last Song of Sirit Byar would be a strong contender for the best of this collection, but I don’t want to sell any of the others short. The author is deeply interested in music and in graphic arts as a complement and enhancer of traditional storytelling. The tale of Sirit Byar is rich in themes and in emotional intensity, well beyond its limited wordcount.
Ah, the ports – the smell, salt and spice and tar, miles before you could even see the towns. The food waiting for us there in the stalls, on the barrows – fresh, fresh courel, jeniak, boreen soup with lots of catwort. Strings of little crackly jai-fish, two to a mouthful. And the light on the water, and children splashing in the shadows of the rotting pilings, and folk yelling welcome to their „white sheknath” in half a dozen tongues. The feeling that everything was possible, that you could go anywhere in the world from here...
Set in the same imaginary world as The Innkeeper’s Song , the tale follows the peregrinations of master singer Sirit Byar and of his apprentice – a tone deaf, big and ugly hill girl who ran away from her poor hamlet to live like a gypsy, always on the move from one place to another. The two first meet near a temple to Azdak : He is the god of wanderers. He knows his own.
Another tragic yet beautiful love story forms the backbone of the tale, with magic being created in this universe by songs, a skill in which Sirit Byar is a true master.
The singing is what matters, big girl. Not for whom. To do what I do, I have to walk the roads. I can’t ride. If I ride, the songs don’t come. That’s the way it is. [...]
Kings need jugglers, jugglers don’t need kings.
Lila the Werewolf is an original take on the myth of Frankenstein, as in creating monsters versus teaching tolerance. The setting is New York but the narrator is the same Farrell we met earlier in Avicenna, displaying the same live-and-let-live attitude that got him through so many rough patches in life.
The thing is, it’s only Lila, not Lon Chaney or somebody. Look, she goes to her psychiatrist three afternoons a week, and she’s got her guitar lesson one night a week, and she cooks eggplant maybe twice a week. She calls her mother every Friday night, and one night a month she turns into a wolf. You see what I’m getting at? It’s still Lila, whatever she does, and I just can’t get terribly shook about it.
What Tune the Enchantress Plays is another story set in the world of „The Innkeeper’s Song” , another exploration of the power of music to create magic. A young girl is born into a family of powerful magicians, but in order to reach her potential and to maintain the family tradition she must marry within the clan. When she falls in love with an outsider she sets in motion a powerful drama where good intentions and self-sacrifice lead to destruction from a scorned lover from a generation back. As Sirit Byar used to sing :
Only two things last forever –
Sorrow and love, sorrow and love ...
Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel is another favorite and is one of three novellas set in the author’s homeplace in Bronx, told through the eyes of a child. The premise is a painter visited by an uninvited muse, a beautiful blue lady with wings who claims to be an angel sent from above to inspire the slightly boozy and unambitious artist.
I got a very bad feeling that we’re both supposed to learn something from this. Bad, Bad feeling.
The humorous tone of the beginning masks the much more painful truths that Chaim is foreshadowing during his first sitting with the angel, but the real surprise comes from the young witness to the events, the boy who loved movies and music and who had to face daily bullying on the streets of Bronx for being Jewish and bookish. (‚I know all about not wanting to go outside.’)
My memory is that I regarded her as a nice-looking lady with wings, but not my type at all, I having just discovered Alice Faye. Lauren Bacall, Lizabeth Scott and Lena Horne came a bit later in my development.
Also,
I don’t know a thing about ten-year-olds today; but in those times one of the major functions of adults was to supply drama and mystery to our lives, and we took such things where we found them.
Equally important in the story are these adults and the lessons they teach: Aunt Rivke about being steadfast and about fighting for what you love, the reformist rabbi Shulevitz about tolerance (‚Forgiveness is everyone’s business. Even the dead. On this earth or under it, there is no peace without forgiveness.’) and Chaim about what it means being an artist:
Like that Chinese monkey trying to grab the moon in the water. That’s me, a Chinese monkey.
Salt Wine is another love and sorrow novella, told with part humour, part horror through the voice of a rough sailor who once saw a friend save a merman from a shark attack. Rewarded with the secret formula for magic vine, the friend becomes immensely rich, but can he also find love?
„Salt wine,” I says, and different this time, slowly. „Salt wine ... that’d be like pickled beer? Oysters in honey, that kind of thing, is it? How about bloody fried marmalade, then? Whale blubber curry? Boiled nor’easter?
Later,
The one thing I’ve got a good hold on, when I’m with her, it’s like coming home. First time I saw her, it came over me, I’ve been gone a long time, and now I’m home.
Two Hearts is the long awaited sequel to „The Last Unicorn” and it doesn’t disappoint when measured against the most popular story told by Beagle. The magic is still there, love and courage are pitted once again against terrible monsters, and old friends meet perhaps for the last bittersweet time in this world.
Two hearts, never forget that – many people do. Eagle heart, lion heart – eagle heart, lion heart. Never forget, little one.
A young girl and an old man ride together against a griffin, their hearts beating as one to save the kingdom from a child-eating monster. Schmendrick and his lover stand ready to offer assistance and somewhere, on another plane, the last unicorn might hear their cry for help. I dearly hope the author will return to this realm of wonder:
But the unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world I’m never going to see, but it doesn’t matter, because now I have seen it, and it’s beautiful, and I was in there too.
Giant Bones is a marvelous celebration of storytelling, a going back to basics as a busy, tired and cranky parent tries to tell a tall, truly scary tale to his child and get him to sleep. I loved every single word of it
And sometimes she’d start in really laughing, no warning. He said the ground would tremble, blossoms and leaves would be coming down everywhere, birds would pop right off their nests, and your bones would buzz for an hour afterward. That’s what it was like when Qu’alo laughed.
King Pelles the Sure is a bit shorter than the other novellas included in the collection, but, in its own way, it is just as important. Pelles is the ruler of a small yet prosperous little kingdom, but he wants glory and asks his Grand Vizier to arrange a little war to make him famous.
Nobody is ever remembered for living out a dull, placid, uneventful life.
Of course the plan ends up in tears, there are no big or little wars, no minor or major slaughters, just as the Grand Vizier tried to warn the reckless king
There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that needs heroes.
Out of the ashes though there is a path to redemption and it lies in the stories we tell to the next generation, in the ability to learn from our mistakes. The king hides for awhile on a small farm, where he enchants the local children with unusual fairytales:
On occasion grief flowed into overwhelming joy, though that outcome was never something you might want to bet on.
Vanishing is a story about ghosts, and like the previous one it is about learning from the mistakes of the past. Set in a dream space that reawakens the hidden killings committed at the Berlin Wall, the piece is showcasing an author more firmly engaged in current events than some of his imaginary worlds would let one to assume.
The Tale of Junko and Sayuri is a very good translation of the author’s themes into a Japanese setting, rivaling in here my previous favorites like Lian Hearn or Kij Johnson. Spirit animals and the medieval code of honor feature strongly in the plot, but the main ingredients remain love and sorrow, tragedy as the outcome of good intentions.
Often and often does evil result where nothing but good was meant. I am sure this is true in your case. I have many times thought that in this world far more harm is wrought by foolish men than by wicked ones. Perhaps you were foolish, my daughter. Are you also vain enough to imagine yourself the only one?
The Rock in the Park is the second autobiographical piece set in a Bronx where magic is just around the corner of your perception for those who care enough to look. Two thirteen year boys like spend their free time daydreaming, sprawled on the top of a boulder in the local park, and one day they see a family of centaurs asking for directions to a warmer climate (Florida )
If I were a tiger,
I would dance for you.
If I were a mouse,
I would dance for you.
If I were a whale,
I would dance for you ....
One of the boys is a budding poet, the other an aspiring painter. Together they might create a magic strong enough to save the centaur family. I like to see this story as a true confession, as the artistic credo of the author:
I’m an artist. Artists are always drawing people’s journeys.
I keep telling you, the artist isn’t the magic. The artist is the sight, the artist is someone who knows magic when he sees it. The magic doesn’t care whether it’s seen or not – that’s the artist’s business. My business. [...] And magic’s not an all-the-time thing, you’re not ever entitled to magic – not ever, no matter how good you are. Best you can do – all you can do – is make sure you’re ready when it happens. If.
We Never Talk About My Brother is a return to the weird / horror style of some earlier pieces. Magic in here is a dangerous weapon in the hands of the wrong people.
I read once, in India they’ve got gods that are also demons. Depends on their mood, I guess, or the time of year. Or maybe just their lunch.
The Rabbi’s Hobby is a fitting closing piece to the whole collection, another novella with autobiographical elements that reaffirms and underlines the links between love and sorrow, beauty and loss, kindness and forgiveness.
A thirteen year old boy is sent to a rabbi to be tutored for his upcoming coming-of-age ceremony (bar-mitzvah). The lessons are dealing less with religious dogma and more with human understanding and with the coming of wisdom. The hobby hinted at in the title is the collection of lost keys, useless pieces of metal without the locks they were supposed to open.
Well, you know, Joseph, those keys aren’t useless just because I don’t have the locks they fit. Whenever I find a lock that’s lost its key, I try a few of mine on it, on the chance that one of them might be the right one. God is like that for me – a lock none of my keys fit, and probably never will. But I keep at it, I keep picking different keys and trying them out, because you never know. Could happen.
The particular lock that Joseph needs to open comes to them in the form of a photograph from an old glossy magazine. On the cover, an incredibly beautiful, mysterious lady captures their imagination, and boy and rabbi spend many days trying to discover her identity.
We call them spirits, when we call them anything, and we imagine some of them to be malevolent, dangerous – demonic, if you like. But there are benign ones as well, and those are usually here for a specific reason. To help someone, to bring a message. To comfort.
A key without a lock, a restless spirit in need of release, a young boy learning about life – the final destination takes us back where we started, to a place that feels like coming home after a long and amazing journey through the imaginary kingdoms of Peter S Beagle.
Before that letter [‚Mirror Kingdoms’] I had no understanding of beauty, and no idea of what love is, or what can be borne out of love. And after it I knew enough at least to recognize these things when they came to me.
October 5, 2025
Although there're a few other pieces I would've liked to see included here, this collection does justice to both Peter Beagle's versatility and the concept of "best." The majority of the stories certainly go beyond "good." ;) I've highlighted some of them in my notes below.
Before we go there, let me tackle this question: is Mirror Kingdoms a suitable entry point to Beagle's ouevre?
... Nah, I can't tackle it. If anything, the question will tackle me if I try too hard. Let's just say you can enter Peter's ouevre from any point along his creative timeline. You won't be disappointed; nor would the first point prepare you for any other. (So in fact you may be disappointed if you expect to find more of the same splendor and subtlety that you just read. Peter doesn't like repetition. It won't, can never be the same.)
Now, about some of those points:
https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...
Before we go there, let me tackle this question: is Mirror Kingdoms a suitable entry point to Beagle's ouevre?
... Nah, I can't tackle it. If anything, the question will tackle me if I try too hard. Let's just say you can enter Peter's ouevre from any point along his creative timeline. You won't be disappointed; nor would the first point prepare you for any other. (So in fact you may be disappointed if you expect to find more of the same splendor and subtlety that you just read. Peter doesn't like repetition. It won't, can never be the same.)
Now, about some of those points:
https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...
December 21, 2016
It took me months to read this book, not because I struggled with it, but because it was like a flourless chocolate cake: so rich, so dense, that I could only digest small portions at a time, then come back to it later when I was hungry again.
The difference between fantasy I truly love and fantasy I don't give a damn about is that the former understands that the truest fantasy exists to shine a light (and maybe it's a light that's not of this world) on real human emotions, foibles, and achievements. Most fantasy doesn't get this right at all. Most fantasy gets so caught up in worldbuilding and twelve-stranded plots that its humanity is a second thought, if thought about at all.
But think about the truly great fantasy, how Ursula Le Guin used Ged to explore the human fear of death, or how Neil Gaiman used Dream to explain how death might come to some as a welcome relief. It's not that Le Guin or Gaiman skimps on the worldbuilding or plotting; it's just that they rightfully take a backseat to the authors' human themes.
And maybe no one is better at using fantasy to explore the human condition than Peter Beagle. A Fine and Private Place is nominally about ghosts, but is really about love and death and what power each has over the other. The same can be said about Tamsin. And The Last Unicorn is nominally about mythical creatures, but is really about greed, responsibility, family, mortality, love . . . you name it.
Each of Beagle's story in this collection of short stories/novelettes is a gem that uses fantasy elements as the engine on stories that are designed to break your heart just enough. They're almost the mirror image of a Twilight Zone tale: instead of droll commentary on the banality of evil or the stupidity of society, Beagle's stories leave us instead with an earnest meditation on love or forgiveness or altruism or mourning. And lest you think "earnest" equates with dull, preachy, or saccharine, let me assure you, this couldn't be further from the truth: Beagle is always quick-witted and resonant even while being as humane a writer as you could ask for.
This is not to say I liked every story in the book equally. But every one is worth reading. (Well. OK, let me be totally honest: I'd skip "The Last and Only," because it's just silly. Hey, everyone's allowed a bit of silliness; this slice just wasn't my style.)
The difference between fantasy I truly love and fantasy I don't give a damn about is that the former understands that the truest fantasy exists to shine a light (and maybe it's a light that's not of this world) on real human emotions, foibles, and achievements. Most fantasy doesn't get this right at all. Most fantasy gets so caught up in worldbuilding and twelve-stranded plots that its humanity is a second thought, if thought about at all.
But think about the truly great fantasy, how Ursula Le Guin used Ged to explore the human fear of death, or how Neil Gaiman used Dream to explain how death might come to some as a welcome relief. It's not that Le Guin or Gaiman skimps on the worldbuilding or plotting; it's just that they rightfully take a backseat to the authors' human themes.
And maybe no one is better at using fantasy to explore the human condition than Peter Beagle. A Fine and Private Place is nominally about ghosts, but is really about love and death and what power each has over the other. The same can be said about Tamsin. And The Last Unicorn is nominally about mythical creatures, but is really about greed, responsibility, family, mortality, love . . . you name it.
Each of Beagle's story in this collection of short stories/novelettes is a gem that uses fantasy elements as the engine on stories that are designed to break your heart just enough. They're almost the mirror image of a Twilight Zone tale: instead of droll commentary on the banality of evil or the stupidity of society, Beagle's stories leave us instead with an earnest meditation on love or forgiveness or altruism or mourning. And lest you think "earnest" equates with dull, preachy, or saccharine, let me assure you, this couldn't be further from the truth: Beagle is always quick-witted and resonant even while being as humane a writer as you could ask for.
This is not to say I liked every story in the book equally. But every one is worth reading. (Well. OK, let me be totally honest: I'd skip "The Last and Only," because it's just silly. Hey, everyone's allowed a bit of silliness; this slice just wasn't my style.)
January 14, 2020
For most of his career, Peter Beagle has been known primarily as a novelist, writing such classics as The Last Unicorn and A Fine And Private Place. While he did produce some short fiction, it was most definitely not what generally came to mind when think of the works of Peter S. Beagle. However, for the last decade, Beagle has been a short story writing machine, with three collections of his stories having been published by Tachyon Publications.
In this excellent collection of Beagle's short stories, editor Jonathan Strahan has assembled eighteen short stories representing both Beagle's early and recent short fiction. Strahan has also made sure that stories from a wide variety of sources are represented. In addition to stories that first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beagle's fiction that first appeared in small press publications is represented as well, including stories that appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Strange Roads, Beagle's contribution to a chapbook series put out by DreamHaven Books. Older stories such as "Lila the Werewolf" and "Come Lady Death" are represented as well as more recent fiction such as the award winners "El Regalo" and "Two Hearts", the sequel to The Last Unicorn.
Many of these stories such as "The Last Song of Sirit Byar" and "King Pellas the Sure" are quite melancholy and others such as "Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rivka and the Angel" and "The Rabbi's Hobby" harken back to Beagle's Jewish boyhood growing up in New York City. In one of Beagle's more unusual stories, "The Last and Only, or, Mr. Moscowitz becomes French", the title character, a mild mannered librarian from California, gradually becomes French and must move to France, where he finds himself ultimately equally alienated and unwelcome, because he has become such the embodiment of all things France that he makes French people embarrassed and uncomfortable that they aren't up to his standard of Frenchness.
Strahan's introduction offers a good overview of Beagle's evolution as a writer of short fiction. Also, this being a Subterranean Press publication, Mirror Kingdoms also comes with fabulous cover art – in this case a beautiful Michael Wm. Kaluta illustration.
In this excellent collection of Beagle's short stories, editor Jonathan Strahan has assembled eighteen short stories representing both Beagle's early and recent short fiction. Strahan has also made sure that stories from a wide variety of sources are represented. In addition to stories that first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beagle's fiction that first appeared in small press publications is represented as well, including stories that appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Strange Roads, Beagle's contribution to a chapbook series put out by DreamHaven Books. Older stories such as "Lila the Werewolf" and "Come Lady Death" are represented as well as more recent fiction such as the award winners "El Regalo" and "Two Hearts", the sequel to The Last Unicorn.
Many of these stories such as "The Last Song of Sirit Byar" and "King Pellas the Sure" are quite melancholy and others such as "Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rivka and the Angel" and "The Rabbi's Hobby" harken back to Beagle's Jewish boyhood growing up in New York City. In one of Beagle's more unusual stories, "The Last and Only, or, Mr. Moscowitz becomes French", the title character, a mild mannered librarian from California, gradually becomes French and must move to France, where he finds himself ultimately equally alienated and unwelcome, because he has become such the embodiment of all things France that he makes French people embarrassed and uncomfortable that they aren't up to his standard of Frenchness.
Strahan's introduction offers a good overview of Beagle's evolution as a writer of short fiction. Also, this being a Subterranean Press publication, Mirror Kingdoms also comes with fabulous cover art – in this case a beautiful Michael Wm. Kaluta illustration.
November 1, 2016
My love affair with Peter Beagle began in the 60's with The Last Unicorn. His writings always leave you with something to ponder over- the plot or a phrase that sticks in your mind with its beauty. This collection of short stories does not disappoint and the last story The Rabbi's Hobby brought me to tears.
September 10, 2014
The stories widely vary in quality, there were some really good ones, but the Farrell novellas were all between boring and annoying so I just skipped those after struggling through the first one and half.
In more detail:
A Dance with Emilia: 1/5, boring, similar to the Farrell stories in tone
Mr. Sigerson: 4/5, I liked this one, despite it being non-fantasy
Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros: 5/5, this was quite good!
Come Lady Death: 2/5, I kinda liked the narrator, but the plot is totally senseless
The Naga: 2/5, meh bland
Salt Wine: 5/5, excellent!
Two Hearts: 3/5, I liked the Last Unicorn a lot more, the sequel lacked something, character or flavour
El regalo: 4/5, quite good, but uses way too much Spanish for non-Spanish-speakers
"The Last and Only, or Mr. Moskowitz Becomes French": 2/5, mildly entertaining, but totally inane plot again
My Daughter's Name Is Sarah: 1/5, this isn't even a story, where is the plot
Telephone Call: 1/5, again, no plot, what's even the point of publishing these
Farrell stories: 1/5, boring, pretentious, pointless, plotless slice-of-life stories, yawn
"Up The Down Beanstalk: A Wife Remembers": 3/5, bizarre, but mildly entertaining
"Four Fables: The Fable of the Moth, The Fable of the Octopus, The Fable of the Ostrich, The Fable of the Tyrannosaurus Rex": 4/5, kinda cute stories
Gordon, the Self-Made Cat: 4/5, cute :)
In more detail:
A Dance with Emilia: 1/5, boring, similar to the Farrell stories in tone
Mr. Sigerson: 4/5, I liked this one, despite it being non-fantasy
Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros: 5/5, this was quite good!
Come Lady Death: 2/5, I kinda liked the narrator, but the plot is totally senseless
The Naga: 2/5, meh bland
Salt Wine: 5/5, excellent!
Two Hearts: 3/5, I liked the Last Unicorn a lot more, the sequel lacked something, character or flavour
El regalo: 4/5, quite good, but uses way too much Spanish for non-Spanish-speakers
"The Last and Only, or Mr. Moskowitz Becomes French": 2/5, mildly entertaining, but totally inane plot again
My Daughter's Name Is Sarah: 1/5, this isn't even a story, where is the plot
Telephone Call: 1/5, again, no plot, what's even the point of publishing these
Farrell stories: 1/5, boring, pretentious, pointless, plotless slice-of-life stories, yawn
"Up The Down Beanstalk: A Wife Remembers": 3/5, bizarre, but mildly entertaining
"Four Fables: The Fable of the Moth, The Fable of the Octopus, The Fable of the Ostrich, The Fable of the Tyrannosaurus Rex": 4/5, kinda cute stories
Gordon, the Self-Made Cat: 4/5, cute :)
April 27, 2017
Really good
Beagle had written some really excellent novels. However his shirt fiction may be even better. The closest thing I can compare it to is Ursula Le Guin crossed with Borges. It has Ursula's humanness and the poigent wierdness of Borges.
Beagle had written some really excellent novels. However his shirt fiction may be even better. The closest thing I can compare it to is Ursula Le Guin crossed with Borges. It has Ursula's humanness and the poigent wierdness of Borges.
May 20, 2017
This may be my favorite short story collection by PSB. It's got all my favorites, especially "Come Lady Death", "Salt Wine", and "Two Hearts".
June 22, 2020
I requested this book because I’ve come across the stories of Peter S. Beagle now and again in my magazine and anthology reviews and always liked them. A bit of research reveals that he is much lauded and awarded in the genre and rightly so, but I didn’t know that. Pleasing to find your own inclinations justified so.
‘Mirror Kingdoms: The Best Of Peter S. Beagle’ contains two categories of story: those set in our world and those set in a fantasy realm. I’ll consider the ‘realistic’ ones first, that is, the yarns not set in imaginary realms. ‘Professor Gottesman And The Indian Rhinoceros’ is about a middle-aged, absent-minded professor of philosophy at an ordinary university who has a rhinoceros from the zoo talking to him and even following him home. It’s really a unicorn. It sounds preposterous and obviously is but so do all the stories herein when told cold. Yet Beagle carries it off with élan because the characters are so well done and likeable. The similes are so good and the gentle observations so apt.
‘Julie’s Unicorn’ is again based on a completely daft premise. The beast comes out of a tapestry hanging on the wall of a museum, bought to life by some witchery Julie learned from her granny. It’s only as big as a kitten because that’s how big it was in the picture. Various events ensue, bringing some trouble to Julie and her friend, a loveable old cook. The unicorn, I should add, is not at all nice but they do their best for it anyway.
‘Lila The Werewolf’ is set in New York, as is ‘Rock In The Park’, which is a bit autobiographical, except for the centaurs, I presume. ‘Salt Wine’ makes clever use of mermen, for if there are mermaids there must surely be mermen, too. A sailor gets the recipe for the title drink and makes a fortune. Obviously, there are complications. That one’s set in the past, as is ‘The Tale Of Junko And Sayuri’, which takes place in old Japan. A nice, easy-going hunter, comfortable with his low station in life, gets a wife who can change into animals at will. Trouble ensues.
‘The Vanishing’ is a grim tale about a man who used to be a guard on the Berlin Wall before it came down. While waiting for his pregnant daughter at a hospital, he goes into a kind of coma and finds himself back on the Wall in a strange limbo world surrounded by darkness. He encounters some other people and slowly discovers that they are all there for a purpose. It was absolutely gripping and a strong contender for the best one in the book, except that nearly all of them are strong contenders, damn it!
‘We Never Talk About My Brother’ uses chatty first person narration with the protagonist, Jacob, talking to a reporter here about his brother Esau, a big name television reporter famed throughout the USA with a hidden secret to his success. Another great story. ‘The Rabbi‘s Hobby’ was in a more minor key but the sentiment was delicately handled and it left you feeling good.
Many of the stories and, perhaps the best ones, are set in fantasy realms. In these fairy tales, even more than in the others, Beagle achieves the gentle rhythm of an old-fashioned storyteller, unhurried, mildly amused, sometimes sardonic and always interesting. ‘The Last Song Of Sirit Bayar’ features a ballad singer who drinks and a big ugly girl who has underage sex, not with him. The narrative technique is her telling the story to a scribe who writes it down, which is clever. As usual, the characters insinuate themselves into your soul and, as it moves toward the fabulous ending, the heart of the reader is well nigh split in twain with the pain and the beauty of it all.
‘Giant Bones’ is narrated by a garrulous farmer telling his son a bed-time story about how their great-great-great-grandfather came over the mountains to the flat lands they now inhabit and started the family. It starts slow, as they all do, and a reader wonders if it’s worth persisting with this verbose old fool. It is, as usual. The story turns out not to be the kind of story you thought it was going to be at the start. ‘What Tune The Enchantress Plays’ has a pair of star-crossed lovers and the lady must decide between her proper destiny and her true love for a boy.
Beagle gives away the secret of his writing in the introduction. He starts a story without the least idea of how it’s going to end and often does several drafts to get it right and several can mean a dozen. That explains, perhaps, why the plots are unpredictable and also explains why the writing is elegant. Many of these are not short stories but novellas, longer because they need to be, for part of Beagle’s method is to get you to know and understand the characters so you care when the plot does bad things to them.
The method works. It all works. A reviewer runs out of superlatives. This is the best collection of stories I have ever read and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
‘Mirror Kingdoms: The Best Of Peter S. Beagle’ contains two categories of story: those set in our world and those set in a fantasy realm. I’ll consider the ‘realistic’ ones first, that is, the yarns not set in imaginary realms. ‘Professor Gottesman And The Indian Rhinoceros’ is about a middle-aged, absent-minded professor of philosophy at an ordinary university who has a rhinoceros from the zoo talking to him and even following him home. It’s really a unicorn. It sounds preposterous and obviously is but so do all the stories herein when told cold. Yet Beagle carries it off with élan because the characters are so well done and likeable. The similes are so good and the gentle observations so apt.
‘Julie’s Unicorn’ is again based on a completely daft premise. The beast comes out of a tapestry hanging on the wall of a museum, bought to life by some witchery Julie learned from her granny. It’s only as big as a kitten because that’s how big it was in the picture. Various events ensue, bringing some trouble to Julie and her friend, a loveable old cook. The unicorn, I should add, is not at all nice but they do their best for it anyway.
‘Lila The Werewolf’ is set in New York, as is ‘Rock In The Park’, which is a bit autobiographical, except for the centaurs, I presume. ‘Salt Wine’ makes clever use of mermen, for if there are mermaids there must surely be mermen, too. A sailor gets the recipe for the title drink and makes a fortune. Obviously, there are complications. That one’s set in the past, as is ‘The Tale Of Junko And Sayuri’, which takes place in old Japan. A nice, easy-going hunter, comfortable with his low station in life, gets a wife who can change into animals at will. Trouble ensues.
‘The Vanishing’ is a grim tale about a man who used to be a guard on the Berlin Wall before it came down. While waiting for his pregnant daughter at a hospital, he goes into a kind of coma and finds himself back on the Wall in a strange limbo world surrounded by darkness. He encounters some other people and slowly discovers that they are all there for a purpose. It was absolutely gripping and a strong contender for the best one in the book, except that nearly all of them are strong contenders, damn it!
‘We Never Talk About My Brother’ uses chatty first person narration with the protagonist, Jacob, talking to a reporter here about his brother Esau, a big name television reporter famed throughout the USA with a hidden secret to his success. Another great story. ‘The Rabbi‘s Hobby’ was in a more minor key but the sentiment was delicately handled and it left you feeling good.
Many of the stories and, perhaps the best ones, are set in fantasy realms. In these fairy tales, even more than in the others, Beagle achieves the gentle rhythm of an old-fashioned storyteller, unhurried, mildly amused, sometimes sardonic and always interesting. ‘The Last Song Of Sirit Bayar’ features a ballad singer who drinks and a big ugly girl who has underage sex, not with him. The narrative technique is her telling the story to a scribe who writes it down, which is clever. As usual, the characters insinuate themselves into your soul and, as it moves toward the fabulous ending, the heart of the reader is well nigh split in twain with the pain and the beauty of it all.
‘Giant Bones’ is narrated by a garrulous farmer telling his son a bed-time story about how their great-great-great-grandfather came over the mountains to the flat lands they now inhabit and started the family. It starts slow, as they all do, and a reader wonders if it’s worth persisting with this verbose old fool. It is, as usual. The story turns out not to be the kind of story you thought it was going to be at the start. ‘What Tune The Enchantress Plays’ has a pair of star-crossed lovers and the lady must decide between her proper destiny and her true love for a boy.
Beagle gives away the secret of his writing in the introduction. He starts a story without the least idea of how it’s going to end and often does several drafts to get it right and several can mean a dozen. That explains, perhaps, why the plots are unpredictable and also explains why the writing is elegant. Many of these are not short stories but novellas, longer because they need to be, for part of Beagle’s method is to get you to know and understand the characters so you care when the plot does bad things to them.
The method works. It all works. A reviewer runs out of superlatives. This is the best collection of stories I have ever read and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
September 18, 2017
Demorei mais tempo para terminar este livro do que pensei que gastaria. Em parte pelo tamanho, em parte pelo investimento que cada conto exige. Não consigo elogiá-lo o tanto quanto o livro merece - é o Peter Beagle que tem o dom das palavras, não eu. Eu entendi que se houvessem infinitos contos do Peter Beagle eu acabaria deixando de viver a minha vida para viver apenas as que ele cria a partir do nada e que acabam significando tudo.
June 6, 2019
Another excellent anthology of Peter S. Beagle stories. Some I've read before, most were new to me. Particular favorites were "Julie's Unicorn," "What Tune the Enchantress Plays," and "The Rabbi's Hobby," the latter of which reminded me of a Ghibli-esque ghost story. As usual, Beagle uses fantasy to approach complex human emotions, and handles those emotions with incredible deftness, realness, and grace.
February 9, 2020
As usual with collections of what some editor thinks are an author's best, some really are very good short stories. Others are good and some are really not very good. Overall the very good one make a likeable book to sit quietly and enjoy.
February 5, 2025
Peter Beagle is an amazing writer! These stories are phenomenal. I highly recommend this book and this author!
December 28, 2010
I like short stories, but I have trouble to read any collection of it whole. No matter whether it is a themed anthology, or “best of”, or one-author collection, I start out excited and run through several stories, and then I my enthusiasm fizzles out and I have to make myself read on, and them there are always some stories that are left unread – not necessarily at the end of a book, since I rarely read them in order. There are exceptions, of course. But all my latest science-fiction and fantasy short stories reading followed the same pattern. And I've decided to make piece with it. Yes, I won't read the whole collection, so what? I'll still read several whole short stories and get my fun.
The last attempt is the collection of best short stories by Peter S. Beagle Mirror Kingdoms. I have never actually read anything by Beagle before, so I came with no expectations except that it was supposed to be awesome. And it was – some of what I read, anyway. I started with My Uncle Chaime, My Aunt Rifke and the Blue Angel. And... You have to read this, it's amazing, and possibly beyond amazing. It's a very stark, very simple story and it touches something - our sense of wonder, our hunger for mystery and some deep-seated sadness. It is my favourite type of stories – when in our regular world something wondrous happens. There are other stories in the collection of that type, but none had a similar effect on me. It happens in New York of author's childhood, and the details are so vivid that I can feel everything the boy narrator sees and feels – Beagle's stand-in, his uncle Chaim, the artist, uncle's friend, aunt Rifke, the rabbi, and the city they live. It's an amazing story.
After that – I was not reading in order, but by accident, I had a totally unexpected treat. You see, my parents had a book, a part of science fiction collection, that I loved to read when I was about 10 or 12. It was an anthology of magical short stories by foreign writers (foreign to USSR ) It was mostly translations from English, but I think there was a Japanese story and something else non-English. The thing is, it all being in Russian and me not caring about names as much as about stories I hardly remember whose stories I read and loved. But I remember the stories themselves. (I probably could research it on the Internet, but it was never urgent, just a delicious memory.) Back to the book: I open one page, and I see a story from that book, from my childhood! Very much the same, translation notwithstanding. Come Lady Death.
Then there were other stories – some I liked a lot, some I was kind of meh about. All worthwhile read. And I read El Regalo – which I liked, and realized that I am done with this book. I am leaving it in a very good place and hope to come to it again some day in the future. There are still unread stories there. I might even love them, but not now.
The last attempt is the collection of best short stories by Peter S. Beagle Mirror Kingdoms. I have never actually read anything by Beagle before, so I came with no expectations except that it was supposed to be awesome. And it was – some of what I read, anyway. I started with My Uncle Chaime, My Aunt Rifke and the Blue Angel. And... You have to read this, it's amazing, and possibly beyond amazing. It's a very stark, very simple story and it touches something - our sense of wonder, our hunger for mystery and some deep-seated sadness. It is my favourite type of stories – when in our regular world something wondrous happens. There are other stories in the collection of that type, but none had a similar effect on me. It happens in New York of author's childhood, and the details are so vivid that I can feel everything the boy narrator sees and feels – Beagle's stand-in, his uncle Chaim, the artist, uncle's friend, aunt Rifke, the rabbi, and the city they live. It's an amazing story.
After that – I was not reading in order, but by accident, I had a totally unexpected treat. You see, my parents had a book, a part of science fiction collection, that I loved to read when I was about 10 or 12. It was an anthology of magical short stories by foreign writers (foreign to USSR ) It was mostly translations from English, but I think there was a Japanese story and something else non-English. The thing is, it all being in Russian and me not caring about names as much as about stories I hardly remember whose stories I read and loved. But I remember the stories themselves. (I probably could research it on the Internet, but it was never urgent, just a delicious memory.) Back to the book: I open one page, and I see a story from that book, from my childhood! Very much the same, translation notwithstanding. Come Lady Death.
Then there were other stories – some I liked a lot, some I was kind of meh about. All worthwhile read. And I read El Regalo – which I liked, and realized that I am done with this book. I am leaving it in a very good place and hope to come to it again some day in the future. There are still unread stories there. I might even love them, but not now.
November 22, 2010
Mirror Kingdoms is a collection of short works, but not quite a book of short stories. Many are a little long for that term, and I find that I am not properly appreciative if I think of them as short stories. Most are more like modern fairy tales than anything else.
The writing style is loose and dreamy in some, tight and present in others. I must admit, I didn't feel in the mood to read a whole book of them this week, though that's a fault in me, not in the writing. I'm glad I stuck with it, though, as the stories saved for late in the book are phenomenal.
Lets get the main thing out of the way first: what did I think of "Two Hearts", the "coda" to The Last Unicorn? Mixed, honestly. The tone is fine, the voice is great, but I'm just not sure of the point, either of the story itself or the reason for writing it. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either.
There were some stories that I really liked. "Salt Wine", about the dangers of taking favors from merpeople, was pretty fantastic. In "El Regalo", a girl has to rescue her brother, trapped in last Thursday. "The Tale of Junko and Sayuri" is a hauntingly evocative story grounded in Japanese myth. "Giant Bones" is one of his more well known short pieces, and its descriptions of giant life are pretty amazing.
My favorites were "The Rock in The Park" and "We Never Talk About My Brother". In the first one, a young boy with a gift for words and his childhood friend with a gift for pictures meet some unusual travelers in a park in the Bronx. The end of that one is absolutely beautiful. In "We Never Talk About My Brother", Jacob relates the story of his brother the famous anchorman, who has a troubling secret power.
I don't want to say more, because discovering the richness of each world is a large part of the enjoyment of these stories. I didn't enjoy each and every one, but some people can write a whole novel with a less fully imagined world than is implied in most of these stories. Many do.
Most if not all of these stories have been printed before in other volumes, which is good, because Mirror Kingdoms is already out of print.
See more book reviews at The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf
The writing style is loose and dreamy in some, tight and present in others. I must admit, I didn't feel in the mood to read a whole book of them this week, though that's a fault in me, not in the writing. I'm glad I stuck with it, though, as the stories saved for late in the book are phenomenal.
Lets get the main thing out of the way first: what did I think of "Two Hearts", the "coda" to The Last Unicorn? Mixed, honestly. The tone is fine, the voice is great, but I'm just not sure of the point, either of the story itself or the reason for writing it. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either.
There were some stories that I really liked. "Salt Wine", about the dangers of taking favors from merpeople, was pretty fantastic. In "El Regalo", a girl has to rescue her brother, trapped in last Thursday. "The Tale of Junko and Sayuri" is a hauntingly evocative story grounded in Japanese myth. "Giant Bones" is one of his more well known short pieces, and its descriptions of giant life are pretty amazing.
My favorites were "The Rock in The Park" and "We Never Talk About My Brother". In the first one, a young boy with a gift for words and his childhood friend with a gift for pictures meet some unusual travelers in a park in the Bronx. The end of that one is absolutely beautiful. In "We Never Talk About My Brother", Jacob relates the story of his brother the famous anchorman, who has a troubling secret power.
I don't want to say more, because discovering the richness of each world is a large part of the enjoyment of these stories. I didn't enjoy each and every one, but some people can write a whole novel with a less fully imagined world than is implied in most of these stories. Many do.
Most if not all of these stories have been printed before in other volumes, which is good, because Mirror Kingdoms is already out of print.
See more book reviews at The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf
April 2, 2013
This is not a fun book, or an easy book, but it is a magnificent book. Well worth the read. I'd read a lot of the stories before in other collections or as special freebies that I got for being a member of the Peter S Beagle fan club, but almost all of those were worth reading again anyway, and the ones I hadn't seen before ranged from great to astounding in quality. I think my favorite might be "Junko and Sayuri", but there are so many good ones and I know that if I'd encountered them at the right moment in my life I would have picked a different one.
Only a few of them are the suspenseful "can't put it down" kind of story; almost all of them are the emotional gut-punch or at least the deeply emotionally resonant stories. I think we'd all be better people if we learned how to feel the way Beagle shows us here, how to love, how to appreciate beauty.
Only a few of them are the suspenseful "can't put it down" kind of story; almost all of them are the emotional gut-punch or at least the deeply emotionally resonant stories. I think we'd all be better people if we learned how to feel the way Beagle shows us here, how to love, how to appreciate beauty.
Read
February 27, 2012This is the best collection of short stories I've ever read. Clever, poignant, and when necessary, hilarious. Peter S. Beagle is a remarkable author, and his skill with words is well represented in his short stories.
While some authors write short stories for practice or to play with new concepts, each of Beagles entries is a complete story, with an arc, memorable characters, and absolutely delicious resolution.
I may not recommend the entire collection to anyone, but there's at least one story in here for everyone.
While some authors write short stories for practice or to play with new concepts, each of Beagles entries is a complete story, with an arc, memorable characters, and absolutely delicious resolution.
I may not recommend the entire collection to anyone, but there's at least one story in here for everyone.
May 17, 2012
Beagle is the best fantasy writer going for a superlative blend of artistry and story. These are the best of his short form writings, and they're wonderful. The only problem with short stories is that when they're good, you wish they had gone on longer. In the case of this book, that's just about every single tale. My humble fantasy is that Peter Beagle will live forever and keep writing his imperishable fiction. If only he were a denizen of one of his own worlds, then he could manage it.
May 26, 2015
I never feel like I'm being fair when I rate single-author collections, because by the end of the book the author's tics and flaws and favorite phrases and weaknesses have become really irritating to me.
So, for instance, Peter Beagle is fond of first-person narrators with distinct, funny, wonderful voices -- until after a while I begin to think, "If I separate this story from the narrator's voice, is there anything left? If I combine this story with the narrator's voice, does the one add anything to the other?"
Read it for "Two Hearts," the follow-up to "The Last Unicorn.)
So, for instance, Peter Beagle is fond of first-person narrators with distinct, funny, wonderful voices -- until after a while I begin to think, "If I separate this story from the narrator's voice, is there anything left? If I combine this story with the narrator's voice, does the one add anything to the other?"
Read it for "Two Hearts," the follow-up to "The Last Unicorn.)
August 1, 2011
Loved it, as I always love Peter Beagle. Includes some stories from his other books, The Line Between and We Never Talk About My Brother, but a lot of new stuff too.
May 13, 2012
I had previously only read The Last Unicorn, at thought it somewhat odd. These stories were also most definitely odd, but very enjoyable. My favorite was one about a Rhinoseros who claims to be a Unicorn and the professor whom he befriends. I am definitely going to explore Peter S. Beagle's writing further.
June 4, 2010
Amazing anthology!
August 28, 2010
The endings aren't necessarily what you'd expect, but that's what makes the stories so good.
October 6, 2010
This is one of the best collections of short stories I have ever read!
January 23, 2011
Peter S. Beagle is one of the best fantasy writers in the field today. If you haven't read any of his stuff -- what are you waiting for??
January 5, 2013
These stories are like eating fresh bread: fulfilling, seemingly simple, warming, and surprisingly rich.
July 8, 2013
Greatly imaginative short stories sort of not really sci-fi more tall talish
August 25, 2016
Absolutely lovely. I'd read some of these before, and I can say, if you're a fan of the Last Unicorn, this book is worth it just for the one story with those characters, but all of them are great.
Want to read
November 1, 2011Fan of author - urban fantasy thread on SDMB inspired search for Beagle short story collection
December 27, 2013
Amazing, absolutely amazing. A must read..
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews