I’ve long been a fan of Peter S. Beagle. I’ve read all of his fiction and most of his short story collections, but this was in the pre-Goodreads days. I had been meaning to go back and re-read, when along comes the first of a two-volume collection of some of his short stories. The Universe (and Tachyon Publications) oblige! But I make no secret of my terrible memory; in fact, one of the reasons I joined Goodreads was to track the books I’ve read so that I could avoid that disconcerting experience of discovering I’ve read something before–a third into the book. But Beagle’s stories–ah, there’s nothing déjà vu about them–I remember them. Professor Gottesman, Lady Death, Lila the Werewolf, and The Stickball Witch have all stuck in my memory despite reading decades ago, if not for the plot, than for the sentiment behind so many of them.

Beagle excels when his stories hit the intersection in the Venn diagram of memory, emotion, and feeling. One direction becomes a little more maudlin, another, more visceral. Professor is one of my favorites here, and will ly be more amusing to those who recognize classical philosophers. The combination of a possibly deluded rhinoceros and the eccentric professor will never not amuse me, and I will always prefer its sweet ending.

“He would pour himself a glass of wine and sit down in the living room to debate philosophy with a huge mortar-colored beast that always smelled vaguely incontinent, no matter how many baths it had taken that afternoon.”

The Stickball Witch slides slightly into the other direction, a little less sweet and a little moreÂ… umami, I think. Not quite bitter, but both rich and with a bite. I d it, even more as an older reader. Despite being rooted in memory, it does a nice job of capturing an eleven year-old voice, cycling in and out.

“You couldn’t walk away from a double-dare, even from a dumbshit Stewie. I mean, you could, but the rest of your life wouldn’t ever be worth living after that. I knew that then. Not believed. Knew.”

Speaking of endings, We Never Talk About My Brother is probably one of the best entries here. The Last Unicorn, it is a gut-punch to the feels. Framed as an interview, itÂ’s a very different voice than the other stories.

“‘Declare to goodness,’ he said, and it wasn’t the smooth TV voice at all, but more the way his mouth was born, as we say around here.”

El Regalo is a different version of a similar tale, if things had gone differently, and feels easier to read. Beagle writes about his intention to turn it into a book. As a more modern young-adult urban fantasy, about a teenager and her younger brother who discovers heÂ’s a witch, IÂ’m sure it has a spot in the commercial market, but The Last Unicorn, thereÂ’s a sense of age and consequence here that might miss the younger readers.

“Marvyn was utterly business about lies: in a crisis he always told the truth, until he thought of something better. He said, ‘I’m warning you right now, you won’t believe me.'”

King Pelles follows that morality tale too far and lands a little outside the sweet spot for me, but itÂ’ll work for some as a twist on the fairy-tale setting. The Four Fables are a miss for me, mostly because fables have always missed me. I only read them as a youth because I had exhausted the fairy-tale section of the library. I BeagleÂ’s vividness, of course, but the inherent morality/consequence is too simple for his writing.

Spook and Lila are shorts nominally featuring Joe Farrell, of The Folk of the Air, and while it was sort of nice to see him again in Spook, the battle of wits verged a bit too far into the bitter for my taste. Lila, on the other side, feels too much of a wallowing in sexuality and is triggering for animal deaths–no doubt why it retained a negative feeling for all these years. Although Farrell's problems in dating sound strangely familiar, so there may be an element of discomfort there.

“The trouble is that I know her. That was the real mistake. You shouldn’t get to know people if you know you’re not going to stay with them, one way or another. It’s all right if you come and go in ignorance, but you shouldn’t know them.”

As a final note, that introduction by Jane Yolen–yikes. While I usually admire her writing, she includes mention of a school shooting in it. How this slipped past editing–such a strange and non-sequitur way for her to work on her own catharsis, apparently–I do not understand. It’s a discordant note in an anthology about people who are one one-step removed from the world, or about a world that is open to the possibilities of the mystical.

Stephanie LawÂ’s drawings are the perfect companion to his works. IÂ’ve long been a follower of her art on Instagram and recognized the style as soon as I saw it here. I wish I could see it in color, however, and not my black-and-white screen. Definitely not optimal. (Watch her do gold-leafing on Insta sometime. ItÂ’s wonderful).


Table of contents for the completionists in the house:

-Peter Beagle: Bottling Talent by Jane Yolen
-Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros
-Come Lady Death
-Lila the Werewolf
-Gordon, the Self-Made Cat
-Four Fables:
The Fable of the Moth
The Fable of the Tyrannosaurus Rex
The Fable of the Ostrich
The Fable of the Octopus
-El Regalo
-Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel
-We Never Talk About My Brother
-King Pelles the Sure
-The Last and Only; or, Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French
-Spook
-The Stickball Witch
-A Dance for Emilia


Three and a half stars. Rounding up, because that writing.

Links to Law's work at my wordpress review. https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2022/...

Many thanks to NetGalley and Tachyon Publications. All opinions always my own.advance-reader-copy my-library-kindle short-story-collections96 s PlotTrysts799 340

Great collection of Beagle stories! Standouts include:

Come Lady Death - historical fantasy perfect for anyone who s a touch of the morbid in their ballrooms

We Never Talk About My Brother - an exploration of what it would really mean to be a superhero

King Pelles the Sure - a spare antiwar allegory that's both funny and touching ( all great Peter S. Beagle stories, really!)

This objective review is based on a complimentary copy of the anthology.netgalley11 s Elentarri1,732 36

Rating: 3.5 stars

This collection of short stories by Peter S. Beagle (of The Last Unicorn fame) is something of a mixed bag for me.  The man can write, but he does tend to go on and on when he should rather have not.  I suspect that some of these short stories were the beginnings of novels that just didn't get there.  I would read a novel about the Indian Rhinoceros, but not about Stickball.

Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros 5/5
A charming and vaguely funny unicorn story.  It's not everyday that one finds a Rhino that insists it's a unicorn wallowing in one's bath tub.  This is the best story in the collection. 

Come Lady Death 4/5
Historical fantasy in which Death gets invited to a party hosted by a very old, very bored, obnoxious and very rich woman...  with interesting consequences.

Lila the Werewolf 3.5/5
The story of a man with a werewolf girlfriend. 

Gordon, the Self-made Cat 4/5
An amusing kiddies story about a young mouse that wants to be a cat, so he goes to cat school.  This story was fun.

Four Fables 3/5
A quartet of very short fables with a moral at the end. So-so. A bit silly - some more than others.
- The Fable of the Moth
- The Fable of the Tyrannosaurus Rex
- The Fable of the Ostrich
- The Fable of the Octopus

El Regalo 4/5
An entertaining story about pre-teen Korean-American siblings in which the 8 year old younger brother is a witch. Genteel mayhem ensures... and a run in with a very old witch. 

Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel 3/5
An angel appears in front of Uncle Chaim the painter, insisting that he paint her portrait and that she is to be his muse.  Aunt Rifke is not amused. There is too much filler before getting to the meat of the story.  Interesting ending.

We Never Talk About My Brother 2/5
"Esau turns people into ghosts". I didn't enjoy this story. Too rambling and too long.  Interesting concept though.

King Pelles the Sure 4/5
Anti-war story. King Pelles wishes to be immortalised in legend as a "Great King" and thinks fighting a war is a good way to go about it. So he invites a weaker country to attack his little county. Things do not go as he has planned.

The Last and Only; or, Mr. Moscowitz becomes French 2/5
I didn't enjoy this story. Mr. Moscowitz has a mental disorder in which he progressively becomes more French.

Spook 4/5
An entertaining and funny ghost story involving an unusual duel.

The Stickball Witch 3/5
Too much "street baseball" aka stickball, which does not interest me in the least.  Kids knock the ball into the local "witch's" garden and one of the boys has enough courage to get it back and gets caught by the witch. The story starts getting interesting when the witch shows up.

A Dance for Emilia 3.5/5
Two people come together over their reminiscence of a dead friend/lover, with unintended consequences. Maudlin.anthologies books-read-2023 fantasy-and-sf ...more9 s Alex Sarll6,294 315

An anthology of choice short work by the great fantasist best known for The Last Unicorn, and stymied in recent years by far too much legal bullshit. I was struggling to sum up what makes him so special without resorting to entirely worn out words 'classic', before I hit on at least part of it: there are still all manner of people writing great short fiction, but often it's fiddly to describe – either you have to spoil something too far in, or talk in terms of a riff on X, told in the style of Y, in response to Z. Whereas with Beagle, the simple single sentence does it, same as with a fairytale: an academic is befriended by a rhinoceros, which insists it's a unicorn. A great lady invites Death to her ball. A New Yorker learns something he wishes he hadn't about his girlfriend, but fears confrontation more than werewolves. And I was a little surprised at that last example being the title story here, because it feels dated in its specifics in ways the others mostly don't, but under those it's still a scenario that's perfect in its tilted plausibility. Not that he's just a master of the pitch, or the plot; he can weave a spell with his words too, such that even the animal fables, probably the most cynical stories here (at their heart, I mean – many of the others have cynical characters, but that's another matter) have moments of sheer beauty, the octopus wondering whether the fleetingly glimpsed albatross, "So splendid and so alone", might be God, or the class at cat school which teaches them about "the enchanting things all cats can see that no one else ever does – the great, gliding ancestors, and faraway castles, and mysterious forests full of monsters to chase." I think my favourite tale might be the one in which the no-nonsense New York Jewish artist finds himself with an angel for a model, but apart from anything else that's one of the few I've read before; ask me next month and you'd ly get a different answer. Sure, some of the stories are slighter than others, but there's not a one which doesn't feel it's achieved exactly what it intended, even if in one case that's mainly an excuse to expose readers to some of the worst poetry ever perpetrated by non-Vogons. It all wraps up beautifully with A Dance For Emilia, which possibly torpedoes my theory about Beagle's stories being easily pitched, in that I'd need to give too much away to say more than that it's a story about losing a friend too soon, but doesn't it always feel too soon? Still, it's the piece here which has been least widely available, and even if you're an assiduous follower of Beagle's, the collection would be well worth it just for this.

(Netgalley ARC)8 s Beth CatoAuthor 115 books616

I received an advance copy of this book (and its companion) from the publisher via NetGalley.

Peter Beagle really needs no introduction. He's one of the greats of the fantasy genre, and this book is a clear demonstration of way. I expected this collection to be good, mind you, but I didn't expect it to be such an emotional journey. Every single story is fantastic (not something I can say about many collections or anthologies) but some of them--wow. "Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel" is up there among my favorite stories of all time with its gentle yet harsh story of an artist, an angel, and sheer goodness. Also profound were "Come Lady Death," "The Stickball Witch," and the astonishing finale, "A Dance for Emilia." I think it's fair to say that, based on Beagle's introductory notes, his stories that tended to touch me the most were the ones that were semiautobiographical for him--drawn from his own life, with a magical twist.

Superb. Just superb.2023 anthology classic ...more7 s Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm)692 3,770 Want to read

Oooh goody goody, an illustrated collection of short stories from Peter S. Beagle.
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