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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9781404389670
ISBN number: 1404389679
Label: IndyPublish.com
Manufacturer: IndyPublish.com
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 116
Printing Date: 2003-07
Publishing house: IndyPublish.com
Studio: IndyPublish.com
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
First published in 1910.
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Rated by buyers 
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Wildside Press does much good by resurrecting rare old books, but this edition of Dunsany's classic has some of the worst typos I have ever seen. For example:
Page 34: Instead of "Never since then have I seen my city alive," Wildside has: "Now since then have I seen my city alive," disastrously reversing the meaning of the sentence, at the very climax of "The Madness of Andelsprutz".
Page 111: Instead of "But the folk of the Weald arose and went back well-fed to their byres," Wildside has: "But the talk of the Weald arose and went back well-fed to byres" (two errors in one line!).
Page 113: A line has dropped out! Instead of ". . . and beat the roses against cottagers' panes, and whispered news of the befriending night," Wildside has: ". . . and beat the roses of the befriending night"--ruining one of Dunsany's more evocative passages.
And most ridiculous of all, at the climax of "Blagdaross", instead of "Saladin is in this desert with all his paynims", we get "Saladin is in this desert with all his pyjamas"!
And so on. These errors might be a minor annoyance encountered in, say, "War and Peace", but Dunsany's tales are very short, very carefully crafted, every word selected with care and precision. They are more nearly poetry than prose. Errors of this kind GLARE at the reader.
Wildside boasts that this edition is "authorized" by the Dunsany estate, but Dunsany would have been infuriated by it. Wildside needs to issue a corrected version, and maybe an apology.
Rated by buyers -
Before there was Tolkein, there were William Morris, E.R. Eddison and Lord Dunsany. Dunsany's richly poetic style is delicious but a bit like a box of chocolates--best savored in small doses; too much and you might get a tummy ache. These are not so much tales as fragments, dreams, wisps of imaginings. Plot takes a backseat; these pieces read more like prose-poems, and are all about setting and language. They work well together since most are about dead or forgotten (imagined) cities or lands. An air of sadness wafts off the pages. Recommended for those who wish to voyage to exotic kingdoms that don't exist and those who enjoy reading ornate, beautiful prose evocative of Swinburne and Tennyson.
Rated by buyers 
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Lord Dunsany has a rare imagination and unqiue gift for writing. If you enjoy imaginative and visionary tales or if you are a fan of fictional mythologies, you will like Dunsany. While the stories are often compact, the vision is almost always expansive. He adopts language and prose approrpriate to his subject matter; often dreamy and languid it is a step away from the norm. Dunsany's tales dwell in places seldom visited by modern authors. Highly recommended.
Rated by buyers -
How neat to be able to easily purchase this great book. Dunsany skillfully weaves his tales so the reader is brought into his world of imagination. His was a unique vision. Each tale still speaks to our world yesterday a message of morality. His worlds are very real.
Rated by buyers -
"These are the Inner Lands..." Technically that describes the fictional cities in the very first story of "A Dreamer's Tales," but it could easily have described Lord Dunsany's fantastical mind. Full of invented legends and exotic characters, Dunsany's short stories are a wonderful early fantasy read.
He writes about desert cities, where the sea is only a legend; of a rocking horse that revels in a little boy's fantasies; of cities that are "quite dead; of dreams and redemption, long-dead cities that were supposedly going to last forever, prophets and swords, desert curses and terrible, beautiful gods.
There are boats on the banks of the Yann river, the "everlasting" city of Zaccarath, a stone age tale of religion and sacrifice, and the hashish man. Most striking is "The Field," in which Dunsany experiences strange feelings while sitting in a field of flowers -- a field with a terrible secret.
Dunsany had a masterful flair for exotic-edged fantasy. Before anyone had ever heard of J.R.R. Tolkien or "The Hobbit," Dunsany was spinning his stories. And while Tolkien has been the most powerful influence on modern fantasy, Dunsany did his share too -- he can be seen in descriptions of beautiful temples and desert cities.
His writing style is typical of the late 19th/early 20th century, rather formal and ornate. But the imagination of the stories frees them up. "I dreamt that I had done a horrible thing, so that burial was to be denied me either in soil or sea, neither could there be any hell for me," Dunsany says ominously at the start of one story. And half the horror of that is wondering what the horrible thing is.
Dunsany is shown in his glory in "The Dreamer's Tales," a rich collection of beautiful fantasy stories. Funny, poignant, majestic, this is a keeper.
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