Once Upon a Time: A Treasury of Fantasies and Fairy Tales - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 071264993X ISBN 13: 9780712649933

Publisher: Legend, 1991

Synopsis

Ten of the top writers of fantasy present their views of the ways and byways of fairyland:
ISAAC ASIMOV -- A most unusual knight meets an even more unusual dragon.
TERRY BROOKS -- A boy and an elf discover courage conquers more than monsters.
C.J. CHERRYH -- Three wishes -- and the strangest love story ever told.
LESTER DEL REY -- The little princess didn't really believe in a fairy godmother.
SUSAN DEXTER -- The hermit boy didn't know that his pet fawn was a unicorn.
WAYLAND DREW -- Each traveler claimed precedence -- until a stranger joined them.
BARBARA HAMBLY -- Three strange children from a dragon's lair were loved, until . . .
KATHERINE KURTZ -- A fairy learns of faith and love from a holy man.
ANNE McCAFFREY -- Humans and the descendants of Pegasus seek to escape their prison.
LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS -- Killing a dragon is easy -- once one knows how.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

op writers of fantasy present their views of the ways and byways of fairyland:
ISAAC ASIMOV -- A most unusual knight meets an even more unusual dragon.
TERRY BROOKS -- A boy and an elf discover courage conquers more than monsters.
C.J. CHERRYH -- Three wishes -- and the strangest love story ever told.
LESTER DEL REY -- The little princess didn't really believe in a fairy godmother.
SUSAN DEXTER -- The hermit boy didn't know that his pet fawn was a unicorn.
WAYLAND DREW -- Each traveler claimed precedence -- until a stranger joined them.
BARBARA HAMBLY -- Three strange children from a dragon's lair were loved, until . . .
KATHERINE KURTZ -- A fairy learns of faith and love from a holy man.
ANNE McCAFFREY -- Humans and the descendants of Pegasus seek to escape their prison.
LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS -- Killing a dragon is easy -- once one knows how.

From Kirkus Reviews

The brief introduction to this anthology of stories styled as ``modern fairy tales'' reveals its chief weakness--the editors don't convey a good understanding of the fairy tales, and few of their authors have captured the flavor, style, or tone of their putative paradigms. The old tales gathered by the Grimms rarely featured dragons (as in Barbara Hambly's ``Changeling''), nor do the fairies of the ancient legends ever appear as simple bell- tinklers (as in Katherine Kurtz's ``A Tinkling of Fairybells''). The most successful stories here are more similar to the lays and romances of the Middle Ages than to ``Hansel and Gretel'' or ``Rumpelstiltskin''--C.J. Cherryh's ``Gwydion and the Dragon'' and Lawrence Watt-Evan's ``Portrait of a Hero,'' for example, recall Breton ballads, not Hans Christian Andersen. Only the story-within- the-story in Wayland Drew's ``The Old Soul'' manages to re-create the effects of the old fairy tales. The less successful stories here are little more than fluff. Though they don't live up to their billing, the best of these tales are good examples of a very rare breed in today's high fantasy genre--the short story. Almost all such work these days appears in three-or-more book series. Stories such as Cherryh's, Hambly's, and Anne McCaffery's (``The Quest of a Sensible Man'') prove that entertaining high fantasy can be delivered at shorter lengths. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Legend
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 071264993X
• ISBN 13: 9780712649933
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Michael Pangrazio
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Risa Kessler