Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle [Hardcover]

Peter S. Beagle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2010

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 Kingdoms: 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Scientists may call the rhinoceros a unicorn, but only Beagle can make it feel like one. Facing reality—often a magical reality hidden under mundane trappings—is the key to understanding magical transformations and repairing damage, saving one time-traveling brother trapped in Thursday (El Regalo) and thwarting another who is the angel of death (We Never Talk about My Brother). Prosaic rabbis must deal with angels (Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel) and ghosts (The Rabbi's Hobby) while supernatural daughters cope with mother issues (Lila the Werewolf, What Tune the Enchantress Plays). Two Hearts, the coda to The Last Unicorn, is a moving ode to heroism. Beagle plays on the heartstrings like a master musician, and this definitive collection, a magnificent grand tour of his many created worlds, will thrill his legions of fans. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

Because Beagle, not editor Strahan, introduces this hefty tome, the reasons why these 18 tales are Beagle’s best are never stated. How irksome for Beaglephiles, who know that he doesn’t write mediocre, much less bad, stories. Five previous collections contribute all but four stories here, so maybe a reviewer will be most helpful characterizing the erstwhile fugitives. “What Tune the Enchantress Plays” is the irritable dramatic monologue, delivered to a demon, of a woman tricked out of the love of her life and her subsequent vengeance; it’s utterly convincing, for Beagle catches precisely the voice of just such a not-in-this-world character. “Vanishing” is a ghost story about atonement and, just possibly, redemptive change by a man who let a moment of horror at the Berlin wall in 1963 ruin his life. The autobiographically tinted “The Rock in the Park” and “The Rabbi’s Hobby” are about, respectively, a boy’s run-ins with centaurs (in Central Park, yet) and the ghost of someone who never lived. They’re superb and in superb company. --Ray Olson

Product Details

• Hardcover: 456 pages
• Publisher: Subterranean; Trade Hardcover edition (February 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596062916
• ISBN-13: 978-1596062917
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,012,421 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, but could have been perfect, April 22, 2010

By 

Calibandar "calibandar" (Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle (Hardcover)

This really is a very good collection of Peter Beagle's shorter work. There is some early work here but the lion share is made up by Beagle's excellent burst of short fiction in the last few years. Whereas his novel output the last 12 years or so has been non-existent, short stories is the area where he has become one of the masters of the SFF genre.

In his introduction Beagle notes that he often has several drafts even for these novelettes ( nearly all stories here are some 20-30 pages), sometimes doing a story 7 times. He does this because he feels there is very little room for mistakes in a shorter work as opposed to a novel, which may well be true. The stories feel expertly crafted as a result. The subjects vary greatly but the style and depth of intelligence is always there.

The only downside of this book is that there is no original material in it, and secondly that many ( but not all) of the stories here have already been collected in the Tachyon collections "The Line Between" and "We never talk about my brother". This made me go back and forth several times before I decided to purchase this otherwise awesome and very well made book ( it's pricy but lovingly produced with excellent paper and a good cover, shame about the type used for the table of contents btw). I would have liked the collection to be even bigger, containing some new materials. As an aside, there's new Beagle stories in "Beastly Bride" "Warriors" "Full Moon City" and "Eclipse 3" for those interested. Another niggle I have is that the book is supposedly edited by Jonathan Strahan but he does not even contribute a preface/introduction or afterword to this book. Some sort of essay on Beagle's work by Strahan would surely have been of added value to this collection.

Summing up, a landmark collection of Beagle stories, many of which will be new to readers who do not already have two Tachyon collections listed above, and as such well worth buying now that you still can, also as a collector's item because the book is already out of print with the publisher. The collection could have been made perfect with some extra essays from Beagle experts or the editor, and some previously unpublished stories.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic Worlds to Explore, November 22, 2010

By 

BlueFairy (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle (Hardcover)

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 certain 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.