by Lord Dunsany
Lord Dunsany earned literary fame through his otherworldly short stories. This book compiles fifty-one of them, without a seeming theme except that they're extremely short—sometimes as short as a few paragraphs. The stories range from morality tales, to dreamlike vignettes, to gloomy prophecies told in a foreboding voice. A thread of bleak humor sometimes runs through them, like with much of Dunsany's literary output. Fifty-One Tales was published simultaneously in England and America, with each edition featuring a story that the other did not.
