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Avram Davidson was one of the great original American writers of this century. He was erudite, cranky, Jewish, wildly creative, and sold most of his wonderful stories to pulp magazines. Now, his estate and his friends have brought together a definitive collection of his finest work, each story introduced by an SF luminary: writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe, Guy Davenport, Peter S. Beagle, Gregory Benford, Thomas M. Disch, and dozens of others. This is a volume every lover of fantasy will need to own.

This invaluable collection of Avram Davidson's resonant, witty short stories describes some incidents in the career of many-times-Doctor Engelbert Eszterhazy, loyal subject of the Triune Monarchy of Scythia- Pannonia-Transbalkania, located in a 19th-century Europe whose political landscape will be, after a little reflection, familiar to most fantasy listeners. Enquire with Doctor Eszterhazy into curious matters: the lurley, the old woman who lived with a bear, gingerbread men, dancing goats, and more.

Peregrine was the bastard son of the King of Sapodilla, the last Pagan kingdom in the world to resist Christianity. Accompanied by his page and the rather time-worn sorcerer, Appledore, the prince sallies forth into the Dark Ages to find his fortune. What he finds instead is: dragons, whores, Huns, Roman legions, emperors, and a most fantastic collection of mysteries and adventures.

Professor Vlad Smith is on a terrifying quest, one that will take him from the halls of our most hallowed institutions to the most run-down of old houses in blighted neighborhoods. A mysterious committee, shredded yellowed newspapers, a daguerreotype of a Confederate soldier, a headless corpse, and a corpseless head.... These are the clues that Smith must piece together to save his sanity and his daughter and uncover the terrible secret of the Boss in the Wall.

In this collection of stories from 1959 to 1961, Avram treats us to pieces on maritime tragedies, Prohibition-era gangsters, forgotten Americans, the Triangle Shirt Co. tragedy, and the Crimean Light Brigade blunder. He also has an intriguing theory about Jack the Ripper.  

Like Malamud and Jackson, Avram Davidson brought a unique level of charm, wit, and intrigue to the short story form. Collected here for the first time are his remarkable mystery tales, including the 1815 investigations of New York's Chief Constable; a sinister lesson in New England thrift; New Amsterdam river pirates versus the KGB; treachery in nursing home; and expatriates who will kill for a little peace and quiet. 

In 1962, Avram wrote Beer Like Water, which was part of a book of Davidson’s true short stories titled Crimes & Chaos. In this audiobook, in Avram’s typical fashion, he plays with the setting such that it’s a bit more special than reality. Beer! Beer! Beer! exists at the intersection of magical realism (just a hint) and historical fiction, with the streets of Yokums representing the Yonkers of his youth in the 1920s and 1930s much in the way that the British Hidalgo of Limekiller! parallels Belize.

The Phoenix and the Mirror: or, The Enigmatic Speculum by Avram Davidson is a fantasy novel that tells the story of a sorcerer named Vergil Magus. This sorcerer was named for Virgil (or Publius Vergilius Maro), poet and author of The Aeneid. In an introduction to The Phoenix and the Mirror, Davidson claims that during the Dark Ages, people tended to forget that Virgil was a poet and instead believed he was a sorcerer. The Phoenix and the Mirror was the first book in which Davidson attempted to retell the legend of this mysterious sorcerer.

Set during the reign of the Aztecs in Mexico, two alien forces, dormant for centuries, enter a confrontation on a remote mountain that will decide Earth's fate. The great old ones benevolently ruled before the cruel Aztecs were shaped by the Huitzil, who came from the evil stars and taught the Aztecs how to conquer and demanded endless human sacrifice. 

Jerrod Northi-rogue, pirate and a citizen of Pemath, was desperate enough to want to go through the transformation. It cost 100,000 units for the Craftsmen to endow him with the Seven Signs - a rather steep price even for him. But he would pay it somehow, for since the attack of the deadly leeris, he feared that the cost of missing this opportunity to find a refuge in the land of Tarnis would be even higher.

Rond and his crew had been left to die slowly on an unknown planet. As they moved warily through the alien forest they heard the eerie rhythms coming toward them. Then they saw the grotesque figures. A bizarre army of screaming women! Masked, brandishing gleaming swords, rattling their terrible death drums, howling with the fury of some primitive blood lust - and they were attacking! As the scarlet waves of growling women approached, Rond and his men began to run - back into the dark forest of looming horror...

The Maze is a pathway between worlds and times. Its Masters know the secret but decline to interfere. Its Guardians at different levels prevent invasion of one world by the inhabitants of another. But the alien hive-creatures called Chulpex mean to find their way past the Guardians to colonize a new world, and one ordinary, untrained Earthman is catapulted into wild adventure in his determination to stop them.

A world of living legend, peopled by centaurs, golems, harpies, and primitive but shrewd humans - all this in a mysterious realm of Starflux and Earthflux, closer to the primordial chaos than the world we know and told in a style at once familiar and fantastic, homely and horrific.

Fictional? Authoritative? Fantastic? Deadpan? Investigations into the real, the true...and the things that should be true....

Avram Davidson's six Jack Limekiller stories create a rich and colorful world where the magical and inexplicable coexist with the outboard motor and the escalation of the American war in Vietnam. British Hidalgo is "a place that you can put your arms around" - welcoming and friendly to the visitor, but uncanny beings dwell in the bush and roam along its coast.

Earth was old, her riches gone. Her children too had left her, all but a few who lived peacefully off the land. And then came the Kar-Chee, to crack Earth open and suck out what remained of her richness, threatening the twilight of the old planet with an evil beyond anything that had gone before. With them they brought their servants, beasts so cruel and horrible that men could recall their like only from ancestral nightmares, and named them "dragons".... 

Jon-Joras had come to Earth simply to oversee arrangements for a dragon hunt to amuse the king. These hunts were as much pageantry as sport - the dragons, brought to Earth centuries before as pets of an alien race, were powerful but slow-witted.... 

Ten years in the service of Kublai Kahn...Marco, Niccolo, and Maffeo Polo have seen magic and miracles, and accumulated riches beyond their dreaming. But now all they want is to return to their beloved Venice. Alas - as the only Westerners in the glittering Mongol court, they are high favourites with the Khan of Khans. And before he will allow them to leave, they must undertake one strange, final quest. 

The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy is a collection of historical mystery fantasy short stories by Avram Davidson, featuring his scholarly detective character Doctor Eszterhazy and set in an imaginary European country. It never got better than this - short stories set in the "triune monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania" in the decades before the World Wars. 

Avram Davidson was widely regarded as one of the most outstanding authors of short fantasy fiction in our time. This collection comprises his distinctive historical fantasies - tales of strange Mitteleurpoas, of magic in Victorian England, and on the American frontier. Here are "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire", "Traveller from an Antique Land", and "What Strange Stars and Skies"; here are dragons, cameras, and "The Singular Incident of the Dog on the Beach".