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"A much-awaited collection of prose and poetry from one of the great cosmic masters of the supernatural. Not just any fantasy, horror, and science fiction author could impress H. P. Lovecraft into calling him "unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living" or compel Fritz Lieber to employ the worthy term sui generis. Clark Ashton Smith-autodidact, prolific poet, amateur philosopher, bizarre sculptor, and unmatched storyteller-simply wrote like no one else, before or since. This new collection of his very best tales and poems is selected and introduced by supernatural literature scholar S. T. Joshi and allows readers to encounter Smith's visionary brand of fantastical, phantasmagorical worlds, each one filled with invention, terror, and a superlative sense of metaphysical wonder"--… (more)
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Where to begin? Well, since this is intended as introductory volume of Clark Ashton Smith's literary work, perhaps a few brief remarks about Smith himself are in order.
Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was a poet, short story writer, sculptor, and painter. He is primarily
On to the book itself. This volume is divided into five sections: a mid-length (15-20 page) introduction by editor S.T. Joshi, a lengthy section (about 250 pages, comprising the majority of the book) of short stories, a brief section (about 20 pages) of prose poetry, a longer section (about 60 pages) of non-prose poetry, and about 30 pages of explanatory notes. The short story selection is excellent, and probably does as good of a job is as possible in a relatively constrained space to demonstrate to the Smith neophyte the range of the author's fiction. The prose poetry is, for lack of a better word, delightful; Joshi has referred to Smith as the finest prose poet in the English language, and, after reading the selections included here, I think the reader will find it very hard to argue the point. I found the non-prose poems to be slightly more problematic, as Smith's (in)famous fondness for recondite words is more readily on display here than elsewhere; nevertheless, there is much to admire here, and a work like his long poem "The Hashish-Eater" probably surpasses anything I have ever read in terms of sheer phantasmagoric imagination. Finally, the footnotes, as they always are in Joshi-edited works, are excellent.
Should you purchase this? If you are a fan of writers like Dunsany, Lovecraft, Howard, and Tolkien, the answer is a resounding "yes". Smith is most certainly not to all tastes, but if you enjoy his work, you will almost certainly be an admirer of his for life.