The Return Of The Sorcerer: The Best Of Clark Ashton Smith
by Clark Ashton Smith
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Book Summary Information
Author: Clark Ashton SmithEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-29
ISBN: 0809556650
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Prime Books
Book Reviews of The Return Of The Sorcerer: The Best Of Clark Ashton Smith
Book Review: A Tremendous story collection by a near-forgotten author
Summary: 5 Stars
Clark Ashton Smith, along with Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, was considered one of the three great authors who wrote for Weird Tales in the 1930's. This collection reprints 18 of Smith's best stories for that magazine and other publications of the period. While Howard and Lovecraft have been reprinted innumerable times, Smith has been mostly forgotten or published in expensive hardcover collections aimed at the hard-core collector. This edition from Prime Books contains a great sampling of Smith's work and an introduction by noted SF/fantasy author, Gene Wolfe. It's edited by life-long Smith fan and weird fiction expert, Robert Weinberg (me). And it's priced right, available from Amazon.com for little more than $10.00.
It's hard to single out any one story as being the star of this collection as all of the stories in the book are top notch. Still, "The City of the Singing Flame" is hard to match as a science-fantasy classic. This novelet is one of Smith's masterpieces and is one of the finest and most imaginative stories ever written. I read "City" fifty years ago, when I was thirteen years old, and I still remember every detail of the story today. Having read thousands of fantasy and science fiction stories, and having edited over a hundred books in the field, I consider "The City of the Singing Flame" one of the four or five best science-fantasy stories I ever had the pleasure of reading.
Nearly entertaining, but evoking an entirely different mood, is "The Isle of the Torturers." The last line of this finely written story is worth the price of the book alone. Smith was a writer with a diabolical sense of humor and a taste for the ironic and this story delivers.
This book is a treasure. If you never have read Clark Ashton Smith, this collection will serve as a good introduction to a great fantasy author. Buy it. Read it. You won't be disappointed.
Summary of The Return Of The Sorcerer: The Best Of Clark Ashton Smith
Selected carefully by well-respected editor Robert Weinberg and with an introduction by award-winning author Gene Wolfe, The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith offers both readers and scholars a definitive collection of short fiction and short novels, by an overlooked master of fantasy, horror and science-fiction.General Books
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