* Where did Sinbad Sail? * Who Fired the Phoenix? * The Boy Who Cried Werewolf * The Great Rough Beast * Postscript on Prester John * The Secret of Hyperborea * What Gave All Those Mammoths Cold Feet? And many more--fictional? authoritative? fantastic? deadpan?--investigations into the real, the true...and the things that should be true PREFACE BY PETER S. BEAGLE ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE BARR "Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, nobody knows what a wombat looks like and everyone knows what a dragon looks like." Not a novel, not a book of short stories, Adventures in Unhistory is a book of the fantastic--a compendium of magisterial examinations of Mermaids, Mandrakes, and Mammoths; Dragons, Werewolves, and Unicorns; the Phoenix and the Roc; about places such as Sicily, Siberia, and the Moon; about heroic, sinister, and legendary persons such as Sindbad, and Aleister Crowley, and Prester John; and--revealed at last--the Secret of Hyperborea. The facts are here, the foundations behind rumors, legends, and the imaginations of generations of tale-spinners. But far from being dry recitals, these meditations, or lectures, or deadpan prose performances are as lively, as crazily inventive, as witty as the best fiction of the author, a writer praised by Gardner Dozois as "one of the great short story writers of our times." Who, on the subject of Dragons, could write coldly, dispassionately, guided only by logic? Certainly not Avram Davidson. Certain facts, these facts, deserve more than recitation; they deserve flourish, verve, gusto, style--the late, great Avram Davidson's unique voice. That prose which, in the words of Peter S. Beagle's Preface to this volume, "cries out to be read aloud."

A collection of the best stories published in 1994.

Eighteen exotic tales of the seas most seductive mystery. _The Prevalence of MermaidsÓ by Avram Davidson _Nothing in the RulesÓ by L. Sprague de Camp _She Sells Sea ShellsÓ by Paul Darcy Boles _The Soul CagesÓ by Thomas Crofton Croker _Sweetly the Waves Call to MeÓ by Pat Murphy _DriftglassÓ by Samuel R. Delany _Mrs. Pigafetta Swims WellÓ by Reginald Bretnor _The Nebraskan and the NereidÓ by Gene Wolfe _The Lady and the MeremanÓ by Jane Yolen _The Fishermans WifeÓ by Jane Yolen _Till Human Voices Wake UsÓ by Lewis Shiner _A Touch of StrangeÓ by Randall Garrett and Avram Davidson _The Crest of Thirty-sixÓ by Davis Grubb _The Shannon MerrowÓ by Cooper McLauglin _Fish StoryÓ by Leslie Charteris _In the IslandsÓ by Pat Murphy At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

“Lavers keeps his intellectual detective story passionate and suspenseful.” — Washington Post Book World From Biblical stories about virgins to adventures with Harry Potter, unicorns have enchanted people for millennia. In the endlessly fascinating The Natural History of Unicorns, author Chris Lavers ingeniously traces the legend of this mysterious creature to the real people, places, and animals that have influenced its story.

Intimate, humorous, and insightful, Readings is a collection of classic essays and reviews by Michael Dirda, book critic of the Washington Post and winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. From a first reading of Beckett and Faulkner at the feet of an inspirational high-school English teacher to a meeting of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, from an obsession with Nabokov's Lolita to the discovery of the Japanese epic The Tale of Genji, these essays chronicle a lifetime of literary enjoyment.