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No. 3207
The best reaction to the success of Lord of the Rings was in 1969, when Lin Carter piggybacked on the success of LOTR to do the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, bringing back some of the most wonderful books ever written into print, putting great covers on them, and hooking a generation of readers into E.R. Eddison and Hope Mirrlees and Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell and Ernest Bramah, Mervyn Peake and George MacDonald even people as disparate as G. K. Chesterton, William Morris and William Beckford. If you liked Lord of the Rings back then and wanted more of the same then and went looking for it, there were treasures and not much else.
These days, if you like Lord of the Rings and go to the Fantasy shelves to see what else there is like that, you are apt to find some pretty gamy fare. (Yes, there's good stuff. But it's harder to find.)
(...) As a general rule, the books on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy List were good. (You can find the complete list at http://home.epix.net/~wallison/bafs.html .) Yes, there were a few exceptions -- and, I should add, good doesn't always mean easy-to-read
- Neil Gaiman
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I'm not sure what's in print right now, but classic fantasies that shouldn't blend, and should make you happy to have read them would include Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, Lord Dunsany's fantasies, both the short stories in volumes like Time and the Gods, and the longer books like The Charwoman's Shadow and The King of Elfland's Daughter, James Branch Cabell -- The High Place is a good place to start: it's the story of what might have happened if Bluebeard had woken, married, and tired of Sleeping Beauty, or Jurgen, or The Silver Stallion -- and then there are Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung stories, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, and there's always Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Charles G Finney's The Circus of Dr Lao is, I think, back in print at present. T. H. White's Sword in the Stone and his
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