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The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard
The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard
not yet rated

Locus Award nominee 2013.

More than twenty-five years ago, Lucius Shepard introduced us to a remarkable fictional world, a world separated from our own “by the thinnest margin of possibility.” There, in the mythical Carbonales Valley, Shepard found the setting for “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” the classic account of an artist — Meric Cattanay — and his decades long effort to paint — and kill — a dormant, not quite dead dragon measuring 6,000 feet from end to end. The story was nominated for multiple awards and is now recognized as one of its author’s signature accomplishments.

Over the years, Shepard has revisited this world in a number of brilliant, independent narratives that have illuminated the Dragon’s story from a variety of perspectives. This loosely connected series reached a dramatic crossroads in the astonishing novella, “The Taborin Scale”. The Dragon Griaule now gathers all of these hard to find stories into a single generous volume. The capstone of the book — and a particular treat for Shepard fans — is “The Skull,” a new 40,000 word novel that advances the story in unexpected ways, connecting the ongoing saga of an ancient and fabulous beast with the political realities of Central America in the 21st century. Augmented by a group of engaging, highly informative story notes, The Dragon Griaule is an indispensable volume, the work of a master stylist with a powerful — and always unpredictable — imagination.

Table of Contents:

  • The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule
  • The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter
  • The Father of Stones
  • Liar’s House
  • The Taborin Scale
  • The Skull
  • Story Notes
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Standard Shelves
Updated 01/01/2024
Category: Fantasy, Collection
Release date: May 28, 2012

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Lucius Shepard

Lucius Shepard

Lucius Shepard (1947–2014) was an American writer. Classified as a science fiction and fantasy writer, he often leaned into other genres, such as magical realism. His work is infused with a political and historical sensibility and an awareness of literary antecedents.

Brief biographies are, like history texts, too organized to be other than orderly misrepresentations of the truth. So when it's written that Lucius Shepard was born in August of 1947 to Lucy and William Shepard in Lynchburg, Virginia, and raised thereafter in Daytona Beach, Florida, it provides a statistical hit and gives you nothing of the difficult childhood from which he frequently attempted to escape, eventually succeeding at the age of fifteen, when he traveled to Ireland aboard a freighter and thereafter spent several years in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, working in a cigarette factory in Germany, in the black market of Cairo's Khan al Khalili bazaar, as a night club bouncer in Spain, and in numerous other countries at numerous other occupations. On returning to the United States, Shepard entered the University of North Carolina, where for one semester he served as the co-editor of the Carolina Quarterly. Either he did not feel challenged by the curriculum, or else he found other pursuits more challenging. Whichever the case, he dropped out several times and traveled to Spain, Southeast Asia (at a time when tourism there was generally discouraged), and South and Central America. He ended his academic career as a tenth-semester sophomore with a heightened political sensibility, a fairly extensive knowledge of Latin American culture and some pleasant memories.

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Toward the beginning of his stay at the university, Shepard met Joy Wolf, a fellow student, and they were married, a union that eventually produced one son, Gullivar, now an architect in New York City. While traveling cross-country to California, they had their car break down in Detroit and were forced to take jobs in order to pay for repairs. As fortune would have it, Shepard joined a band, and passed the better part of the 1970s playing rock and roll in the Midwest. When an opportunity presented itself, usually in the form of a band break-up, he would revisit Central America, developing a particular affection for the people of Honduras. He intermittently took odd jobs, working as a janitor, a laborer, a sealer of driveways, and, in a nearly soul-destroying few months, a correspondent for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, a position that compelled him to call the infirm and the terminally ill to inform them they had misfiled certain forms and so were being denied their benefits.

In 1980 Shepard attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University and thereafter embarked upon a writing career. He sold his first story, "Black Coral," in 1981 to New Dimensions, an anthology edited by Marta Randall. During a prolonged trip to Central America, covering a period from 1981-1982, he worked as a freelance journalist focusing on the civil war in El Salvador. Since that time he has mainly devoted himself to the writing of fiction. His novels and stories have earned numerous awards in both the genre and the mainstream.

More books by Lucius Shepard

The Best of Lucius Shepard, Volume Two
  ★ 8.00 / 1
Beautiful Blood
not yet rated
Five Autobiographies and a Fiction
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The Taborin Scale
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Vacancy and Ariel
not yet rated
Viator Plus
  ★ 8.00 / 1
Skull City and Other Lost Stories
not yet rated
The Best of Lucius Shepard
not yet rated
Softspoken
not yet rated
Dagger Key and Other Stories
not yet rated
Trujillo
not yet rated
Eternity and Other Stories
not yet rated
Viator
not yet rated
Liar’s House
not yet rated
Trujillo
not yet rated
Two Trains Running
not yet rated
A Handbook of American Prayer
not yet rated
Aztechs
not yet rated
Colonel Rutherford's Colt
not yet rated
Louisiana Breakdown
not yet rated
Floater
not yet rated
Valentine
not yet rated
Barnacle Bill the Spacer and Other Stories
not yet rated
The Last Time
not yet rated
Sports and Music
not yet rated
The Golden
  ★ 6.80 / 5
Kalimantan
not yet rated
Kalimantan
  ★ 6.66 / 3
The Ends of the Earth
not yet rated
Nantucket Slayrides: Three Short Novels
not yet rated
The Father of Stones
not yet rated
The Jaguar Hunter
not yet rated
Life During Wartime
  ★ 8.00 / 1
Green Eyes
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