Sleight of Hand
Locus Award nominee 2012.
"Peter S. Beagle is the magician we all apprenticed ourselves to." – Lisa Goldstein, author of the American Book Award winning novel, The Red Magician
Magic is back.
Peter S. Beagle returns with an inspired collection of new fantasy that showcases his incomparable mastery and range. In these tales – with settings as different as an impossible reconstruction of the Berlin Wall and the kitchen of Mrs. Eunice Giant (72 Fairweather Lane, East-Of-the-Bean, Sussex Overhead) – warriors, monsters, and utterly ordinary people struggle with possession and forgiveness, life and love, hate and death... and the choices that come after everything else has been stripped away by Fate.
Inside these pages:
– The daughter of the Shark God leaves her Pacific island home, determined to find her mysterious father and hold him accountable for the curse of her own existence.
– A dilapidated dragon, a frustrated cop, and an unapologetic author square off over a dangerously-abandoned narrative.
– An enchantress-to-be sings of power, desire, and the ultimate betrayal of her heart.
– In a nothing diner, in a nowhere town, a woman lost in grief learns how to fool Death with one artful shuffle of the deck.
Featuring a brand-new Schmendrick tale set before The Last Unicorn, plus twelve other wonderful stories, Sleight of Hand is suffused with a luminous misdirection that moves the soul as much as it fools the eye. Always ready to delight his readers, Beagle proves yet again that he is a master magician.
Contents:
- The Woman Who Married the Man in the Moon (a Schmendrick story)
- Sleight of Hand
- The Children of the Shark God
- The Best Worst Monster
- What Tune the Enchantress Plays
- La Lune T'Attend
- Up the Down Beanstalk: A Wife Remembers
- The Rock in the Park
- The Rabbi's Hobby
- Oakland Dragon Blues
- The Bridge Partner
- Dirae
- Vanishing
Peter S. Beagle
Peter Soyer Beagle (born 1939) is an American fantasist and author of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays. He is also a talented guitarist and folk singer. He wrote his first novel, urban fantasy A Fine and Private Place (1960), when he was only 19 years old. Travel book I See By My Outfit (1965) is a nonfiction classic. Today he is best known as the author of The Last Unicorn (1968), a modern fantasy classic.
Beagle's work as a screenwriter interrupted his early career direction as a fiction author, but in the 1990s he returned to prose fiction. Beagle's own favourite is a literary fantasy novel The Innkeeper's Song (1993). Four years later Beagle returned to the land that was the novels setting for a collection of short stories The Magician of Karakosk and Other Stories (1997, known as Giant Bones).
In 2005 Beagle finally published a coda to The Last Unicorn, a novelette entitled ”Two Hearts,” and began work on a full-novel sequel. In 2006, ”Two Hearts” won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette and in 2007 it won the Nebula Award in the same category. The story was also nominated as a short fiction finalist for the World Fantasy Award. In 2006, Beagle won the Inkpot Award for Outstanding Achievement in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Peter S. Beagle lives today in Oakland, California.
More books by Peter S. Beagle
