In the latest New Yorker, Laura Miller uses the occasion of the publication of In the Land of Time, a new Lord Dunsany collection from Penguin, not to argue the strengths and weaknesses of the collection as a representation of Dunsany's oeuvre but rather to dismiss him as a dilettante and lay the blame for today's epic fantasy at his feet:
If not for contemporary advocates of fantasy fiction, who see him as a pioneer of the genre, a new selection of his tales, "In the Land of Time," from Penguin Classics ($14), would surely never have appeared. It is too easy, however, to blame Dunsany's disappointments on the fickleness of public taste. Modernism happened for a reason, and so did Dunsany's slow drift to the margins of literary renown. [full article]Along the way, she skirts troublesome topics like Dunsany's influence on the likes of Lovecraft, Tolkien, and (of particular interest to her audience) Borges and Calvino, and only breaks into half-throated appreciation when dealing with his later Wodehousean stories.
I wonder why she, or the magazine, bothered with the topic at all?
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