Adventures in Unhistory : Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends

* 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 truePREFACE BY PETER S. BEAGLEILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE BARR"e;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."e;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 "e;one of the great short story writers of our times."e;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, "e;cries out to be read aloud."e;At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.