The Gods of Pegana

Before Tolkien imagined Middle-earth, before Le Guin dreamed her worlds, there was Pegana: a place where gods drummed the universe into being and un-make it on a whim. Lord Dunsany's 1905 masterpiece is the birthplace of modern fantasy, a collection of interlocking myths that read like fragments of a lost bible discovered from some ancient, alien civilization. In the beginning, MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI slept, and then he created the gods, who created the world. Skarl beats his drum and the stars turn; Kib sends life flowing into the vessels of clay; the lesser gods play their cosmic games with the fates of mortals. These tales unfold with the strange, incantatory power of dreams, each sentence bearing down like ancient prophecy. And yet beneath the beauty lies a quiet horror: that both gods and men may be equally ignorant of what lies behind the drumbeat of existence. The book that birthed modern fantasy. Essential for anyone who loves the genre or wants to understand where it all began.