Dunsany was one of the harbingers of modern fantasy, along with William Morris and George MacDonald. A successful playwright, he once had five concurrent plays running on Broadway (Five Plays). He wrote over seventy books, many with a quill pen, others dictated to his wife, beginning in 1905 with The Gods of Pegana, and including the very readable memoirs Patches of Sunlight and While the Sirens Slept. In the words of the ardent admirer H.P. Lovecraft: "To the truly imaginative he is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream." Such magical tales as "Idle Days on the Yann" and "A Shop in Go-by Street" conjure idyllic realms of fantasy far away from the worries of the common world -- though they may well have troubles of their own.

Online Texts by Lord Dunsany

Stories

• The Book of Wonder -- Dunsany's fifth collection of stories (1912, 1918) at Literature of the Fantastic (Doyle and Macdonald)

• "Bethmoora" and others: several stories in Spanish translation.

• "The Bride of the Man-Horse"

Poems

• Night -- at this site.

Other Dunsany Sites

• Official Site of the Dunsany Family and Lord Dunsany. Biography, family history, photos of Castle Dunsany, bookshop.

• Books by Lord Dunsany at Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works.

• Lord Dunsany -- Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination by S. T. Joshi. Publisher's entry (Greenwood Press); No. 64 of Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Westport, Conn. 1995).

• Lord Dunsany Bibliography by John Wenn at the Linköping SF Archive.

• Lord Dunsany's Poetry, essay by Jonathan Vos Post, chapter 9 of Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry (Magic Dragon Multimedia).

• Lord Dunsany: The Potency of Words and the Wonder of Things, essay by Angelee Sailer Anderson.

Chess Problem by Lord Dunsany

• Dunsany's Chess, discussion at The Chess Variants Page

• Dunsany's Game, a poem by Keith Allen Daniels about Dunsany's chess variation

Recent and Notable Publications

• Lord Dunsany, The Collected Jorkens (Night Shade Books, 2004, 3 vols.) Edited with Introduction by S.T. Joshi, Preface by Edward Plunkett, the 20th Baron of Dunsany, Foreword by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. A handsome, new three-volume hardcover edition brings together for the first time all of the beloved "tall tales" of Jorkens. Note: vol I. is out of print. Order from Night Shade Books.
• Lord Dunsany, The Pleasures of a Futuroscope. Edited by S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003). His last major work, previously unpublished! Order from Hippocampus Press.
• Arthur C. Clarke and Lord Dunsany, A Correspondence 1945-56, ed. Keith Allen Daniels (Palo Alto: Anamnesis Press, 1998). Dunsany's letters, written in flowing cursive with a quill pen, are reproduced throughout the text.

Solution to Above Chess Problem

• f6 (P x P e.p.) More problems by Lord Dunsany