The Gods of Pegāna
cover of The Gods of Pegāna
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| Author | Lord Dunsany |
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| Illustrator | Sidney Sime |
| Cover artist | Sidney Sime |
| Country | UK |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy short stories |
| Publisher | Elkin Mathews, 1905, Pegana Press, 1911 |
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Publication date
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1905 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 94 pp |
| Followed by | Time and the Gods |
The Gods of Pegāna is the first book by Anglo-Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany, published on a commission basis in 1905. The book was reviewed favourably but as an unusual piece. One of the more influential reviews was by Edward Thomas in the London Daily Chronicle.
The book is a series of short stories linked by Dunsany's invented pantheon of deities who dwell in Pegāna. It was followed by a further collection Time and the Gods and by some stories in The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories and in Tales of Three Hemispheres. In 1919 Dunsany told an American interviewer "In The Gods of Pegana I tried to account for the ocean and the moon. I don't know whether anyone else has ever tried that before".
The book contains a range of illustrations by Sidney Sime, the originals of all of which can be seen at Dunsany Castle.
Aside from its various stand-alone editions, the complete text of the collection is included in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy collection Beyond the Fields We Know (1972), in The Complete Pegāna (1998), and in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks omnibus Time and the Gods (2000).
New York Times critic John Corbin described Dunsany's debut collection as "an attempt to create an Olympus of his own and people it with an assemblage of deities, each with a personality and a power over human life acutely conceived and visualized ... To me, [the collection] is autobiography, and all the more self-revealing because it is profoundly unconscious. As an achievement of the imagination", Corbin concluded, "this bible of the gods of Pegana is simply amazing".
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Wikipedia