“We were on a panel, the two of us, and we had five or 10 minutes to get used to each other,” said Beagle. I’d first heard of Beagle through Gaiman, who has praised Beagle’s work, and the kind words went both ways as Beagle recalled their first meeting at a convention. As a kid, I’d gotten most of my books this way, pawing through paperbacks at rummage sales, yard sales and Friends of the Library events.īeagle, who recently regained control of his intellectual property, is publishing a new book in April, “The Way Home: Two Novellas from the World of The Last Unicorn,” and in May he’s bringing out the two-volume, “The Essential Peter Beagle.” I’m told there’s going to be a new edition of “The Innkeeper’s Song,” and in the UK this fall, there will be a new edition of “A Fine and Private Place” with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. “There is no telling what might show up,” the website had promised, and I wondered if they were referring to me as I shook off the rain.īut as I entered and saw the tables and tables full of old paperbacks, I knew I’d made the right decision.

I’d never been, but my colleague Steven Rosenberg had tipped me to it.

I was on a mission to visit the Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Collectors Show at the Glendale Civic Auditorium, which promised “tens of thousands of vintage paperbacks” along with authors Denise Hamilton, Tim Powers, Gary Phillips, Larry Niven and more. While the smart money was on a day of pajamas, Sunday papers and hot beverages, I’d decided to leave the great indoors for a cold downpour. But this time it had more to do with avoiding puddles and keeping my clothes from soaking through. This is a question I often ask myself, rain or not. This is a book no fantasy reader should miss Beagle argues brilliantly the need for magic in our lives and the folly of forgetting to dream.The rain came down hard last Sunday, and I wondered whether I’d made the right decision. Ahead wait King Haggard and his Red Bull, who banished unicorns from the land. They are joined by Molly Grue, who believes in legends despite her experiences with a Robin Hood wannabe and his unmerry men.

She meets Schmendrick the Magician-whose magic seldom works, and never as he intended-when he rescues her from Mommy Fortuna's Midnight Carnival, where only some of the mythical beasts displayed are illusions. The unicorn discovers that she is the last unicorn in the world, and sets off to find the others. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. Beagle writes a shimmering prose-poetry, the voice of fairy tales and childhood: The Last Unicorn is one of the true classics of fantasy, ranking with Tolkien's The Hobbit, Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

The last unicorn paperback