Vintage Treasures: The Barbarians Anthology Series
There’s been some good discussion of Sword & Sorcery on the BG blog of late, from Brian Murphy’s excellent list of “A Half-Dozen Swords And Sorcery Short Stories Worth Your Summer Reading Time, and Howard Andrew Jones’s skillful examination of the writing technique of the genre’s patriarch, “Under the Hood with Robert E. Howard,” to Joe Bonadonna’s warm reminiscence of the very best S&S of his youth, “How I Met Your Cimmerian (and other Barbarian Swordsmen).”
I thought I was pretty well educated in Sword & Sorcery; but it’s the sign of a rich and vibrant genre that it can still surprise you after decades of collecting.
That’s exactly what happened when I found the artifact at left, buried deep in a paperback science fiction collection I recently purchased.
Barbarians was a major S&S retrospective anthology published by Signet in 1986. It was edited by Robert Adams, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles Waugh, and contained stories by Fritz Leiber, Fred Saberhagen, Andre Norton, Karl Edward Wagner, and many more. It’s a thick paperback original with 13 short stories.
And no, I’d never seen a copy before — or its sequel. Here’s the back cover copy:
From a beautiful huntress with glittering eyes and a killing kiss to mighty Conan’s struggle in a deadly place beyond magic… from a distant planet fated to do battle with the forgotten past to primeval swordsmen pledged to protect a besieged land — here are tales of titanic strength and unearthly courage, of savage warriors facing incredible challenges in the far-flung realms of the imagination.
Sounds pretty good. Not entirely sure how this one escaped me for all these years, but I’m glad I’ve stumbled across it now.
Fans of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings should be thrilled that The Hobbit, originally planned as two feature films, 
To start, this is the debut novel from my favorite author, Jonathan Carroll. First published in 1980, The Land of Laughs has enjoyed a sporadic publication history (like most of Carroll’s books), going in and out of print. Unlike a lot of debut novels, the themes and voice found in his later books is already present and strong, making this an excellent place to start if you’ve never read anything by him.
A few months ago, I started an irregular series of posts about Romanticism and fantasy. I wanted to talk about the significance of Romanticism, the literary movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to the development of fantasy fiction. For a variety of reasons, I’d been distracted from continuing those posts for a while; I want to return to them now. The original inspiration for this series of posts came when 
“But my memories of that great tragedy are not all sad. There was high adventure, there was noble fighting; and in the end there was — but perhaps you would like to hear about it.”