Search Results for: leiber

Vampires, Frozen Worlds, and Gambling With the Devil: The Best of Fritz Leiber

Comments 5 comments

In my last post I reviewed The Best of Stanley Weinbaum, the first volume in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series. In this one I’ll review the second in the series, The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974). The introduction was done by the excellent sci-fi/fantasy author Poul Anderson (1926-2001). The cover was by Dean Ellis (1920-2009), though a later 1979 printing (see below) has a cover by Michael Herring (1947-). Fritz Leiber is probably best known for his Fafhrd and Grey…

Read More Read More

Dual Structures in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Stories and Robin Wayne Bailey’s Swords against the Shadowland

Comments 11 comments

Recently I completed my reading of all of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. After I had put down the second or fourth collection (this depends on how you approach the editions from White Wolf, which collected the books doubly in single volumes, and these are the publications with which I began my survey), I made some faintly denigrating comment on Goodreads (if I remember it correctly), something about the quality of these stories being like flies caught in…

Read More Read More

Lust, Women, and the Devil: Seven Decades of Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife

Comments 18 comments

There are a lot of fascinating things you can learn about 20th Century America — and America today — by being a compulsive paperback collector. Seriously. It’s like being a Cultural Anthropologist. Let’s take a look at Fritz Leiber’s first novel, Conjure Wife. In fact, it’s a near perfect example. The book has been reprinted around a dozen times by roughly as many publishers over the last 70 years, and each time the cover art and marketing copy tell you as…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Night Monsters by Fritz Leiber

Comments 12 comments

Night Monsters is an interesting case study in book collecting, as least for me. It was originally published in 1969 as part of an Ace Double set, with a moody but otherwise fairly unremarkable cover by Jack Gaughan (see below). The subtitle Ace put on the collection was “A new collection of the weird, the wonderful, and the macabre,” which was certainly accurate, if a little pedestrian. I bought a copy 25 years ago. Never read it. It shared a…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Best of Fritz Leiber

Comments 19 comments

And so we come to Fritz Leiber, in our continuing exploration of Lester del Rey’s Classic Library of Science Fiction series. The Best of Fritz Leiber, published in 1974, was the second in the line, following The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum. Unlike Weinbaum and many of the authors who would follow him, Leiber was well known — even a star — to contemporary SF readers in 1974, thanks chiefly to his popular Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books. Which…

Read More Read More

Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Comments 6 comments

Over at Tor.com, Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode continue with their thoughtful and entertaining tour through Gary Gygax’s famous Appendix N, the library of fantasy and SF titles referenced in the back of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. In the past few weeks, they’ve covered Fritz Leiber and Edgar Rice Burroughs — proving once again that they can write these columns faster than I can keep up. So we’ll play catch-up today. Here’s what Mordicai says about Leiber, author of the…

Read More Read More

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Part 2: The Fritz Leiber Novelization

Comments 3 comments

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966) By Fritz Leiber, from a Screenplay by Clair Huffaker I have never watched a movie and then immediately felt an urge to “Read the Jove Paperback” (or whatever publisher released the tie-in). Movie novelizations are marketing after-thoughts and I think most readers pick them up as after-thoughts as well. A wanderer in a bookstore might spot a paperback copy of Blockbuster Film You Kinda Enjoyed and think to herself, “Hey, this might be…

Read More Read More

Art of the Genre: Looking Back at Old Readings with Neil and Fritz Leiber

Comments 5 comments

Neil Gaiman and I have a strange relationship, that being that we have no relationship whatsoever. That said, I take full responsibility for our lack of communication as the first time I turned my nose up at speaking privately with Neil was back in 1993 at the Diamond Comic Distributors convention in Atlanta. So there I was, two floors above the off-entry lounge and looking over a railing when Neil, in his usual black, walked into the empty square couches…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Girl With the Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber

Comments 16 comments

Sometimes it seems that every time a new sword & sorcery novel appears, a publicist automatically slaps “comparable to Fritz Leiber!” on the cover. I’ll tell you why: it works. When Karen Burnham at SF Signal noted that Tim Pratt’s latest Pathfinder novel Liar’s Blade had done “an excellent job of capturing the spirit” of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, I bought it immediately. A fantasy novel with the charm and style of Fritz Leiber’s great adventures? Where’s my credit…

Read More Read More

Art of the Genre: Leiber, Mignola, and Graphic Novels

Comments 2 comments

In 1991 I wasn’t a fan of the Mike Mignola. To be frank, I actually couldn’t stand his artwork, but again I was twenty and my taste in art leaned much toward the polished standard and less toward the truly talented. At that time I also wasn’t much of a reader. Sure, I read almost every day, taking in as much fantasy as I could, but for the most part it was also commercially driven stuff that in the final…

Read More Read More