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Fifty-One Tales is one of the many collections of short stories published by Lord Dunsany. It was first published in both the US and UK in 1915. Almost all of Dunsany's works are short stories but the Fifty-One Tales takes the cake for brevity. Most tales are a page or less and cover such diverse topics as the doing of the barnyard's poultry to the end of the world. While the tales are hardly morbid there is a sense of futility running through most of them. Time returns destroying empires and dragging people from their cradles to their grave and he's now joined by Death to the usual effect. Folly harries the hare, Wind and Fog compete for the destruction of ships, and the Puritan discovers his sins a bit too late. Despite all of that the whimsy and cheer counterbalance it rather nicely.
Here's the fifty-one tales:
The Assignation
Charon
The Death of Pan
The Sphinx at Giza
The Hen
Wind and Fog
The Raft-Builders
The Workman
The Guest
Death and Odysseus
Death and the Orange
The Prayer of the Flower
Time and the Tradesman
The Little City
The Unpasturable Fields
The Worm and the Angel
The Songless Country
The Latest Thing
The Demagogue and the Demi-monde
The Giant Poppy
Roses
The Man With the Golden Ear-rings
The Dream of King Karna-Vootra
The Storm
A Mistaken Identity
The True History of the Hare and the Tortoise
Alone the Immortals
A Moral Little Tale
The Return of Song
Spring In Town
How the Enemy Came to Thlunrana
A Losing Game
Taking Up Picadilly
After the Fire
The City
The Food of Death
The Lonely Idol
The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts)
The Reward
The Trouble in Leafy Green Street
The Mist
Furrow-Maker
Lobster Salad
The Return of the Exiles
Nature and Time
The Song of the Blackbird
The Messengers
The Three Tall Sons
Compromise
What We Have Come To
The Tomb of Pan
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