Clark Ashton Smith
Finally collected in a signature single standalone edition, Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne is a testament of temptation and transcendence: corrupt sellswords, vengeful sorceresses, and time-warping dissident priests all play a part in these tales set in the louche groves of Smith's decadent imagination.
Printed in the style of the erstwhile Ballantine Books Adult Fantasy Series, Averoigne concludes the iconic five-book cycle begun by editor Lin Carter in 1970 and left unfinished until now.
"No other world [of Smith's] feels so bound to actual human endeavors, to the concrete ruins of landscape and lore, to humanity groping toward a sense of itself. What Averoigne offers us is an affective history, a surrender of the imagination not to history’s facts, but to its ambience, its desires." - Kit Schlüter