Set upon a nameless island near contemporary Bali, this lovely, enthralling story is told with the deceptive simplicity of a fable, and written in clear, enchanting prose. Madai, a young man born into a fishing family, discovers a moonstone amulet of the bird god Garuda, who introduces him to the spirit world and enable him to become a great healer. But he also finds himself tempted by the evil of the sorceress Rangda, who offers a path of power and riches. In the face of sudden losses and terrible grief, what choice will Madai ultimately make?

The story moves effortlessly between the everyday world of the island, with its occasional Western tourists, and the mystic world of spirits, demons and gods. Especially wonderful are the descriptions of Madai's voyages to the undersea realm of the Nagas, his flight to a moon of myth, and his journey to the mountain at the center of the universe in the company of Hanuman the Monkey-King:

"The army of forest creatures reached the shore of the island, and paused on a narrow beach ringed with fluttering coco-palms. The frothy ocean looked like purple jade in the moonlight. Madai wondered where they would go, for monkeys have no power to fly to other realms. Then the white monkey made a running leap and vaulted into a giant somersault. It was all Madai could do to cling to the coarse hair of his neck as they whizzed through the air. They hurtled across the water--a vast distance, and landed in a desolate range of gleaming iron mountains, where the air was thin and nothing grew in the rusty dust. ...Another leaping somersault, and they landed on the slopes of glowing copper mountains as the monkey grew even bigger. Another leap across endless black waters, and they stood among silver mountains that shone with their own light, for there was no longer any moon or stars in the airless black overhead... Another hurtling somersault, and they landed among bright golden mountains that glimmered like morning sunlight. The great monkey bellowed a great whoop and made another great leap, and landed on the slopes of a mountain so high that its peak could never be seen. The jagged boulders on the hillsides were made of precious stones--turguoise and jade, amethyst, ruby and lapis lazuli--that flashed in the crystalline light of a very young sun. They had reached the mountain in the center of the universe..."

Read this wonderful book! It's worth searching to find -- most highly recommended!

This book is just so neat! It can be used as a toy or decoration! The book opens to form a circle with a lot of the Hogwarts rooms featured in GREAT DETAIL. It's an interesting alternative to reading all about Harry Potter and Hogwarts School, you can actually see another visual representation of what J.K. Rowling invented. It would make a great/unique present for the Harry Potter fan in your life.

I have read these books and they are exciting for me.They are too good and I want to read the next book fast. I can't wait to read it.

Hello my name is nathalia. I love this movie and Im reading the books,I dont speak english soo im reading the book in espanich.Im going to buy the books are in english but I thing Harry Potter is a good book.My mother said this book is important because when the children read it the now what is the magic.I think is a good book because when I haved 6 years old(now I have 12)my mother said me all we do is magic ex:the rain is magic and when we are crying... and the magic is a part of our life.MY father is going to buy me
all the books of H.P I want to talk with daniel radcliffe because I want to ask him some questions about the movie and I want to now how is him.I think H.p is the best book in the world.good bye! thank for read this.

Davidson's quirky stories are a delight to read and reread. Well worth the investment and a worthy supplement to The Avram Davidson Treasury & The Avram Davidson Investigations. One hopes that the Jake Limekiller stories will be collected soon and that an expanded volume of Adventures In Unhistory is next on the list of publication.

The Other Nineteenth Century is the third recent hardcover collection of a selection of Avram Davidson's short fiction, after The Avram Davidson Treasury (1998) and The Investigations of Avram Davidson (1999). Needless to say this is very welcome -- perhaps a reissue of the complete Eszterhazy stories (rumoured to be in the works), and a first collection of the complete Limekiller stories, and maybe one more collection of excellent leftover pieces would be nice. This collection is theoretically of stories set in some version or other of the 19th Century, though a few stories are actually set in the 20th Century, and one or two may be set in the 18th or earlier. But no point quibbling.

The collection is marvelous. It displays Davidson's trademark wonderfully discursive prose, and his autodidact-style erudition, and his deep interest in the nooks and crannies of history. The stories span pretty much Davidson's whole career. Among the best: "What Strange Stars and Skies", about a virtuous do-gooder woman ministering to people in the slums of London who runs afoul of "that unspeakably evil Eurasian, Motilal Smith". "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire" aka "The Price of a Charm", about a man in the early part of this century deciding whether to buy a love charm or a hunting charm -- with significant results. "The Montavarde Camera" is a spooky story about a man with a nagging wife who buys the title camera only to learn its terrible power. The rather late "Twenty-Three", in which we slowly learn the horrible secret of an old family. Another late story, "El Vilvoy de las Islas", about a strange man living on a remote South African island. One of the last (perhaps it was the last) Eszterhazy stories, "The Odd Old Bird", more of a jape than anyhing. "Dragon Skin Drum", a dark story about two American servicemen in China, and Mao's revolution, and the ignorance of Westerners. And so on, and so on ... excellent excellent stuff.

Avram Davidson has written in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, mystery (he wrote several Ellery Queen stories)and history. The short stories in THE OTHER NINETEENTH CENTURY bring fantasy and history together as the author imagines events and instances in the 19th century that got nudged onto a different path. Such things as the American Revolution being a bit too successful , who really killed Lizzie Borden's parents and why or dining on an extinct species. Davidson does not have to create some outlandish speculation to make his tales work. The beauty of them is that it just takes a little bump to come up with something different. In the end its really great fun and you'll be wishing there was more.

I hate some of the stories in this book; the remainder leave me gibbering with awestruck, overwhelmed delight. The specific stories a reader might revile or adore (or both) will vary. It's a huge, manifold collection of shorts by one of the best writers in English from...

OK, I'm hesitant to say, "the last century" or "the century recently passed", partly because that's awfully goofy, and partly because I'm not near well-read enough to make such claims with authority. I'm gonna say it anyway. I stumbled upon a copy of a long out of print and svelter collection of Davidson's work (Or All The Seas With Oysters...) at fourteen and I've never been quite the same. He's not the writer whose works I wish I could have written: he is the writer whose works I would have wished I could have written had I been the writer I wished I could have been.

(we see why a writer I am not, Yoda knowingly says)

Davidson had a dear whimsy, a weariness, and a bite that was, dare I say it, very Jewish. When I (re)read his stories I feel as if I (an agnostic Gentile) have magically been allowed to understand & overhear the Yiddish folk yarns the kindly, crusty grandfather spins for the kids while the middle generation shouts in the background.

Davidson wrote as well as Singer. Perhaps better, at his best. No small praise; I know what I am claiming. Do not allow my muddy writing dissuade any reader from buying and luxuriating in this important collection.

As a long-term reader of science fiction and an admirer of the writings of Avram Davidson the publication of this particular book was, for me, a noteworthy event. I was able to renew my acquaintance with some of the delightful stories I had first read ten to twenty-five years ago. Each story is preceded by a thoughtful introduction by author friends of the late Mr. Davidson. I found these short essays generally very helpful since most of the writers maintained a correspondence with AD and could provide personal insights and biographical data related to the stories. The 38 stories are grouped chronologically by the decade in which they were published; Fifties to Nineties. I noticed that the excellent Ray Bradbury afterward had been used as an introduction to another out-of-print AD collection, Strange Seas and Shores, Doubleday, 1971. My only grouse is that I wish the editors had included a listing of the titles of AD books, novels and short story collections. Thank you editors Silverberg and Davis, a beautiful book and a fitting tribute to "one of the finest short story writers ever to use the English language"...Robert Silverberg.

Avram Davidson died in 1993. He was, as so often said, one of the great originals. His writing was elegant and complex: always adapted to the voices of his narrators and characters, always at some level humorous even when telling a dark story. He was one of those writers whose stories were always enjoyable just for wallowing in the prose: for its sprung rhythms and fine, out of the way, images. And his stories were enjoyable for wallowing in the atmosphere: for its evocation of exotic place-times, whether it be late '50s New York City or early '70s Belize or turn of the century Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania or far future Barnum's Planet, and for its evocation of exotic world-views, and the packing and repacking of wondrous, seemingly inconsequential (though rarely truly so) tidbits of history and unhistory into the backgrounds. And his best stories took these characteristics and harnessed them in the service of well-honed themes or (sometimes) clever plots.

This collection is organized as a retrospective, with the selections placed in order of first appearance. This is, I think, an excellent choice for any collection of this magnitude in that it allows the interested reader to try to track evolutions in the writer's style and thematic concerns over time. (I would suggest, perhaps, that the older Davidson was more prone to explorations of esoterica than the younger, and less often openly angry. Throughout his career he was ready with the comic touch, even in the midst of a darker context. His style was always special, but perhaps grew more involved as he grew older.)

Another feature of this collection is the introductions, by many of Davidson's friends: mostly fellow authors and editors, but also his bibliographer, Henry Wessels, and his son. This represent a significant chunk of "value added": they include some personal reminiscences, some analyses of the work, some elegiac passages. I'll add that the book is nicely and elegantly put together, and that editors Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis (as well as Tor in-house editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden) deserve thanks and applause for working to bring us this book.

But, of course, there is no Avram Davidson Treasury without the stories Avram Davidson wrote, of which 38 are assembled here. And the stories are the only real reason to buy and exult in this book. I'm a big Davidson fan, make no mistake: I come to this review not at all objective, and having reading all but a few of the stories already, many of them several times. At least one, "The Sources of the Nile", is firmly on my personal list of the best SF stories of all time.

There is not space to discuss the delightful stories herein contained. Suffice it to say that this collection is big enough, and varied enough, to whet the appetite of any reader whose ear can be tuned to catch the strains of Davidson's voice. And even this large collection inevitably leaves out many fine stories (the other Eszterhazy and Limekiller stories, "The Lord of Central Park", many more), to say nothing of his engaging collection of essays, Adventures in Unhistory, in which he discusses at length many obscure legends, and their possible bases in fact. So buy it and read it, and very likely you will find yourself searching out the out of print and small press books which house the rest of his work (for now), and very likely too you will be hoping with the rest of us Davidson lovers for a few more treasures to be dug from his papers.

Beautifully structured, ages well, satisfying on its own yet leaves you with a desire to sample more. The Boss in the Wall, completed by his ex-wife and partner, Grania Davis, contains many of the best qualities of Davidson's writing. It is filled with wonderful bits of knowledge you won't find collected anywhere else; each piece adds to the enjoyment of the story; the reader walks a few pages listening to a terrific story-teller and then - BANG - she is in the middle of an involving tale without being entirely sure how she got there. Read - read - read.

The late Avram Davidson is well-represented by this collection edited by his former wife, Grania Davis, and Richard Lupoff. I have previously read and thought of Davidson as a science fiction writer, but this book demonstrates that he was a master of the mystery as well. In fact, these stories transcend their genre and desearve to be praised in the broader context of short story literature. The 13 stories were originally published between 1964 and 1992.

While the primary locale for the stories is his native New York City, Davidson also uses New England, Memphis, Cyprus, "La Banana" and Mexico. They range back in time as far as the 1840's. More remarkable than their diverse settings, though, is how economically Davidson creates a sense of time, place, and mood -- with a just a handful of descriptive wordstrokes. The heat in a chinese laundry becomes palpable when Davidson describes a washman wiping his hands and bare torso before he folds an ironed shirt so that his persperation won't drip on the garment.

Few of the stories' twists are predictable -- even for an old mystery hand. I finished each story smiling at the inventiveness of the plot and enriched by the esoteric pieces of information (like the origins of and differences between sea island and nanking cotton) that dot Davidson's writing like raisins in a scone.

This book has arranged the plants according to the color of their flowers, the most obvious characteristic. The book is sectioned into areas for all colors (white, yellow, blue, pink, red, etc.). If a plant flowers in more than one color, it is shown in each color area. The color photos show excellent examples of the plant. The only drawback to using this book would be if the plant is not flowering. Other plant characteristics are listed with the pictures, but it would be difficult to locate a specific species if the flower color was unknown.