<div><div><i>* Where did Sinbad Sail?</i><br /><i>* Who Fired the</i> <i>Phoenix</i><i>?</i><br /><i>* The Boy Who Cried Werewolf</i><br /><i>* The Great Rough Beast</i><br /><i>* Postscript on Prester John</i><br /><i>* The Secret of Hyperborea</i><br /><i>* What Gave All Those Mammoths Cold Feet?</i><br /><br />And many more--fictional? authoritative? fantastic? deadpan?--investigations into the real, the true...and the things that should be true<br /><br />PREFACE BY PETER S. BEAGLE<br />ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE BARR<br /><br /><i>"Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, nobody knows what a wombat looks like and everyone knows what a dragon looks like."</i><br /><br />Not a novel, not a book of short stories, <i>Adventures in Unhistory</i> is a book of the fantastic--a compendium of magisterial examinations of Mermaids, Mandrakes, and Mammoths; Dragons, Werewolves, and Unicorns; the Phoenix and the Roc; about places such as Sicily, Siberia, and the Moon; about heroic, sinister, and legendary persons such as Sindbad, and Aleister Crowley, and Prester John; and--revealed at last--the Secret of Hyperborea.<br /><br />The facts are here, the foundations behind rumors, legends, and the imaginations of generations of tale-spinners. But far from being dry recitals, these meditations, or lectures, or deadpan prose performances are as lively, as crazily inventive, as witty as the best fiction of the author, a writer praised by Gardner Dozois as "one of the great short story writers of our times."<br /><br />Who, on the subject of Dragons, could write coldly, dispassionately, guided only by logic? Certainly not Avram Davidson. Certain facts, <i>these</i> facts, deserve more than recitation; they deserve flourish, verve, gusto, <i>style--</i>the late, great Avram Davidson&amp;#39;s unique voice. That prose which, in the words of Peter S. Beagle&amp;#39;s Preface to this volume, "cries out to be read aloud."</div></div>