Why am I passionate about this?
The world is a strange place and life can feel very weird at times, and I have long had the suspicion that a truly imaginative and inventive comedy has more to say about reality, albeit in an exaggerated and oblique way, than much serious gloomy work. Comedy has a wider range than people often think. It doesn’t have to be sweet, light, and uplifting all the time. It can be dark, unsettling and suspenseful, or profoundly philosophical. It can be political, mystical, paradoxical. There are humorous fantasy novels and short story collections that have been sadly neglected or unjustly forgotten, and I try to recommend those books to readers whenever I can.
Rhys' book list on underrated offbeat humorous fantasy
Why did Rhys love this book?
This book is luminous. The world of everyday reality and the world of magic overlap and interact and influence each other. There are philosophers and gods, leprechauns and (once again) taking animals, and women wiser than all of them put together. The plot concerns a crime that never occurred and various types of bizarre trouble that result from it. Adventures follow adventures in a picaresque manner, not all of them necessarily connecting with any other, a free and easy approach that gives great fluidity to the whimsical narrative.
1 author picked The Crock of Gold as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The Crock of Gold (1912), one of three original novels by James Stephens, is a work only a master of fiction and folklore could imagine. Taking up the major philosophical and psychological concerns of the early-twentieth century-over a decade before works by T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, among others, would cement literary Modernism's place in history-Stephens' novel is a groundbreaking and important work.
The text centers on the Philosopher and his wife, the Thin Woman, who undergo a series of journeys and harrowing trials. Faced with danger both human and divine, the two characters are forced to weather…