Lord Dunsany is best known as a favorite of other writers--such as H P Lovecraft, who counted him second only to Edgar Allan Poe as an influence on his work. Lovecraft readers will be interested to know that two ideas Lovecraft got from Dunsany were (1) an artificial pantheon of gods and other entities (Dunsany's Pegana Mythos predates Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos) and (2) a cosmic vision of man as living on a tiny island of order amid a vast and chaotic universe. Perhaps, as S T Joshi writes in the introduction to this collection, "It is now time to appreciate Dunsany in his own right as a master fantasist whose prodigal imagination was equaled by few, whose prose style was a model of affecting simplicity, and whose bold philosophical vision remains challenging to the present day." This edition includes the complete stories from The Gods of Pegana (1905) and Time and the Gods (1906), plus three other stories belonging to the Pegana cycle. --Fiona Webster