Lord Dunsany earned literary fame through his otherworldly short stories. This book compiles fifty-one of them, without a seeming theme except that they're extremely short-sometimes as short as a few paragraphs. The stories range from morality tales, to dreamlike vignettes, to gloomy prophecies told in a foreboding voice. A thread of bleak humor sometimes runs through them, like with much of Dunsany's literary output.

Fifty-One Tales was published simultaneously in England and America, with each edition featuring a story that the other did not. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the ordering of the American edition, and includes the story that was only published in the English edition, bringing the total number of stories in this edition to fifty-two.

Readers who enjoy brief, imaginative fiction that blends whimsy with melancholy will find each of these miniature tales a small door into Dunsany's singular imagination.

The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)