âNone strikes the note of cosmic horror as well as Clark Ashton Smith. In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer.â
Not just any fantasy, horror, and science fiction author could impress H. P. Lovecraft into calling him âunexcelled by any other writer, dead or livingâ or compel Fritz Lieber to employ the worthy term sui generis ....
In addition to being a prolific and innovative poet in his own right, Clark Ashton Smith was a noted translator of French and Spanish poetry. Teaching himself French in the mid-1920s, Smith undertook the ambitious program of translating the entirety of...
Included in this volume are four tales by Clark Ashton Smith: "The Empire of the Necromancers," "The Enchantress of Sylaire," "The Invisible City," and "The Mother of Toads."
In 1911 the poet George Sterling was the focus of a thriving literary community in California that included Jack London, Mary Austin, and the aged Ambrose Bierce. When he received a letter and some manuscript poems from a young writer in Auburn named Clar...
Clark Ashton Smith was a prodigy, who wrote Arabian Nights novels in his mid-teens and was heralded as a major voice in American poetry by the time he was nineteen. In one frantic burst in the middle 1930s, he wrote nearly a hundred strange, wondrous,...