Sunday 28 June 2009

Charles de Lint II

I have recently ordered a few books by him that my bookstore never stocked and I am beginning to understand a few things about him better...

This is a man who has a story and when e has it, he has to let it out. The story is allowed to be itself. It isn't shortened or lengthened to make it fit a publishers desire. Because of this his stories are often published by different publishers.

The ones I have read previously are full length adult books. They fall into two types, early works and later works. As he has developed, his full length adult books have become more complex and often are now told from multiple viewpoints.

It seems that full length adult works are not so much where he has been recently. He has been exploring writing for young adults. The main difference in these books are that the main characters are younger and they live the lives of younger people. The stories themselves are just as engaging....

So story length... Some stories are just short. They get published in all sorts of odd places but as a respected author with a little money behind him now, he is able to be true to the stories themselves. Many of the shorter ones are first published in chapbooks with beautiful (I imagine) artwork to accompany them and eventually they are gathered into a collection.

Some stories make short books such as most of the ones I have read recently. They are beautiful....

I guess if you have some idea of what you are getting it helps...

Soooo..... (not exhaustive!)

Early adult books
Longer
Moonheart
Greenmantle
Yarrow
The Little Country

Shorter
Wolf Moon
Jack of Kinrowan (contains two shorter stories)
The Dreaming Place

Collections
Triskell Tales

Young Adult Books
Longer
The Blue Girl
Little Grrrl Lost

Shorter
Dingo

Later Adult Books
Longer
Forests of the Heart
Memory and Dream
Someplace to be Flying

Shorter
Not sure! Have a lot of the later stuff to get...

Collections
Not sure... I think most of his later short stories are waiting being put into collections...

There are some collections but I am not sure which ones are later and earlier... (probably a mixture...)
Moonlight and Vines
Dreams Underfoot
The Ivory and the Horn

3 comments:

  1. I've got two waiting for me....sitting on my table, taunting me...but someone loaned me a set of three books to read and I feel obligated to read them first so that I can give them back in a timely fashion.....that's from the Book Worshippers Rede I think....;)

    Thanks for the list...I can work my way through it now....;)

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  2. I can so understand that... Always seems rude to just sit on someone else's books....

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  3. wow- SO MANY. I have read moonlight and vines, and didn't quite like it... i wasn't a fan of the repetitive short stories- same theme, different characters.
    thank you for putting this together though- as I have been a little nervous buying another book- i want a novel, not a collection- and your list here will help me know the difference! (for some reason the blurb on the back of moonlight and vines didn't "warn" me haha. probably wasn't reading closely enough!)

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