The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances

by Peter S. Beagle

Book Overview

2004 Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire winner

Peter S. Beagle's The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances celebrates the beginning of Beagle's extraordinary career as a fantasist. Widely available for the first time and with a new preface by the author, this delightful book contains seven short stories and three essays by one of the most popular authors in the history of the fantasy field.

The Last Unicorn,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1892391090
• ISBN13: 9781892391094
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Tachyon Publications
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful stories...

I hadn't read that many Peter S. Beagle's short stories, though I had read his other novels. The second story in this collection, "Come Lady Death" sent a shiver up my spine when I got to the end, and the book would be worth reading just for this alone. The other stories are also charming and lovely, but towards the end (I especially did not care for "Julie's Unicorn", but I didn't like "Folk of the Air", either) the book sort of peters out.

A must-buy for any serious Peter S. Beagle fan

"The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances" is a wonderful mixture of old and new works by Peter S. Beagle, several of which have never been collected in book form before. It contains reprints of his two most famous short stories: "Come Lady Death" and "Lila the Werewolf" along with two early stories published while he was in college and never reprinted before ("Telephone Call" and "My Daughter's Name is Sarah"). There are also three non-fiction essays written back in the 60s for magazines like "Holiday" and "The Saturday Evening Post". There are two newer stories that are reprinted here: "The Naga" (first printed in 1992 in "After the King" edited by Martin H. Greenberg) and "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros". The first of the two is a solid piece of fantasy writing, but "Professor Gottesman" is a true gem, a wonderfully loving and off-beat story about a bachelor philosophy professor who has a talking rhinoceros (who claims to be a! unicorn) take up residence with him. Gottesman would normally be annoyed at this intrusion, but he discovers the rhino has a first rate mind and loves to discuss philosophy. This was the single story that Beagle wrote for the collection "The Immortal Unicorn" (1995) that he edited. But there is one jewel in this collection that makes this book a must-buy for any serious fan of Peter S. Beagle, and that is a completely new story: "Julie's Unicorn". Here he picks up the story of Joe Farrell (the protagonist in "Lila the Werewolf" and the novel "The Folk of the Air") and Farrell's on-again-off-again girlfriend, Julie Tanikawa. Beagle reunites them several years after the events in "Folk of the Air" and still in Avicenna, California (a thinly disguised version of Berkeley). When the two of them go to visit an art museum on a date, they find a battered 15th century tapestry of a captured unicorn. Julie is so angered by the scene that, without thinking, she uses some of t! he magic given to her by her grandmother on the image. The! magic frees the unicorn, not just from its captivity in the tapestry, but from the tapestry itself. Farrell and Julie catch the now-freed unicorn and smuggle it out of the museum only to face a bigger problem, what do you do with a real living, breathing, kitten-sized unicorn in modern urban California?I've been a fan of Beagle's work for over twenty years now since I first read "The Last Unicorn", and "Julie's Unicorn" is, in my opinion, the best thing he has writing since "The Last Unicorn". There is real magic in this story.