In The Land of Dreams: Lord Dunsany’s At the Edge of the World by Fletcher Vredenburgh I didn’t read any of Dunsany’s stories until long after I had encountered several of his direct literary descendants. I discovered H.P. Lovecraft on the Stapleton Library shelves, Clark Ashton Smith on the foxed pages of old anthologies, and Jack Vance in dad’s boxes of books in the attic. I didn’t know their style had been presaged by Dunsany’s stories of mysteriously abandoned cities, phantasmagorical river journeys, and strange, forgotten gods. I knew some of Lovecraft’s earlier stories, especially his short novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927), were called “Dunsanian,” but it is only in more recent times I’ve read Dunsany’s own words. Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (1878-1957), veteran of the Boer War and WWI, at one time had four well-received plays performed on Broadway simultaneously. Associated with the Irish Literary Revival, he was a patron of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and was friendly with William Butler Yeats, George William Russell and other movement luminaries. He was a well-known and respected author, known primarily to a small coterie of devotees of the fantastic and for the stories and novels that comprise a lesser part of his collected works. Dunsany published his first collection, The Gods of Pegāna, in 1905. He would complete several other collections of his short fantasy works before turning his attention toward drama and novels. Later, he would devote much of his time to a lengthy series of “club stories” featuring the raconteur, Jorkens. After his death in 1957, his work slowly faded from popular memory. It was only with Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy series that Dunsany was restored to the public’s eye. Many of his works were reprinted for the first time in fifty years. I bring up all this about the ephemeralness of Dunsany’s writing success because so much of his fantasy stories seem to be about impermanence and our constant effort to re-attain things lost to fading memories and time. It was something that seems to have bothered him greatly and he clung fiercely to the accolades of his younger days. At the Edge of the World (1970) is the first of three collections of Dunsany’s stories Carter edited. It includes stories from various original collections of his stories....