Tachyon Publications: A Fine & Private Place, Peter S. Beagle


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			Peter S. Beagle

			Visit the Peter S. Beagle website.

	Peter S. Beagle was born in 1939 and raised in the Bronx, just a few blocks from Woodlawn Cemetery, the inspiration for his first novel, A Fine And Private Place. He originally proclaimed he would be a writer when 10 years old: subsequent events have proven him either prescient or even more stubborn than hitherto suspected. Today, thanks to classic works such as The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper's Song, he is acknowledged as America's greatest living fantasy author; and his dazzling abilities with language, characters, and magical storytelling have earned him many millions of fans around the world. In addition to stories and novels he has written numerous teleplays and screenplays, including the animated versions of The Lord Of The Rings and The Last Unicorn, plus the fan-favorite "Sarek" episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He is also a gifted poet, lyricist, and singer/songwriter. In 2007, Beagle won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for his original novelette, "Two Hearts," from The Line Between .

A Fine & Private Place

by Peter S. Beagle

Also by Peter S. Beagle:
The Line Between
The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche

Cover photograph and design by Ann Monn

One of literature's most beautiful works about ghostly times and places. . .told with wit, charm, and a sense of individuality.
-NY Times Book Review

For nineteen years, Jonathan Rebeck has hidden from the world within the confines of the Bronx's Yorkchester Cemetery, making an abandoned mausoleum his secret home. He speaks with the newly dead as they pass from life to wherever spirits truly go, providing them with comfort, an understanding ear, and even the occasional game of chess.

But Mr. Rebeck's reclusive life is soon to be disrupted. An impossible love has blossomed between two ghosts, and Rebeck himself is drawn to a living woman. Helped along by a cynical talking raven and a mysterious cemetery guard, these four souls must learn the true difference between life and death, and make choices that really are forever.

Told with an elegiac wisdom, Peter S. Beagle's first novel is a timeless work of fantasy, imbued with hope and wonder. This updated edition contains the author's final revisions, and stands as the definitive version of an enduring modern classic.

It's a fully-rounded region, this other world of Peter Beagle's imagination.
-Kirkus

Both sepulchral and oddly appealing . . . [Beagle's] ectoplasmic fable has a distinct mossy charm.
-Time

A Fine and Private Place is just as wonderful as I remembered it to be: beautifully written, the characters warmly drawn, the pages filled with conversations that run the gamut of the human condition.... it's a great book in a lovely affordable package.
-The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Beagle has been compared, not unreasonably, with Lewis Carrol and J. R. R. Tolkein, but he stands squarely and triumphantly on his own feet.
-The Saturday Review

Delightful!
-San Francisco Chronicle

A wonderful work of literature...a gem of a novel.
-BookLoons

Over a cold beverage and a hot bowl of chili, Peter Beagle recently told me how he came to write A Fine and Private Place. He was just 19 years old at the time, the length of time that Mr. Rebeck spent in that cemetery. He was working as a counselor at a boys' summer camp. Once the campers were settled for the night there wasn't much for the counselors to do. Those who had sweethearts at the girls' camp across the lake would borrow canoes and paddle across to see them. Peter had no such luck, he told me, so he warmed up his rattly little portable typewriter, cracked open a ream of paper, and starting writing a book. We are all incredibly lucky that Peter had no girlfriend that summer.
-Dick Lupoff, SF Site

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