Winds from the East: A Talbot Mundy Reader- Novellas, Stories, Poems & Articles.

Compiled by Brian Taves

While many Mundy novels are still widely read today, most of his stories, poems, and essays have been unknown for more than fifty years. This anthology corrects this omission.

It reprints many of his key “shorter” writings in a single “reader,” edited by Mundy biographer Brian Taves. It is an excellent introduction to the work of this seminal author—and the wondrous world of his wisdom and imagination.

"Like sunlight through latticed windows, letting down delicate ladders to higher space, Talbot Mundy’s worlds of illusion entice with beauty and the promise of illumination. His fiction slips out of time’s westbound traffic and tours exotic landscapes. From the stupendous heights of the Himalayas down to the Levant and the planet’s lowest terrain, Mundy writes with what Keats calls 'the power to see as a god sees.'

"I think, for example, of Jimgrim’s analysis of ethnic tension in the Middle East of the 1920s, which delivers insight into today’s Palestine. The physical world reverberates in Mundy's stories, and geography often provides the interconnectedness of people and events ­- always with the author as a collaborative observer.

"The deep mystery of being is Talbot Mundy's passion, and he uses spiritual rapture to occult every story with a dreamlike mood of revelation. Text for him is psychic transfiguration and initiation. Personal valor, his medium."

A. A. Attanasio, author of Radix and Wyvern