Short Fiction

We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation ? Clark Ashton Smith began his literary career as a poet and author of fiction. By the late 1920s he started writing fantasy and science fiction stories for pulp magazines; after his death, many of his better-known weird tales were published as collections, making them available to a larger audience and ultimately cementing them as his claim to fame. While Smith wrote a few more realistic stories without any supernatural elements earlier in his career, the stories in this collection mostly involve weird fiction. "The End of the Story" involves pagan entities and the fictional location of Averoigne; "Marooned in Andromeda" has the protagonists exploring an uncharted planet. Smith also wrote fiction featuring demons and other uncanny beings, like "The Abominations of Yondo." His frequent correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft led to a literary friendship that lasted until the latter's death, with the cross-pollination of influences clear in each of their respective bodies of work. The stories collected here are the ones known to have entered the U.S. public domain, ordered by their date of original publication. Clark Ashton Smith (died 1961) was a significant literary figure of the 20th century. Their work has endured across generations and continues to be read and studied worldwide. Fantastical literature has always allowed writers to explore human truths through the lens of the impossible and the magical. Short Fiction draws on mythology, folklore, and pure invention to construct a world that illuminates our own.