The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony A listing of the many books in the Xanth "trilogy" by Piers Anthony. Knot Gneiss by Anthony Piers Jumper Cable by Anthony Piers Two To the Fifth by Anthony Piers Air Apparent by Anthony Piers Stork Naked by Anthony Piers Pet Peeve by Anthony Piers Currant Events by Anthony Piers Cube Route by Anthony Piers Up In a Heaval by Anthony Piers Swell Foop by Anthony Piers The Dastard by Anthony Piers Xone Of Contention by Anthony Piers Zombie Lover by Anthony Piers Faun & Games by Anthony Piers Yon Ill Wind by Anthony Piers Roc and A Hard Place by Anthony Piers Geis Of the Gargoyle by Anthony Piers Harpy Thyme by Anthony Piers Demons Don't Dream by Anthony Piers The Color Of Her Panties by Anthony Piers Question Quest by Anthony Piers Isle Of View by Anthony Piers Man From Mundania by Anthony Piers Heaven Cent by Anthony Piers Vale Of the Vole by Anthony Piers
Golem In the Gears by Anthony Piers Crewel Lye by Anthony Piers Dragon On a Pedestal by Anthony Piers Night Mare by Anthony Piers Ogre, Ogre by Anthony Piers Centaur Aisle by Anthony Piers Castle Roogna by Anthony Piers The Source Of Magic by Anthony Piers A Spell For Chameleon by Anthony Piers Since 2005, Biblio has donated over $1 million to fund literacy and educational projects that benefit children in impoverished communities of South America. Through BiblioWorks, a 501(c)3 non-profit, we have built 12 community libraries, trained hundreds of teachers and librarians and changed the lives of tens of thousands of underprivileged children. Every time you purchase a book on Biblio, you are supporting our mission of improving literacy and education at home and abroad. And, if you want to give a little more, be sure to choose to "Round up for Reading" when making your purchase, which will allow you to round up your purchase by a small amount - all of which will go directly to BiblioWorks.
To learn about BiblioWorks and to find out more ways you can help promote literacy and education abroad, click here. Thank you for helping Biblio spread the joys of reading and learning to those in need! A Spell for Chameleon by Anthony This item can be delivered to your selected dispatch location in . A Spell for Chameleon (Magic of Xanth) Esrever Doom (Xanth Novels (Paperback)) The Source of Magic Start reading A Spell for Chameleon (Original Edition) (Xanth) on your Kindle in under a minute. Library Binding: 344 pages 17 x 10.4 x 2.8 cm 1,025,036 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) in Books > Fiction > Fantasy in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy Xanth was the enchanted land where magic ruled--where every citizen had a special spell only he could cast. That is, except for Bink of North Village. He was sure he possessed no magic, and knew that if he didn't find some soon, he would be exiled. According to the Good Magician Humpfrey, the charts said that Bink was as powerful as the King or even the Evil Magician Trent.
Unfortunately, no one could determine its form. Meanwhile, Bink was in despair. If he didn't find his magic soon, he would be forced to leave.... Piers Anthony, sometimes called Pier Xanthony, is the pseudonym of a Mundane character who was born in England in 1934, came to America in 1940, was naturalized in 1958, and moved to Xanth in 1977. His first story was published in 1963, and his first novel, Chthon, in 1967. His first Xanth novel, A Spell for Chameleon, won the August Derleth Fantasy Award as the best novel for 1977, and his fantasy novels began placing on the New York Times bestseller list with Ogre, Ogre. He shifted from writing in pencil to writing on the computer, and Golem in the Gears was his first novel created on the machine; naturally, the computer found its way into Xanth. See all 34 customer reviews Mr. D. A. James See all 34 customer reviews (newest first) on Amazon.co.ukBeing a fan of puns is a must. First read this 20 years ago. Just a good the second time round.
On to the next one now. Exactly what I wanted. Read these books as paperbacks years ago. Decided to read them again in Kindle form. Just as entertaining as I remembered. great book if you like puns a bit childish if you don't great company goods excellent one of the best books i have ever had the pleasure to read! Piers Anthony ALWAYS is a great read, and is my favourite author by far! First in a great and funny series of fantasy books. Can't put any of them down. Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy[This is the first half of what became, unintentionally, a two-part review of Piers Anthony, the Xanth series, and one very forgettable novel. Today we consider Anthony and the sexual politics of his most popular series.] We have an uncomfortable relationship with the Xanth novels here at Pornokitsch Towers. On the one hand, we read and loved the series during our collective innocent youths. On the other hand, they're awfully hard to stomach now that we're gumpy, persnickety adults.
So we circle around them uneasily, equally interested in seeing how they hold up and - well, frankly, how hard they fall down. I specifically chose to revisit Anthony's 1989 novel Man from Mundania for two reasons. I liked the book pretty well, when I last read it, about twenty years ago - but I didn't remember exactly why. I also recall finding it incredibly perplexing - again, without any memory of what, exactly, mystified me about it. Man from Mundania was one of the last Xanth novels I read; in the end, the perplexing overcame the series' likability and I moved on. Rereading the novel brought it all back. Twenty years later, I'm no longer mystified by the novel, and I can see what I liked about it when I was eleven. But I don't like it at all now, for reasons that are equally clear: primarily, Anthony's sexual politics. With his first Xanth novel, 1977's A Spell for Chameleon, Anthony created a fairly typical high-fantasy swords-n-sorcery setting, a romanticized pre-industrial, high-feudal world filled with magic and barbarians and monsters and ghosts and elves and princesses and, y'know, fantasy stuff.
Every human has a single, unique magical talent - one man can fly, another can change the color of his urine at will. These abilities range from the quotidian to the prodigiously powerful, and the country is ruled by those with the highest-calibre talents. Anthony twisted his bog-standard setting by literalizing word-play, filling his fantasy land with puns ranging from the light to the groan-inducing. Night mares, for example, are shadowy horses that bring bad dreams to sleepers, and bread grows on breadfruit trees. Anthony also uses his fantasy setting to comment (usually more groan-inducingly than lightly) on modern life: the hypno-gourd is a squash with a peephole; the peeper becomes hypnotized by the moving images inside the gourd and is rendered incapable of looking away, eventually starving to death (that is, if he doesn't lose his soul while trapped "inside" the uncanny vegetable.) Xanth exists side-by-side with Mundania, the miserable "real world" you and I, dreary Mundanes, inhabit.
For the purposes of this review, I've structured the Xanth series into three "epochs." The novels that make up each epoch are similar in terms of tone and content, and markedly different from those of the other epochs. the first epoch is made up of the first two novels, the second of novels three through nine, and the third from number ten forward. The earliest two Xanth novels, A Spell for Chameleon and The Source of Magic, are fairly standard high fantasy, with dark overtones and exceedingly mature themes. Anthony lightens the series' tone considerably with the third installment, Castle Roogna (1979), ushering in the second epoch, but the books remain essentially conventional high-fantasy fluff, swords-n-punnery without a lot of metanarrative commentary. By Golem in the Gears (1986), however, it's clear that Anthony is gearing up for another stylistic shift (moving into the third epoch). Perhaps in part because he'd become aware that his readership was skewing very young, Anthony began to change his focus and tone, ramping up the metanarrative commentary and using older children and teens as main characters.
As a young reader, it's easy to read Xanth on one level, and one level only - literally. The hypno-gourd isn't a thinly-veiled metaphor for television, but simply another layer in a dense and fascinating fantasy world. So too can Anthony's much-ballyhooed icky sexual politics escape notice; when one isn't reading particularly critically, they're merely another set of rules propping up an interesting make-believe universe. It's no wonder I liked the novels... then. The major problem I have with the Xanth novels now is how Anthony approaches the question of sex in the series. With Xanth, Anthony becomes fantasy's creepy uncle. The sexual politics of his world aren't remotely progressive; indeed, the first Xanth novel is one of the more appallingly sexist things I've ever read.* In the first two epochs, Anthony's female characters are super-sexualized no matter what age, though they're generally toothsome under-eighteens with sexy legs and quick-fire tempers (their intellects range from dumb to "bright").
They bounce and jiggle their way through their narratives, lusted after by every male character. It's gross because women don't really matter except as sex objects, and it's fucking creepy because they're teenagers, for fuck's sake. This how it always works in Xanth; all the young human girls are always super hot, and all male characters want to have sex with them, almost constantly. (Unless they're old or ugly No one wants to have sex with an old woman!) The ethical heroes probably wouldn't take advantage of a woman, but the baddies (evil sorcerers, peasants, barbarians, Mundanes, goblins, demons, etc.), without any sort of ethical hangups, have no problem trying. The result is a series of novels wherein the threat of rape is a constant feature. In the Xanth novels following the tonal shift of Golem in the Gears there is less threatened rape.** But Anthony's problematic sexual politics don't disappear; instead, they too transform. As he decreases the age of the male protagonists, he sublimates their urge to have sex, coralling sexual desire under the aegis of a concept he terms "the Adult Conspiracy."
As a fuction of the Adult Conspiracy, sexually immature characters are obsessed with seeing each other naked, without understanding why they want to. Post Golem in the Gears, the Xanth novels primarily stop featuring adult main characters in favor of teenagers and older children. Which gives Anthony free reign to write teenaged male characters who are obsessed with spying on naked teenaged girls. It's a lateral move from sexualizing naked teen girls to fetishizing naked teen girls, and still creepy. Come back tomorrow for Part 2, when we actually review Man from Mundania! * That's the one where Chameleon's magic talent is that she shifts between beautiful/stupid and ugly/smart over the course of a month. She has no control over her talent, which is acutally a fundamental aspect of her being. Also, it's not a talent but a "curse." And when they menstruate, they're ugly, unshaggable and bitchy. ** Oh, there's still the threat of rape in the third epoch novels.