Fantasy One-offs?

First, if this is a repeat topic, I apologize. That is a LONG list.

I enjoy fantasy, but it seems like it only comes in trilogies or series. (Not to mention novels longer than Methusaleh's beard.) Can anyone recommend any good one-offs for a change of pace?

Yup, it's a repeat topic, but that's okay. :-) But if you'd like to browse some of the prior suggestions, here are two threads you might want to check out:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/131332#3445905
http://www.librarything.com/topic/100207#2252565

I believe most, or much, or Patricia McKillip's stuff is stand-alone. I really enjoyed Od Magic.

Master of Whitestorm is one of my favourites. It may well have been mentioned in the other threads too!

Another of Janny Wurts' books, To ride Hell's Chasm, is a stand alone, and it is also excellent.

The Barbed Coil by JV Jones is standalone. It does end with hints of possibilities of further books but they have never happened.
As on the other topics, many of Guy Gavriel Kay's books are standalone though Tigana is still a mighty tome!

Peter S. Beagle is another writer most of whose books are stand alone.

Elantris by Brian Sanderson is a great stand alone. Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart, stands alone and is wonderful, even if there are other books with the same characters.

I can recommend The night circus (dreamy steampnk), Califia's daughters (post-apocalypse), Child of a rainless year (paranormal contemporary) and Warbreaker (great fantasy book with a really bad title).

A classic fantasy, set in the Adriatic Sea during an alternate history Renaissance, is The Malacia Tapestry by Brian Aldiss. Aldiss is known chiefly for his SF, and so this would be except that it's set in the past and owes nothing to speculative science. Though first published in 1976, it's always worth a read, and I'm hoping for a third go in the not too distant future.

Unfortunately, I think that many of my suggestions are out of print, but here are some standalones I have enjoyed:

For lighter, quicker reads:

Changing Fate by Elizabeth Waters - Waters contributed many stories to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress, and this reads in the same tone with a young female protagonist taking up the running of her kingdom and becoming comfortable with her shapeshifting powers.

The Seven Towers by Patricia Wrede - A large cast of almost-cliche characters on a quest. It's been a while since I read this one, but I remember enjoying it.

Emerald House Rising by Peg Kerr - Another one I read a while ago, this follows an apprentice jeweler who discovers she has magic. The society and gemcutting are interesting.

For denser, deeper reads:

The Watcher's Mask by Laurie J. Marks - A two-souled agent of the emperor starts having blackout periods where she neither of her halves can account for her time, and she ends up entangled with a clan that refuses the emperor's rule. This book surprised me- it seemed like a cliche situation, but it never took the cliche way out. It's also relatively short. Well worth a read if you can find it.

Mirage by Louise Cooper - The protagonist is created in a ceremony to summon an ancient hero to save the decaying seaside city of Haven, which is locked in a war with sea-dwellers. Heavy on atmosphere.

The Fire's Stone by Tanya Huff - Someone has stolen the magical stone that prevents the volcano from destroying the country, and a prince, a thief caught by the guard, and a wizard who's been arranged to marry the prince has to get it back. The love triangle is not the one you would expect; this is one of the few fantasy books I'm aware of where one of the protagonists is asexual. This one should still be available in the omnibus Of Darkness, Light, and Fire, along with another Huff novel I haven't read.

Through a Brazen Mirror by Delia Sherman - This one is dense, and seems to capture the feel of medieval life much better than any of the "gritty" fantasy novels I've read. It deals with a woman who disguises herself as a man when her family is slaughtered, but wait- she's middle-aged, she isn't the protagonist, and she isn't going to war or on a solitary quest, she joins a lord's household as a serving-man.

Song of the Beast by Carol Berg is good, though it is of doorstopper length. A bard has just been released from prison after seventeen years of imprisonment and torture, and tries to figure out exactly why this happened to him. I believe this one was just recently reprinted in the US as a trade paperback.

Silent Strength of Stones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman follows a teenager in his interactions with the strange strangers who come to the lakeside resort he and his father run. There are other novels set in this "universe", but they don't include the same characters so this one still stands alone.

I also have, still in my TBR pile, Soulstring by Midori Snyder and Summer King, Winter Fool by Lisa Goldstein, traditional fantasies, and Child of a Rainless Year by Jane Lindskold and The Wood Wife by Terri Windling which are both contemporary Earth settings.

Rachel Neumeier has done a trilogy, but also has done 4 stand-alone novels, I'm reading House of Shadows right now, only 1/4 of the way in but it is good.

I recently read Kristin Kathryn Rusch's White Mists of Power and Heart Readers.

There is also Cherith Baldry with The Roses of Roazon and The Reliquary Ring.

I am lead to believe Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw is good, but I only have Among Others not read that yet.

Valente's The Grass-cutting Sword, Deathless

K J Parker Has some standalones

Most of Guy Gavriel Kay i believe is standalone, and he is excellent.

Mercedes Lacky has the Excellent Black Swan and Firebird

Megan Lindholm, (AKA Robin Hobb) has Cloven Hooves and The Gypsy

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Hounds of the Morrigan, Windhaven, The War of the Flowers, Bloodrights, A Baroque Fable, Faerie Tale, The Night Land, The Well at world's End, The Redemption of Althalus, Winter's Tale, The Worm Ouroboros, The Curse of Chalion

Richard Adams, Peter S Beagle, Alan Garner, Neil Gaiman, , Kim Wilkins, Tim Powers, Patricia Mckillip and Robin Mckinley all have more standalones than series.

Mary Gentle's Serieses can mostly be found as omnibuses which make them satndalones

George Macdonald, Lord Dunsany lived 'before' the trilogy or extended series became popular.

This list can get very long if you just know where to look.

and here is a link just to round this out - http://bestfantasybooks.com/best-stand-alone-fantasy-books.html

oh, and check out the fantasy masterworks as well, brilliant choice of standalones here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Masterworks

^12 I second both Tooth and claw and Among others!

Curse of the chalion is a trilogy. I'm told that it is very good, though. :-)

^14, I think I meant Spirit Ring got confused, I knew that Bujold had done a stand alone but couldn't remember which one of the titles it was, Hallowed Hunt also has only the most tenuous connection to Chalion and Paladin.

Anyway in manchester today and got Curse of the witch-queen, Snare, and The Jaguar Princess

Also remembered Lavinia, Gwenhwyfar The Lost Child, The Tower of Fear, Unicorn Mountain, Threshold, Flightless Falcon, Stone and Flute, Cloud Castles and I'm sure I am forgetting some more that I have thought to put on here through the day.

>15 Musereader:
Interesting you include Lavinia as a fantasy. I sort of see what you mean, but for me it's more in the way of a historical fiction playing on mythical prehistory, like Mary Renault's The King Must Die or Henry Treece's Oedipus.

I have a very loose definition of fantasy when it comes to history. Anything that retells arthur, with or without magic and "Viking" Stuff, like Robert Low and Tim Severin is all fantasy, only recorded history doesn't get the fantasy label Phillipa Gregory, Alison Weir and the likes of that.

I've even got the Nibelungenlied and Bewulf under fantasy, they standalone, if you can read them!

The Curse of Chalion is a stand alone. While there are two other books in the series, the only connection is some of the same characters. It is not part of a trilogy.

The Princess of Flames is a nice stand-alone. I read it like ages ago but I remember it as a nice light read with plenty of battles and magic.

+1 to all Guy Gavriel Kay suggestions he has written quite a few excellent stand-alones.

>16 ed.pendragon: & 17
The role of history in fantasy is an interesting one ... obviously mythology, both historical and fictional, plays a central role in much fantasy writing, but with the expansion, multiplication, and blurring of genre boundaries I wonder how people feel about historical settings and influences on fantasy literature.

The Etched City, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, The Drawing of the Dark, Lud-in-the-Mist, Grendel, Gloriana, or the Unfulfill'd Queen and Little, Big.

Neil Gaiman, Christopher Fowler and Jonathan Carroll's fantasy novels are standalones. Not all of Liz Jensen's books are fantasy, but they are all individual and interesting and both Ark Baby and My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time are standalone fantasy.

There are so many good standalones that don't make you commit to reading a neverending series, which reminds me that The Neverending Story is good too if you like YA books.

Would you like recommendations for short stories too?

>17 Musereader:, 20

Beowulf and The Nibelungenlied are certainly fantasy, though I hope you also have them tagged as 'literature' or 'classics' or 'anonymous' for example to distinguish them from modern fantasy!

You can argue that ALL fiction is fantasy, of course, as it's all the product of minds projecting alternate/alternative worlds to our own. Whether it's set in the present 'real' world or a past historical period it's all total imagination, even when the action and the characters the conversations and thoughts are woven into recognisable events and happenings and geographical locations. Whether a 9/11 novel, or Fifty Shades of Grey, or Wolf Hall, they all play hard or loose with familiar or recognisable settings, but you could argue that they are all fantasy to some extent or another.*

Of course, this is no help when we want to catalogue genres; we conveniently stick under the Fantasy label things to do with magic, don't we? Wizards, supernatural powers, fairies, creatures, ESP, portals to another world, that's what we know and love.

But what then do you do then with titles on the margin? Plots where extraordinary coincidences occur (most classic crime novels, for example)? Realistic plots where one or two elements seem beyond explanation (Of Love and Other Demons, for example, or Midnight's Children), so that we call them 'magic realism'? Plots set in a historical period but based on euhumerised mythological characters (Mary Renault's The King Must Die, for example, which I mentioned above, though commonly described as an historical novel)? Or plots by recognised SF writers who mix in elements we would commonly call magic but which are given scientific-looking terms (Asimov does this in the Foundation series, for example, and Philip K Dick's futures, commonly set in the 1980s which is when coincidentally he died, have unbelievable elements and alternate history themes which I feel are more magical than sciencey, more fantasy than straightforwardly speculative).

* I must add that I haven't read Wolf Hall yet, though it's on my TBR list, and I don't intend to read Fifty Shades of Grey, though I have read enough critiques about it to dissuade me from even picking it up...

22 Like i said, anything with the least hint of fantasy gets lumped with the fantasy, If it is not strictly "realistic" then it's fantasy, with SF being a subgenre of fantsay, of course I have the sub genres including Magical realism though, kind of hard not to when you have as many as I do.

I do have this conversation with my mother who can never understand why I like what I do - it's *because* it's not real, and i have pointed out that all of fiction is made up and fantasy is just more made up that the stuff she likes, but we agree to disagree.

Which reminds me - I got Some kind of Fairy Tale today- All of graham Joyces books are standalone. And the universe is wanting me to get a copy of Memoirs of a Master Forger - you know when the same book just gets brought to your attention by several unrelated contexts.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale looks interesting. Has anyone read The Tooth Fairy also by Graham Joyce?

Thinking it over, most of my favorite authors write mostly standalone stuff, and a lot have been mentioned, but...

I don't see Sharon Shinn listed and she has written a bunch of excellent standalones -- Summers at Castle Auburn or Gateway for example, or the classic The Shape-changer's Wife.

Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

A Book Dragon by Donn Kushner

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull (if you are willing to go for urban fantasy)

There is also Tiger Burning Bright by Mercedes Lackey,Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Andre Norton. Speaking of Bradley, she has standalones placed in Aurthurian England like Mists of Avalon and Forest House. You might also take a look at Druids by Morgan LLywelyn.

>>27 drichpi: Mists of Avalon? I thought that was part of a series? I only recently acquired the first book, and haven't read it yet, but the reason I searched for it in the first place is that I had accidentally bought number 4...

>28 zjakkelien:. It is. So is Forest House. They can be considered standalone by some but they are part of the Avalon series.
Druids is also part of a series...

Lately I like Dave Duncan - mainly because of West of January. See my review there if you want (no spoilers).
And I second Guy Gavriel Kay.

You might also check some of the older fantasy - it was more likely to write a standalone than it is now...

There is also Fahrenheit 666 by Andrew Harmon. If you like your fantasy with tongue firmly in cheek, it is a pleasant read.