In Calabria feels worlds away from his first unicorn story: It's punchy and frank, with a simple, direct style that mirrors Bianchi's straightforward inner life. But Beagle's writing style has slowly trended away from Last Unicorn's loopy whimsy over the past five decades. Every other sentence contains an elaborate metaphor or a magnificently strange turn of phrase. It's fortunate, then, that he's turned them into such a potent metaphor. Peter Beagle will always be associated with unicorns. And when the unicorn arrives, he enjoys her too, in a secret, private, almost religious way. He enjoys his privacy, his independence and his isolation. Around other people, like pushy mailman Romano Muscari and his no-nonsense sister Giovanna, Bianchi is gruff and dismissive. In private, Claudio Bianchi is a poet and a secret romantic. The trend continues with In Calabria, a short novel about a stubborn middle-aged Italian farmer who finds a pregnant unicorn investigating his land. But they generally come away more human, as well. When people in Beagle stories interact with unicorns, they always come away stupefied and enthralled at having touched something much older, richer, and vaster than anything humanity has to offer.

They're avatars of ineffable, unearthly wonder.

In his work, unicorns aren't just animals with magic tacked on. Unicorns are a long-term preoccupation of Beagle's, possibly because the way he conceives them is so emblematic of the kind of fantasy he writes. Over more than 55 years of writing fantasy, non-fiction, autobiography, and humor, he's returned to unicorns many times in smaller ways, from the Last Unicorn sequel novella 'Two Hearts' to the young-adult novel The Unicorn Sonata to short stories like 'Julie's Unicorn' and 'Professor Gottesman And The Indian Rhinoceros.' Peter Beagle owes much of his career to a unicorn - specifically, the protagonist of his 1968 novel The Last Unicorn, the lyrical, tragic, wryly funny bestseller that inspired a cult-hit animated movie and earned him a permanent spot on virtually every knowledgably curated best-fantasy-of-all-time list. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title In Calabria Author Peter S.

Peter beagle the way home