A Landmark Fantasy Adventure Inspired by the legends of the Dark Ages, The Phoenix and the Mirror is the story of the mighty Vergil - not quite the Vergil of our history books (the poet who penned The Aeneid), but the Vergil conjured by by the medieval imagination: hero, alchemist, and sorcerer extroaordinaire Hugo Award winner Avram Davidson has mingled fact with fantasy, turned history askew, and come up with a powerful fantasy adventure that is an acknowledged classic of the field.

Inspired by medieval legends about the poet Vergil, who was revered not only as the author of the Aeneid but also as a powerful necromancer, Davidson embarked on his Vergil Magus series in the '60s with the intriguing novel The Phoenix and the Mirror. In this sequel, Vergil answers a magical summons from Averno, both the wealthiest and the filthiest of cities. The magnates there are worried about the waning and shifting of the natural fires that have fueled their industries and fouled their air. The bare skeleton of plot is fleshed out with an eccentric, wide-ranging series of digressions, reminiscences, dreams and cabalistic glosses, all in a rich, baroque, rhetorical style. Between that form and the subject matter (counterfeiters and alchemists, rituals of superstition and sorcery, mystic visions and magic lantern shows), the novel is less akin to fantasy than to the fiction of Laurence Sterne or William Gaddis. An acquired taste, the work is by turns witty and obscure, frustrating and fascinating.

'Avram Davidson's final Vergil Magus novel, The Scarlet Fig, continues the adventures of the wandering mage through an alternate ancient world filled with exotic landscapes, populated by creatures of myth and legend. The manuscript has been edited by Grania Davis and Henry Wessells and this first edition will include afterwords by the editors, an appendix including facsimiles of cards from the Encyclopaedia of Vergil Magus that Avram Davidson compiled during the three decades he worked on the Vergil cycle.