Figures of Earth (1921). Richmond, Virginia–based author James Branch Cabell wrote his exquisitely crafted, imaginative tales during the age of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. So it is little wonder, then, that mainstream popularity came his way only once, when his novel Jurgen was brought before the Supreme Court on charges of obscenity and for a time his name was indeed on every reader’s lips. But his sophisticated, mildly erotic adventures filled with mysterious wizards and gods that steadily give way to yet more great and powerful gods were never the stuff of popular taste, and so his writing has been relegated to the obscure and the antiquarian. But this tale of the pig-keeper and very reluctant hero Manuel is a colorful romp touching on all the finer points of chivalry and heroism. Falling into and out of beds and bedrooms and high adventures and quests at every opportunity, Manuel molds, as his mother has told him to do, a fine figure of himself from every available material at his disposal.

To this day, so many years later, Cabell’s implacable insistence that no one ever truly understands the will of their god(s) or the worlds that they have created, tempers my every thought as well as gifts me with a knowing, ironic smile, fully displayed at any of my grandiose ideas.

—Charles Vess.