Tell me a little bit about what it was like revisiting Molly Grue, Schmendrick, and Lir as characters again in this novella. Paste: “Two Hearts” is phenomenal and I’m excited for more people to get the chance to encounter it since its original publication. Why do legends survive through the centuries? I just want to keep going. There are things there that I simply don’t know, and I need to find them out. Peter Beagle: Really, all I can say is that it just keeps drawing me in. What do you think it is about this fictional setting that has spoken so deeply to readers for so long? Paste Magazine: Truly, I’m so thrilled to be able to read more stories from the world of The Last Unicorn and I doubt I’m going to be alone in that. We had a chance to chat with Beagle himself about The Way Home, the inspiration for Sooz’s story, and what makes his particular brand of fantasy so compelling.

And while its two tales touch on themes that will be familiar to anyone who has read the original-the inevitably of death, the sharp sting of regret, and the idea that while nothing truly lasts forever, we never really lose the things we love, either-the story opens up this fantasy universe in fascinating new ways, even as it gives us something like closure in others. Now, decades after its original publication, the author has returned to the world of his most famous story with The Way Home, a pair of novellas that take us back to the realm of The Last Unicorn. Like most of the author’s works, which run the gamut from delicate meditations on death ( A Fine and Private Place ) to charming ghost stories ( Tamsin ) and contemporary mythological retellings ( Summerlong ), The Last Unicorn is full of complex thematic and narrative contradictions that challenge the ways many of us have been taught to understand what a fantasy story is meant to be and do.īeagle’s work is unique for many reasons, not the least of which is his tendency to lace his works reject easily digestible platitudes in favor of a bittersweet kind of honesty-and an admission that sometimes there are no easy answers or true happy endings, as much as we might wish that weren’t the case. Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn is a formative text for many fantasy fans, a story whose specifics have only stayed with us for the bulk of our lives, but have impacted how we, as readers, understand the genre itself.

Peter beagle the last unicorn