Sean Guynes (LARB, 04/18/2026), “The Bittersweet Temporality of Love”: "when Thomas Burnett Swann died of cancer at 47, fantasy was a new genre … Only a decade before … The Lord of the Rings had exploded to bestseller status … The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series published 65 books between 1969 and 1974, giving the genre a canon … Swann recast the rise of human civilization as a tragedy, marking the loss of an antediluvian world of sexual freedom, gender egalitarianism, and unabashed q…