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Tales from Jabba's Palace (Star Wars.) (Book 2) | 
 enlarge | Creators: Kevin J. Anderson, Stephen Youll
Publisher: Spectra
Category: Book
List Price: $6.99
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $6.98 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  57 reviews
Sales Rank: 266837
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 4.2 x 1
ISBN: 0553568159
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.0876208
EAN: 9780553568158
ASIN: 0553568159
Publication Date: December 1, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Help save a tree. Buy all your used books from Green Earth Books. Read -> Recycle -> Reuse!
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Amazon.com Review
One of the more prolific--and proficient--Star Wars authors, Kevin J. Anderson, edits and contributes to this anthology of ... well, tales from Jabba's palace. Each of the 19 short tales focuses on a different personality, from the rancor keeper to Salacious Crumb, putting faces and facts on the internecine intrigue swirling around everyone's favorite Huttese crime lord. (As it turns out, you can find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than Mos Eisley.) Find out how Bib Fortuna hoped to overthrow Jabba, or hear the philosophical ramblings of a not-so-bright teenage skiff guard. Or, perhaps best, learn how Boba Fett escaped the Sarlacc in the Great Pit of Carkoon. Style, mood, and quality vary by author, but these Tales are mostly funny and mostly well done, including those by Anderson, Star Trek author A.C. Crispin, Nebula-winner George Alec Effinger, and Hugo-winner Timothy Zahn. --Paul Hughes
Product Description
A collection of short stories takes place in the dog-eat-dog palace of the infamous Jabba the Hutt and includes the works of such authors as Kevin J. Anderson, A. C. Crispin, Barbara Hambly, Jennifer Roberson, and Timothy Zahn.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 52 more reviews...
 Jabba's Posse October 7, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Tales from Jabba's Palace is a collection of 19 stories by a number of different authors with the common ground being the presence of the main characters in Jabba's palace at the time of the rescue of Han Solo from his carbonite slab. As is true with the other Tales collections in the Extended Universe, the concept is sound. Take a particular place at a particular point in time and interweave stories of the characters involved, no matter how insignificant. Previously we have been through Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina and Tales of the Bounty Hunters, and we still have a couple more books to go.
The authors developing these tales for Jabba's characters had mixed results. The first tale is "A Boy and His Monster: The Rancor Keeper's Tale" by Kevin Anderson, and it gets the book off to a good start, particularly for those of us in the Rancors Love to Read program. A good rancor story is hard to beat. The book also finishes well with "Skin Deep: The Fat Dancer's Tale" by A. C. Crispin. The tales in between deal with such characters as Salacious Crumb, Ephant Mon, Ree-Yees, Bib Fortuna, EV-9D9, and Boba Fett. Most of the stories are interesting, and I admire the editing that enables the stories to fit together. It is somewhat like putting together a literary Jabba's palace jigsaw puzzle.
Of course, all of the stories can't be good. For example, as was true in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, we have another tale about Dannik Jerriko and his addiction to soup - not vegetable or chicken noodle, but the fluid he withdraws from unwilling victims. The story from Mos Eisley was bad. This one ("Out of the Closet: The Assassin's Tale") is worse. It can be skimmed or just skipped entirely. Another bad one is "And Then There Were Some: The Gamorrean Guard's Tale". Apparently, one of the guards is so stupid that he carries two dead bodies around with him for days or weeks until he can decide what to do with them. Entirely preposterous.
Tales from Jabba's Palace is worth reading, but some judicious tale selection can be worthwhile.
What ever happened to ....? October 5, 2007
Various tales of the minions of Jabba's Palace from Star Wars Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (Full Screen). Good read & ties into the Star Wars saga.
Jabba and his band of merry sentients July 18, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
One of the most memorable scenes from the first Star Wars film is inarguably the Mos Eisley Cantina. It features a vast array of strange alien creatures and several key character moments, including the introduction of Han Solo and Chewbacca. The Empire Strikes Back stayed away from alien background characters as eye-candy, instead keeping a tight focus on our main heroes and villains. For Return of the Jedi, George Lucas introduced a locale absolutely dripping with fascinatingly bizarre critters and new species. This was Jabba's Palace, a dank and dangerous place indeed. Of course, the most memorable character introduced here (besides the RANCOR!!!) was Jabba the Hutt himself, but many of his unsavory crew of toadies, supplicants, and bodyguards left a sufficient visual impact to make fans thirsty for more information.
The format of this novel is quite similar to Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina in that all the stories contained within revolve around the events we are familiar with from the film. In this case, everything from C-3PO and R2-D2 arriving at Jabba's Palace to the fight at the Sarlacc pit is used as source material to build upon for tales for many of Jabba's goons. The stories range from the darkly serious to the excessively comical, and I found the tone of the book to vary a bit much to make for a consistent read. In terms of story, Kevin J. Anderson does a good job of editing the disparate threads in the many stories into a fairly coherent whole.
One of the standout stories of this collection is Anderson's "A Boy and His Monster: The Rancor Keeper's Tale." This story is a good kickoff and certainly manages to make the rancor's keeper, Malakili (the bane of my childhood toy box), a more interesting figure. From there we are presented with eighteen more tales, plus an epilogue that does some wrap-up on various loose ends left throughout the stories.
A few of the best stories in the collection are Timothy Zahn's "Sleight of Hand: The Tale of Mara Jade," "Old Friends: Ephant Mon's Tale" by Kenneth C. Flint, and A. C. Crispin's "Skin Deep: The Fat Dancer's Tale." Zahn uses his short story to add to the mythology of Mara Jade, telling us of her first attempt to assassinate Luke Skywalker. Flint's first-person story of Ephant Mon, Jabba's only true friend, is a nice change of pace from the parade of tales dealing with courtiers seeking to double-cross Jabba. Crispin's story of Yarna d'al' Gargan concludes the book and manages to wring some real emotion out of a character who gets about three seconds of screentime in Return of the Jedi. Like Ephant Mon's story, it's good to have a few characters who are not shallowly and stereotypically evil living in Jabba's Palace.
The majority of the other tales are entertaining and decently well-written, but there are a few that did nothing for me: "That's Entertainment: The Tale of Salacious Crumb" by Esther M. Friesner, George Alec Effinger's "The Great God Quay: The Tale of Barada and the Weequays," and "Out of the Closet: The Assassin's Tale" by Jennifer Roberson. The Salacious Crumb story is written in a lightly farcical manner and features a foolhardy academic who dreams of interviewing Jabba the Hutt. This one stretches my credulity too far, even in a novel populated by elements such as mechanical spiders controlled by monks' brains in jars, a Gamorrean guard becoming best friends with two corpses, and the "frog-dog" on the stairs to the throne room being part of an assassination plot. My concern with Effinger's story about the Weequay guards also centers around its almost goofy tone. The Great God Quay is literally a magic eight-ball which answers supplicants' questions with silliness such as "Very doubtful" and "Concentrate and ask again." Roberson's story is a continuation of the annoying Anzati Dannik Jerriko from Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina; like its predecessor, the goal here seems to be able to use the word "soup" as many times as humanly possible.
Overall, this collection is more of a mixed bag than the Mos Eisley book, but still well worth a read for anyone looking for a break from the main film characters or anyone who would like more background information on the wild menagerie of characters that lurk in Jabba's Palace.
My Favorite of the SW Tales Books June 12, 2007
I like this book - a lot. It's a quick read and I tore through it, interested in every story, which is something I can't say for the other Tales books. The stories of the various characters really interconnect, more so than in other SW anthologies, and that lent a nice continuity to the book. There was even a recurring mystery that popped up in several stories.
I thought the writing was excellent through out and some great authors pop up in the pages. I'm a particular fan of Jennifer Roberson. The only story I was somewhat disappointed in was Timothy Zahn's tale of Mara Jade - and that is mostly because I wish they would have made it longer with more depth.
But otherwise, this book does a great job of fleshing out the stories of the various beings in Jabba's place during the beginning of RotJ - I recommend it to any Star Wars fan.
Good Tie In May 20, 2007
I like these Tales books. They seem to play off each other rather well, and to expand the main SW tale a bit without going over the top. The stories are exciting and at times insightful. This book deals with the Mos Eisely Cantina scene from Episode5 where the camera pans around the room and you see all the aliens inside the bar. It tells a back story for nearly every being in the shot. My favriotes were the Devron's Tale, The Bartender's Tale (Greedo's demise is nastier than you think) the Hammerhead's Tale, and the Spacer's Tale, which has quite a bit of humor in it- you almost feel sorry for those poor Force-controlled Stormtroopers manning the roadblock. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves the origional movies and is interested in exploring the Expanded Universe. I would also suggest watching the Cantina scene from A New Hope again after finishing the book. It will look even better.
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