It’s the one I was going to mention.
The Odyssey. The Man of Many Turns is still one of the best tricksters.
Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers features Kickaha who is no mean trickster. I think the first of the series, *The Master of Universes *is the best . I may be biased, though, because it’s the first science fiction novel I read.
You might want to check out two of the major charachters in Poul Anderson’s Poleseotechnic League series. Nicholas van Rijn appears in the collection *Trader to the Stars *and the novels *The Man Who Counts *(the best), Satan’s World, and Mirkheim. Commander Sir Dominic Flandry appears in the collections *Agent of the Terran Empire *and *Flandry of Terra *and the novels Ensign Flandry, A Circus of Hells, The Rebel Worlds, A Knight of Ghost and Shadows, and A Stone in Heaven. The latter is not very good, IMO, but the rest are worth reading.
Does it have to be a supernatural figure? Because thinking of examples in Spanish literature, there’s a whole genre called “novelas picarescas” (“rogues’ tales”) whose main character is a trickster, con man, thief, and all-around rogue, living by his wits in a world where every single bet is stacked against him. This link is to a Penguin book containing English versions of the two foremost examples, El Lazarillo de Tormes and El Buscón.
Quite a few of those in English too, but kick me if I can remember any specific examples now :smack:
Barry Hughart: Bridge of Birds, and the other books about Number Ten Ox and Master Li Kao (who has a slight flaw in his character).
A cetrtain Doper has argued here that Bugs Bunny is our Cultural Trickster, and tried to find if he is rooted in other, previous Trickster Rabbits:
scribbles down list of previous recs
Doesn’t need to be a supernatural figure at all.
I’ll add another voice in favor of Coyote Blue.
How about Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat?
I don’t think that rogues are in quite the same category as tricksters. Mostly because I kinda understand rogues, but I don’t “get” tricksters.
Two Folklore books with a fair number of trickster stories:
Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of the Eskimo and Indian Peoples. Ed. by Howard Norman
The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway by Basil Johnson
I just finished The Lost Gate, by Orson Scott Card. It is about Loki, or a variation thereof. I enjoyed it.
Lester Del Rey’s Day of the Giants has a (then) present-day guy meeting Loki. And it came out in 1959, just before Marvel comics started reshaping our image of the Norse Gods.
For a wonderfully wacky take on Loki and the Norse Gods read Jane Sibley’s Norse Myuthology According to Uncle Einar