Fantastic Tales

The acclaimed author presents a rich and wide-ranging anthology of 19th century fantasy and horror stories-with an original introduction for each (Library Journal). Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of nineteenth-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a twentieth-century master of the speculative. As Calvino explains in his introduction to this collection, the true theme of the nineteenth-century fantastic tale is the reality of what we see: to believe or not to believe in phantasmagoric apparitions, to glimpse another world, enchanted or infernal, behind everyday appearances. This anthology of twenty-six enchanting, uncanny, terrifying, and immortally entertaining short stories includes E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Sandman, Nikolai Gogol's The Nose, Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Bottle Imp, and many more, each with a introduction by Calvino. Impressive and utterly pleasing…Each story [Calvino] picks is absorbing, unique, and continually surprising.-Los Angeles Times