With this posthumously published anthology--a successor to his bestselling Italian Folktales--Italo Calvino, a contemporary surveyor of the otherwordly, pays homage to twenty-six of his nineteenth-century precursors. The resulting volume is both an education in the history of fantastic literature and a rollercoaster ride of wonder and terror, vampires, ghosts, and the rebellious creatures of our own psyches. Selections include: E.T.A. Hoffmann--"The Sandman" Gérard de Nerval--"the Enchanted Hand" Nikolai Gogol--"The Nose" Edgar Allan Poe--"The Tell-Tale Heart" Hans Christian Andersen--"The Shadow" Ambrose Bierce--"Chickamauga" Robert Louis Stevenson--"The Bottle Imp" Henry James--"The Friends of the Friends" H.G. Wells--"The Country of the Blind" Comprising stories of the supernatural and narratives of the everyday uncanny, Fantastic Tales is a gallery of enchantments, deliciously entertaining yet more disturbing than our most persistent nightmares. CONTENTS Introduction by Italo Calvino I. The Visionary Fantastic of the Nineteenth Century The Story of the Demoniac Pacheco by Jan Potocki Autumn Sorcery by Joseph von Eichendorff The Sandman by E. T. A. Hoffmann Wandering Willie’s Tale by Sir Walter Scott The Elixir of Life by Honoré de Balzac The Eye with No Lid by Phliarte Chasles The Enchanted Hand by Gérard de Nerval Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne The Nose by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol The Beautiful Vampire by Théophile Gautier The Venus of Ille by Prosper Mérimée The Ghost and the Bonesetter by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu II. The Everday Fantastic of the Nineteenth Century The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens The Dream by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev A Shameless Rascal by Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov The Very Image by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam Night: A Nightmare by Guy de Maupassant A Lasting Love by Vernon Lee Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce The Holes in the Mask by Jean Lorrain The Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson The Friends of the Friends by Henry James The Bridge-Builders by Rudyard Kipling The Country of the Blind by H. G. Wells
Author
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
