Fantastic Tales : Visionary and Everyday

With this posthumously published anthology--a successor to his bestsellingItalian 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" Gerard 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 Talesis a gallery of enchantments, deliciously entertaining yet more disturbing than our most persistent nightmares.

Italo Calvino's works include <b>The Road to San Giovanni</b>, <b>Numbers in the Dark</b>, , <b>The Baron in the Tress</b>, <b>If on a Winter's Night a Traveler</b>, <b>Invisible Cities</b>, and <b>Mr. Palomar</b>. Calvino died in 1985.