Fancies and Goodnights

by Collier, John; Bradbury, Ray

• ISBN13: 9781590170519
• ISBN10: 1590170512
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-05-31
• Publisher: NYRB Classics

Summary

John Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are works of rare wit, curious insight, and scary implication. They stand out as one of the pinnacles in the critically neglected but perennially popular tradition of weird writing that includes E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Dickens as well as more recent masters like Jorge Luis Borges and Roald Dahl. With a cast of characters that ranges from man-eating flora to disgruntled devils and suburban salarymen (not that it's always easy to tell one from another), Collier's dazzling stories explore the implacable logic of lunacy, revealing a surreal landscape whose unstable surface is depth-charged with surprise.

Author Biography

John Collier (1901-1980) was born in London. He began his writing career as a poet, first publishing in 1920. He turned to fiction in the early 1930s, producing the popular and controversial novel, His Monkey Wife, about a man who is married to a chimpanzee. In 1935 Collier left England for Hollywood, where he became an active and prolific writer for film and later television; he was particularly influential in developing the brilliantly creepy and subversive style of such television classics as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Twilight Zone.” An adaptation from Milton, Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind was published in 1973, but never produced as a film. Collier’s other works range from the poetry collection Gemini (1931) to the novels Tom’s A-Cold(1933) and Defy the Foul Fiend (1934), and the short story collections Presenting Moonshine (1941), Fancies and Goodnights (1951), Pictures in the Fire (1958), The John Collier Reader (1972), and The Best of John Collier (1975).

Ray Bradbury started writing fiction at the age of twelve and published his first story when he was twenty. He has since written more than thirty books—novels, stories, essays, plays, and poems—including The Martian Chronicles (1950), the futuristic novel Fahrenheit 451 (1952), and a collection of short stories The Illustrated Man (1951). He lives with his wife in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. vii
Bottle Party	p. 1
De Mortuis	p. 9
Evening Primrose	p. 16
Witchs Money	p. 28
Are you too Late or was I too Early	p. 40
Fallen Star	p. 44
The Touch of Nutmeg Makes it	p. 56
Three Bears Cottage	p. 64
Pictures in the Fire	p. 70
Wet Saturday	p. 84
Squirrels have Bright Eyes	p. 91
Halfway to Hell	p. 97
The Lady on the Grey	p. 104
Incident on a Lake	p. 112
Over Insurance	p. 118
Old Acquaintance	p. 124
The Frog Prince	p. 132
Season of Mists	p. 138
Great Possibilities	p. 146
Without Benefit of Galsworthy	p. 154
The Devil George and Rosie	p. 159
Ah the University	p. 178
Back for Christmas	p. 182
Another American Tragedy	p. 188
Collaboration	p. 195
Midnight Blue	p. 202
Gavin O Leary	p. 208
If Youth Knew if Age Could	p. 217
Thus I Refute Beelzy	p. 228
Special Delivery	p. 233
Rope Enough	p. 249
Little Memento	p. 255
Green Thoughts	p. 260
Romance Lingers Adventure Lives	p. 275
Bird of Prey	p. 279
Variation on a Theme	p. 287
Night Youth Paris and the Moon	p. 299
The Steel Cat	p. 304
Sleeping Beauty	p. 311
Interpretation of a Dream	p. 327
Mary	p. 333
Hell Hath no Fury	p. 346
In the Cards	p. 352
The Invisible dove Dancer of Strathpheen Island	p. 358
The Right Side	p. 365
Spring Fever	p. 370
Youth from Vienna	p. 378
Possession of Angela Bradshaw	p. 398
Cancel all I said	p. 403
The Chaser	p. 415
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