Nightshade 20th Century Ghost Stories

by Phillips, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780786708086
• ISBN10: 0786708085
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-08-11
• Publisher: Da Capo Press

Summary

The phantasms, shades, and specters in this collection of ghost stories by contemporary writers like Alison Lurie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joyce Carol Oates, Muriel Spark, and William Trevor as well as such modern literary giants as Henry James, Isak Dinesen, Franz Kafka, Edith Wharton, and Rudyard Kipling write letters, carry lanterns, ride bicycles, patrol halls, run motorboats, rake leaves, and deliver mail. They also inhabit dolls and sticks of furniture. Some of them merely haunt houses, while others invade the darkest corners of the soul.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction	xiii
Ghosts on the Lake	1	(6)
Ilse Aichinger
Sonata for Harp and Bicycle	7	(10)
Joan Aiken
Enoch Soames	17	(30)
Max Beerbohm
The Happy Autumn Fields	47	(18)
Elizabeth Bowen
Oh Father, Father, Why Have You Come Back?	65	(9)
John Cheever
Dead Women's Things	74	(3)
Kathy Chwedyk
The Upper Berth	77	(23)
F. Marion Crawford
The Supper at Elsinore	100	(50)
Isak Dinesen
Lost Lives	150	(16)
Max Eberts
The Shadowy Third	166	(25)
Ellen Glasgow
A Shape of Light	191	(26)
William Goyen
W. S.	217	(12)
L. P. Hartley
The Astral Body of a U. S. Mail Truck	229	(11)
James Leo Herlihy
The Bus	240	(14)
Shirley Jackson
The Friends of the Friends	254	(28)
Henry James
Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor	282	(23)
Franz Kafka
``They''	305	(23)
Rudyard Kipling
The Highboy	328	(16)
Alison Lurie
The Ghosts of August	344	(3)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Doll	347	(23)
Joyce Carol Oates
Wolfie	370	(10)
Robert Phillips
A Spiritualist	380	(4)
Jean Rhys
Owl	384	(4)
Elizabeth Spencer
A Gracious Rain	388	(17)
Christopher Tilghman
Mrs. Acland's Ghosts	405	(17)
William Trevor
The Leaf-Sweeper	422	(6)
Muriel Spark
Pomegranate Seed	428	(33)
Edith Wharton
Notes on the Authors	461