Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday

Name: Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday
ISBN: 9780679755449

by · 1983

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 Talesis 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 Honore de Balzac

The Eye with No Lid by Phliarte Chasles

The Enchanted Hand by Gerard de Nerval

Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Nose by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol