Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday

By Jan Potocki, Julio Martínez Mesanza, Italo Calvino

Book Overview

"The true theme of the nineteenth-century fantastic tale is the reality of what we see: to believe or not to believe in phantasmagoric apparitions, to glimpse another world, enchanted or infernal,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679755446
• ISBN13: 9780679755449
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 608 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.9" x 1.3" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

The Literary Fantastic According to the Master Himself

The stories collected in this volume span through some several hundred years and many languages. The authors represented wrote not only in the genre of the fantastic, they are recognized masters. But here we find their finest, eeriest, most bizarre and phantasmagoric tales. Reading through the book provides a real sense of the development of the ghost story and the fantasy through the years.Perhaps of even greater importance, for those of us who are Calvino fans, we can see what stories the Italian fabulist cherished most, what he read and what influenced him. He places each book in a historical and literary context, and the opening essay is truly key to understanding Calvino's theories of the fantastic, which in themselves make this book worth buying!