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, behind everyday appearances." -- from Calvino's introduction to Fantastic Tales

Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of nineteenth-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a twentieth-century master of the speculative. This posthumously published anthology of enchanting, uncanny, terrifying, and immortally entertaining short stories includes E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose," Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp," and many more, each with an introduction by Calvino. Fantastic Tales is a delight for the mind and a feast for the senses.

"Impressive and utterly pleasing . . . Each story [Calvino] picks is absorbing, unique, and continually surprising." -- Los Angeles Times

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0544152093
• ISBN13: 9780544152090
• Release Date: August 2015
• Publisher: Mariner Books Classics
• Length: 608 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 5.4" x 7.8"

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!