Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature

This huge anthology offers a kaleidoscope of brilliant writing from the Magi of the imagination. Alberto Manguel has selected 72 fantastic tales from life on the edge of the twilight zone, with stories from Marguerite Yourcenar, Herman Hesse, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, and many, many more. This is a collection of irresistible masterpieces, many of which have never before appeared in the English language.

Fantastic literature Manguel writes in his introduction, makes use of our everyday world as a facade through which the undefinable appears, hinting at the half-forgotten dreams of our imagination. Unlike tales of fantasy, fantastic literature deals with what can be best defined as the impossible seeping into the possible, what Wallace Stevens calls black water breaking into reality. Fantastic literature never really explains everything, it thrives on surprise, on the unexpected logic that is born from its own rules.

Contents:

House taken over by Julio Cortázar
How love came to Professor Guildea by Robert S. Hichens
Climax for a ghost story by I.A. Ireland
The mysteries of the Joy Rio by Tennessee Williams
Pomegranate seed by Edith Wharton
Venetian masks by Adolfo Bioy Casares
The wish house by Rudyard Kipling
The playground by Ray Bradbury
Importance by Manuel Mujica Láinez
Enoch Soames by Max Beerbohm
A visitor from down under by L.P. Hartley
Laura by Saki
An injustice revealed
A little place off the Edgware Road by Graham Greene
From “A School Story” by M.R. James
The signalman by Charles Dickens
The tall woman by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
A scent of mimosa by Francis King
Death and the gardener by Jean Cocteau
Lord Mountdrago by W. Somerset Maugham
The sick gentleman’s last visit by Giovanni Papini
Insomnia by Virgilio Piñera
The storm by Jules Verne
A dream (from The Arabian Nights Entertainments)
The facts in the case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe
Split second by Daphne du Maurier
August 25, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges
How Wang-Fo was saved by Marguerite Yourcenar
From “Peter and Rosa” by Isak Dinesen
Tattoo by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
John Duffy’s brother by Flann O’Brien
Lady into fox by David Garnett
Father’s last escape by Bruno Schulz
A man by the name of Ziegler by Hermann Hesse
The Argentine ant by Italo Calvino
The lady on the grey by John Collier
The queen of spades by Alexander Pushkin
Of a promise kept by Lafcadio Hearn
The wizard postponed by Juan Manuel
The monkey’s paw by W.W. Jacobs
The bottle imp by Robert Louis Stevenson
The rocking-horse winner by D.H. Lawrence
Certain distant suns by Joanne Greenburg
The third bank of the river by João Guimarães Rosa
Home by Hilaire Belloc
The door in the wall by H.G. Wells
The friends by Silvina Ocampo
Et in sempiternum pereant by Charles Williams
The captives of Longjumeau by Léon Bloy
The visit to the museum by Vladimir Nabakov
Autumn Mountain by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
The sight by Brian Moore
Clorinda by André Pieyre de Mandiargues
The pagan rabbi by Cynthia Ozick
The fisherman and his soul by Oscar Wilde
The bureau d’echange de maux by Lord Dunsany
The ones who walk away from Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin
In the penal colony by Franz Kafka
A dog in Durer’s etching “The Knight, Death and the Devil” by Marco Denevi
The large ant by Howard Fast
The lemmings by Alex Comfort
The grey ones by J.B. Priestley
The feather pillow by Horacio Quiroga
Seaton’s aunt by Walter de la Mare
The friends of the friends by Henry James
The travelling companion by Hans Christian Andersen
The curfew tolls by Stephen Vincent Benet
The state of grace by Marcel Aymé
The story of a panic by E.M. Forster
An invitation to the hunt by George Hitchcock
From the “American Notebooks” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The dream by O. Henry