Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday

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”G&#233rard 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 Tales is 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 Honoré de Balzac

The Eye with No Lid by Phliarte Chasles

The Enchanted Hand by Gérard de Nerval

Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Nose by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol

The Beautiful Vampire by Théophile Gautier

The Venus of Ille by Prosper Mérimée

The Ghost and the Bonesetter by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

II. The Everday Fantastic of the Nineteenth Century

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen

The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens

The Dream by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

A Shameless Rascal by Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov

The Very Image by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

Night: A Nightmare by Guy de Maupassant

A Lasting Love by Vernon Lee

Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce

The Holes in the Mask by Jean Lorrain

The Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Friends of the Friends by Henry James

The Bridge-Builders by Rudyard Kipling

The Country of the Blind by H. G. Wells