Fantastic Tales ed by Italo Calvino

Trade paperback format.  Satin-finish matte coated coverstock.

A collection of short stories compiled, edited, and introduced by Italo Calvino — including works  of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Balzac, Gogol, Poe, and many others — surveying the phenomenon of the fantastic in 19th-century European literature.    

“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.