Fantastic Tales — Random House

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"Gérard 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.