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