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.