Italo Calvino 
Fantastic Tales 

The acclaimed author presents “a rich and wide-ranging anthology” of 19th century fantasy and horror stories—with an original introduction for each (Library Journal).   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. As Calvino explains in his introduction to this collection, “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.”   This anthology of twenty-six 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 a introduction by Calvino.  “Impressive and utterly pleasing…Each story [Calvino] picks is absorbing, unique, and continually surprising.”—Los Angeles Times