Fantastic Tales

Visionary and Everyday.

Vampires, ghosts, and other uncanny beings haunt the pages of this rich anthology of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and introduced by Italo Calvino—one of the 20th century’s great literary visionaries.

Published posthumously, Fantastic Tales gathers a captivating range of eerie, enchanting, and psychologically unsettling short stories, including E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp.”

Each story is framed by Calvino’s insightful commentary, offering a window into the strange and the sublime. A literary feast for lovers of the weird and the wondrous, Fantastic Tales is as intellectually stimulating as it is hauntingly entertaining.