Fantastic Tales

Visionary and Everyday

By: Italo Calvino

Narrated by: Luis Moreno

"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." (from Calvino's introduction to Fantastic Tales)

Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a 20th-century master of the speculative. This posthumously published anthology of 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 an introduction by Calvino.

Fantastic Tales is a delight for the mind and a feast for the senses.

©1983 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A. , 1997 English translation Random House LLC (P)2019 Recorded Books

Unexpected pleasure

Ordered this on a whim and it is becoming one of my favorites. A nice variety of materials and authors, some well known some more obscure. Everyone will have their favorites but all are well done. Excellent narration. And kudos to the producer for making labeled track breaks correspond with works, which is great for an anthology.

Stories of ghosts and demons

A good way to find the great older stories of odd visions of reality. Many of these I had heard of but never read. Gogol and HG Wells were wonderful.