Search Worlds Without End

Intricate interior lives are brilliantly explored in these short stories, now presented in one definitive collection as Calvino intended them

In Difficult Loves, Italy's master storyteller weaves tales in which cherished deceptions and illusions of love--including self-love--are swept away in magical instants of recognition. A soldier is reduced to quivering fear by the presence of a full-figured woman in his train compartment; a young clerk leaves a lady's bed at dawn; a young woman is isolated from bathers on a beach by the loss of her bikini bottom. Each of them discovers hidden truths beneath the surface of everyday life.

This is the first edition (by Mariner Books) in English to present the collection as Calvino originally envisioned it, and includes two stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein.

Compiled by Italo Calvino, one of the essential writers of the twentieth century (and editor of the best-selling Italian Folktales), Fantastic Tales is a rich and wide-ranging collection of twenty-six classic, uncanny tales from the nineteenth century written by an intriguing panoply of European and American authors. Master storyteller himself, Calvino has contributed an informative introduction to the collection, and an engaging précis to each story.

As Calvino writes in Fantastic Tales, which traces the genre from its roots in German Romanticism to the ghost stories of Henry James: "The fantastic tale is one of the most characteristic products of nineteenth-century narrative. For us, it is also one of the most significant.... As it relates to our sensibility today, the supernatural element at the heart of these stories always appears freighted with meaning, like the revolt of the unconscious, the repressed, the forgotten.... In this we see the modern dimension of the fantastic, the reason for its triumphant resurgence in our times."

Fantastic Tales is a fantastically canonical anthology assembled by an editor who, in the words of Salman Rushdie, "possesses the power of seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams back to life."

Table of Contents:

• vii - Introduction (Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday) - essay by Italo Calvino
• 3 - The Story of the Demoniac Pacheco (Excerpt) - (1805) - shortfiction by Jan Potocki
• 17 - Autumn Sorcery - (1808) - novella by Joseph von Eichendorff
• 33 - The Sandman - (1816) - novelette by E. T. A. Hoffmann
• 73 - Wandering Willie's Tale - (1824) - shortstory by Sir Walter Scott
• 95 - The Elixir of Life - (1830) - shortstory by Honoré de Balzac
• 123 - The Eye with No Lid - (1832) - shortfiction by Philarete Chasles
• 143 - The Enchanted Hand - (1832) - shortfiction by Gérard de Nerval
• 181 - Young Goodman Brown - (1835) - shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• 197 - The Nose - (1835) - shortfiction by Nikolai Gogol
• 227 - The Beautiful Vampire - (1836) - novelette by Théophile Gautier
• 261 - The Venus of Ille - (1837) - novelette by Prosper Mérimée
• 293 - The Ghost and the Bonesetter - (1838) - shortstory by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
• 307 - The Tell-Tale Heart - (1843) - shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe
• 315 - The Shadow - (1847) - shortstory by Hans Christian Andersen
• 331 - The Signalman - (1866) - shortstory by Charles Dickens
• 347 - The Dream - (1876) - shortfiction by Ivan Turgenev
• 371 - A Shameless Rascal - (1879) - shortfiction by Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov
• 389 - The Very Image - (1883) - shortfiction by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
• 395 - Night: A Nightmare - (1887) - shortstory by Guy de Maupassant
• 403 - A Lasting Love - (1887) - novelette by Vernon Lee
• 441 - Chickamauga - (1889) - shortstory by Ambrose Bierce
• 451 - The Holes in the Mask - shortstory by Jean Lorrain
• 461 - The Bottle Imp - (1891) - novelette by Robert Louis Stevenson
• 493 - The Friends of the Friends - (1896) - novelette by Henry James
• 523 - The Bridge-Builders - (1898) - novelette by Rudyard Kipling
• 559 - The Country of the Blind - (1904) - novelette by H. G. Wells

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.

In "Invisible Cities" Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice.

Filled with kings and peasants, saints and ogres--as well as some quite extraordinary plants and animals--these two hundred tales bring to life Italy's folklore, sometimes with earthy humor, sometimes with noble mystery, and sometimes with the playfulness of sheer nonsense.

A series of short, fantastic narratives inspired by fifteenth-century tarot cards and their archetypical images. Full-color and black-and-white reproductions of tarot cards. Translated by William Weaver.

Two novellas: the first, a parody of medieval knighthood told by a nun; the second, a fantasy about a nobleman bisected into his good and evil halves. "Bravura pieces... executed with brilliance and brio"(Chicago Tribune). Translated by Archibald Colquhoun.

In 1767, when he was twelve years old, a rebellious Italian nobleman, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, reacted against his father's authoritarianism and the injustice of being forced to eat macabre dishes-beheaded snails among them-prepared by his diabolical sister Battista. He climbed a tree, as boys that age are wont to do. Unlike other boys, Cosimo never came down.

The Baron in the Trees is the wonderfully witty novel of Cosimo's unique arboreal existence. From the trees, Cosimo explained, he could see the earth more clearly. Free from the humdrum routine of an earthbound existence, the Baron had fantastic adventures with pirates, women and spies, and still had time to read, study, and ponder the deeper issues of the period. He corresponded with Diderot and Rousseau, become a military strategist, and outstared Napoleon when the Emperor paid him a visit.

Dispensing truth and justice from wherever he might be, the Baron was friend to fruit thieves and noblemen alike. he converted the most feared bandit in the area into a dedicated bookworm, whose passion for literature led to his professional downfall. Women were quite willing to go out on a limb for Cosimo. The most daring of all was Viola, the exotic blonde whose love affair with Cosimo is one of the most intense and extraordinary in fiction.

Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. "Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?" Translated by William Weaver.

A collection of stories about time, space, and the evolution of the universe in which the author blends mathematics with poetic imagination. "Calvino does what very few writers can do: he describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty" (Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books). Translated by William Weaver.