Search Worlds Without End

The Book of Fantasy is the second English translation of Antología de la Literatura Fantástica, an anthology of appromixately 81 fantastic short stories, fragments, excerpts, and poems edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. It was first published in Argentina in 1940, and revised in 1965 and 1976. Anthony Kerrigan previously translated the similar work Cuentos Breves y Extraordinarios as Extraordinary Tales, published by Herder & Herder in 1971. The 1988 Viking Penguin edition for English-speaking countries includes a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The idea and seed for this volume came into being one "night in 1937 in Buenos Aires, when Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo fell to talking - so Casares tells us - 'about fantastic literature. ..simply a compilation of stories from fantastic literature which seemed to us to be the best.'"

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (The Book of Fantasy) - essay by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Sennin - (1976) - shortstory by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (trans. of ?? 1916)
• A Woman Alone with Her Soul - (1912) - shortstory by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
• Ben-Tobith - (1976) - shortstory by Leonid Andreyev (trans. of ???-????? 1905)
• The Phantom Basket - (1696) - shortfiction by John Aubrey
• The Drowned Giant - (1964) - shortstory by J. G. Ballard
• Enoch Soames - (1916) - novelette by Max Beerbohm
• The Tail of the Sphinx - (1893) - shortstory by Ambrose Bierce
• The Squid in Its Own Ink - (1976) - shortstory by Adolfo Bioy Casares (trans. of El calamar opta por su tinta 1962)
• Guilty Eyes - (1976) - shortstory by Ah'med Ech Chiruani
• Anything You Want! ... - shortfiction by Léon Bloy (trans. of Tout ce que tu voudras !... 1894)
• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - (1961) - shortstory by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 1940)
• Odin - (1951) - shortfiction by Jorge Luís Borges and Delia Ingenieros
• The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind - (1953) - shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Man Who Collected the First of September 1973 - (1973) - shortstory by Tor Åge Bringsvaerd (trans. of Mannen som samlet på første September 1972)
• The Careless Rabbi - (1956) - shortfiction by Martin Buber
• The Tale and the Poet - shortfiction by Sir Richard Francis Burton
• Fate is a Fool - shortfiction by Pilar de Lusarreta and Arturo Cancela (trans. of El Destino es chambón 1920)
• An Actual Authentic Ghost - (1834) - shortfiction by Thomas Carlyle
• The Red King's Dream - (1871) - shortfiction by Lewis Carroll
• The Tree of Pride - (1922) - shortfiction by G. K. Chesterton
• The Dream of the Butterfly - (1926) - shortfiction by Chuang Tzu
• The Tower of Babel - (1922) - shortfiction by G. K. Chesterton
• House Taken Over - (1976) - shortstory by Julio Cortázar (trans. of Casa tomada 1946)
• The Look of Death - (1923) - shortfiction by Jean Cocteau
• Being Dust - (1961) - shortfiction by Santiago Dabove
• A Parable of Gluttony - (1931) - shortfiction by Alexandra David-Neel
• The Persecution of the Master - (1931) - shortfiction by Alexandra David-Neel
• The Idle City - (1909) - shortstory by Lord Dunsany
• Tantalia - (1984) - shortfiction by Macedonio Fernández
• Eternal Life - (1913) - shortfiction by J. G. Frazer
• A Secure Home - shortfiction by Elena Garro
• The Man Who Did Not Believe in Miracles - (1915) - shortfiction by Herbert A. Giles
• Earth's Holocaust - (1844) - shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Ending for a Ghost Story - shortfiction by I. A. Ireland
• The Monkey's Paw - (1902) - shortstory by W. W. Jacobs
• What is a Ghost? - (1921) - shortfiction by James Joyce
• May Goulding - (1921) - shortfiction by James Joyce
• The Wizard Passed Over - (1970) - shortfiction by Don Juan Manuel
• Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk - (1948) - shortstory by Franz Kafka (trans. of Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse 1924)
• Before the Law - (1948) - shortstory by Franz Kafka (trans. of Vor dem Gesetz 1915)
• The Return of Imray - (1891) - shortstory by Rudyard Kipling
• The Horses of Abdera - shortfiction by Leopoldo Lugones (trans. of Los caballos de Abdera 1906)
• The Ceremony - (1897) - shortstory by Arthur Machen
• The Riddle - (1903) - shortfiction by Walter de la Mare
• Who Knows? - (1935) - shortstory by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of Qui sait ? 1890)
• The Cat - shortfiction by H. A. Murena
• The Shadow of the Players - shortfiction by Edwin Morgan
• The Story of the Foxes - shortfiction by Niu Chiao
• The Atonement - shortfiction by Silvina Ocampo (trans. of La expiación 1961)
• The Man Who Belonged to Me - (1906) - shortfiction by Giovanni Papini
• Rani - shortfiction by Carlos Peralta
• The Blind Spot - (1945) - shortfiction by Barry Perowne
• The Wolf - (1965) - shortfiction by Petronius
• The Bust - shortfiction by Manuel Peyrou
• The Cask of Amontillado - [Fortunado] - (1846) - shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Tiger of Chao-Ch'Eng - (1880) - shortfiction by Pu Songling (trans. of ??? 1766)
• How We Arrived at the Island of Tools - [Gargantua et Pantagruel] - shortfiction by François Rabelais
• The Music on the Hill - (1911) - shortstory by Saki
• Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched - (1922) - novelette by May Sinclair
• The Cloth Which Weaves Itself - (1900) - shortfiction by W. W. Skeat
• A Theologian in Death - (1971) - essay by Emanuel Swedenborg
• Universal History - (1937) - shortfiction by Olaf Stapledon
• The Encounter - shortfiction by unknown
• The Three Hermits - (1980) - shortstory by Leo Tolstoy (trans. of ??? ?????? 1886)
• Macario - (1966) - shortfiction by B. Traven
• The Infinite Dream of Pao-Yu - shortfiction by Tsao Hsueh-Chin
• The Mirror to Wind-and-Moon - shortfiction by Tsao Hsueh-Chin
• The Desire To Be a Man - shortfiction by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (trans. of Le désir d'être un homme 1882)
• Memnon, or Human Wisdom - (1747) - shortstory by Voltaire (trans. of Memnon: Histoire Orientale)
• The Man Who Liked Dickens - (1933) - shortstory by Evelyn Waugh
• Pomegranate Seed - (1931) - novelette by Edith Wharton
• Lukundoo - (1907) - shortstory by Edward Lucas White
• The Donguys - shortfiction by Juan Rodolfo Wilcock
• Lord Arthur Savile's Crime - (1887) - novelette by Oscar Wilde
• The Sorcerer of the White Lotus Lodge - (1924) - shortfiction by Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930)
• Saved by the Book - (1928) - shortfiction by G. Willoughby-Meade
• The Celestial Stag - (1928) - shortfiction by G. Willoughby-Meade
• The Reanimated Englishman - shortfiction by Mary Shelley (variant of Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman 1863)
• The Sentence - shortfiction by Wu Ch'Eng En
• The Sorcerers - (1893) - shortfiction by William Butler Yeats
• Fragment - (1844) - shortfiction by José Zorrilla

Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of the Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.

Inspired by Bioy Casares's fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in Latin American fiction's now famous postwar boom. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Last Year in Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.