American fantastic tales : terror and the uncanny from Poe to the pulps / Peter Straub, editor.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Straub, Peter, 1943-2022.

Series:

Library of America ; 196.

Library of America ; 196

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fantasy fiction, American.

Horror tales.

Genre:

Fantasy fiction, American.

Horror tales.

Short stories.

Physical Description:

xv, 746 pages ; 21 cm.

Other Title:

Terror and the uncanny from Poe to the pulps

American fantastic tales : Poe to the pulps

Place of Publication:

New York, N.Y. : Library of America, [2009]

Summary:

From early on, American literature has teemed with tales of horror, of hauntings, of terrifying obsessions and gruesome incursions, of the uncanny ways in which ordinary reality can be breached and subverted by the unknown and the irrational. As this pathbreaking two-volume anthology demonstrates, it is a tradition with many unexpected detours and hidden chambers, and one that continues to evolve, finding new forms and new themes as it explores the bad dreams that lurk around the edges--if not in the unacknowledged heart--of the everyday. Peter Straub, one of today's masters of horror and fantasy, offers an authoritative and diverse gathering of stories calculated to unsettle and delight. This first volume surveys a century and a half of American fantastic storytelling, revealing in its forty-four stories an array of recurring themes: trance states, sleepwalking, mesmerism, obsession, possession, madness, exotic curses, evil atmospheres. In the tales of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, the bright prospects of the New World face an uneasy reckoning with the forces of darkness. In the ghost-haunted Victorian and Edwardian eras, writers including Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ambrose Bierce explore ever more refined varieties of spectral invasion and disintegrating selfhood. In the twentieth century, with the arrival of the era of the pulps, the fantastic took on more monstrous and horrific forms at the hands of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, and other classic contributors to Weird Tales. Here are works by acknowledged masters such as Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Conrad Aiken, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with surprising discoveries like Ralph Adams Cram's "The Dead Valley," Emma Francis Dawson's "An Itinerant House," and Julian Hawthorne's "Absolute Evil." American Fantastic Tales offers an unforgettable ride through strange and visionary realms. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Contents:

Somnambulism: a fragment / Charles Brockden Brown

The adventure of the German student / Washington Irving

Berenice / Edgar Allan Poe

Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne

The tartarus of maids / Herman Melville

What was it? / Fitz-James O'Brien

The legend of Monte del Diablo / Bret Harte

The moonstone mass / Harriet Prescott Spofford

His unconquerable enemy / W.C. Morrow

In dark New England days / Sarah Orne Jewett

The yellow wall paper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The black dog / Stephen Crane

Ma'ame Peþlagie / Kate Chopin

Thurlow's Christmas story / John Kendrick Bangs

The repairer of reputations / Robert W. Chambers

The dead valley / Ralph Adams Cram

The little room / Madeline Yale Wynne

The striding place / Gertrude Atherton

An itinerant house / Emma Francis Dawson

Luella Miller / Mary Wilkins Freeman

Grettir at Thorhall-stead / Frank Norris

Yuki-Onna / Lafcadio Hearn

For the blood is life / F. Marion Crawford

The moonlit road / Ambrose Bierce

Lukundoo / Edward Lucas White

The shell of sense / Olivia Howard Dunbar

The jolly corner / Henry James

Golden baby / Alice Brown

Afterward / Edith Wharton

Consequences / Willa Cather

The shadowy third / Ellen Glasgow

Absolute evil / Julian Hawthorne

Unseen-unfeared / Francis Stevens

The curious case of Benjamin Button / F. Scott Fitzgerald

The curse of Everard Maundy / Seabury Quinn

The king of the cats / Stephen Vincent Beneþt

The jelly-fish / David H. Keller

Mr. Arcularis / Conrad Aiken

The black stone / Robert E. Howard

Passing of a god / Henry S. Whitehead

The panelled room / August Derleth

The thing on the doorstep / H.P. Lovecraft

Genius Loci / Clark Ashton Smith

The cloak / Robert Bloch.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9781598530476 :

159853047X :

OCLC:

311777136