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 nineteenth-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a twentieth-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. Impressive and utterly pleasing . . . Each storyCalvino] picks is absorbing, unique, and continually surprising. Los Angeles Times "