Fantastic Tales: Visionary And Everyday - Tapa blanda

Compiled by Italo Calvino, this a historical overview of great fantastic literature of the 19th century. Many of the stores are from well-known authors (Sir Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Ivan Turgenev, Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells), but Calvino largely avoided their best-known stories. The contributors range from moderately well-known to obscure. This is an intelligently annotated anthology of superb fiction, but, in one pleasant sense, a collection of mostly new stories.

Writer, essayist, and journalist, Italo Calvino was born in 1923 in Cuba, of Italian parents. He spent his early years in San Remo, and studied at Turin, where he worked as a publisher. His first novel, THE PATH TO THE NEST OF SPIDERS(1947), described resistance against Fascism in a highly naturalistic manner. Calvino's whimsical and imaginative fables made him one of the most important Italian fiction writers in the 20th century. He died in 1985.