The Book of Fantasy
The Book of Fantasy is the 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.'"
Contents
Pagination is given per the Penguin edition.- Introduction. Ursula K. Le Guin
- "Sennin". Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, The Three Treasures, 1951
- * This is a reworking of a Japanese Zen koan; the koan can be found in the collection Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
- "". Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 1912
- "Ben-Tobith". Leonid Andreyev, from his The Crushed Flower and Other Stories
- "The Phantom Basket". John Aubrey, Miscellanies, 1696
- "The Drowned Giant". J. G. Ballard, The Terminal Beach, London: Gollancz, 1964
- "Enoch Soames". Max Beerbohm, The Century May ’16
- "The Tail of the Sphinx". Ambrose Bierce, San Francisco Examiner January 14, 1893. Later included in Bierce's Fantastic Fables
- "The Squid in Its Own Ink". From El Lado de La Sombra, 1962, Adolfo Bioy Casares; translated by Alexandra Potts
- "Guilty Eyes". Ah‘med Ech Chiruani
- "Anything You Want!..." from Histoires Désobligeantes, 1894, Léon Bloy; translated by Moira Banks,
- "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". 1941, Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962
- "Odin". Jorge Luis Borges & Delia Ingenieros,
- "The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind" Ray Bradbury, Epoch Win ’53. Also in Bradbury's The Golden Apples of the Sun
- "The Man Who Collected the First of September, 1973". Tor Åge Bringsvaerd; translated by Oddrun Grønvik, 1973
- "The Careless Rabbi". Martin Buber; translated by Olga Marx, Tales of the Hasidin, vol. 1, 1956
- "". Sir Richard Burton
- "Fate Is a Fool". Arturo Cancela, Pilar de Lusarreta; translated by Lucia Alvarez de Toledo & Alexandra Potts
- "An Actual Authentic Ghost". From Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle, 1834
- "The Red King’s Dream". From Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll, London: Macmillan, 1871
- "". G. K. Chesterton, The Trees of Pride, Cassell, 1922
- "". G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Cassell, 1922
- "The Dream of the Butterfly or “Chuang Chu and the Butterfly”". Chuang Tzu; translated by Herbert A. Giles, 1926
- "The Look of Death". From Le Grand Ecart, Jean Cocteau, 1923
- "House Taken Over". Julio Cortázar, End of Game and Other Stories, Random House, 1967
- "Being Dust". Santiago Dabove, La Muerta y su Traje, 1961
- "A Parable of Gluttony". From With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet, Alexandra David-Neel, 1931
- "The Persecution of the Master". From With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet, Alexandra David-Neel, 1931
- "". Lord Dunsany, Saturday Review April 10 ’09
- "Tantalia". Macedonio Fernández; translated by Lucia Alvarez de Toledo & Alexandra Potts -
- "Eternal Life" J. G. Frazer 1913; Balder the Beautiful, Volume I. A Study in Magic and Religion: the Golden Bough, Part VII., The Fire-Festivals of Europe and the Doctrine of the External Soul
- "A Secure Home". Elena Garro
- "The Man Who Did Not Believe in Miracles". From Confucianism and Its Rivals, Herbert A. Giles, 1915
- "Earth’s Holocaust" Nathaniel Hawthorne, Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine May, 1844
- "Ending for a Ghost Story". I. A. Ireland, 1919
- "The Monkey's Paw". W. W. Jacobs, Harper’s Monthly, September ’02
- "What Is a Ghost?". From Ulysses, James Joyce 1921
- "May Goulding". From Ulysses. James Joyce, 1921
- "The Wizard Passed Over". Don Juan Manuel, Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio, Allen Lane, 1970
- "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk". March 1924, Franz Kafka
- "Before the Law". Franz Kafka
- "". Rudyard Kipling, Mine Own People or Life's Handicap, New York: Hurst & Co., 1891; EQMM Sep ’58
- "The Horses of Abdera". Leopoldo Lugones; Las Fuerzas Extranas, Buenos Aires, 1906.
- "The Ceremony". Arthur Machen, Ornaments in Jade, New York: A.A. Knopf, 1924
- "". Walter de la Mare, Monthly Review February ’03; The Riddle, and Other Stories
- "Who Knows?". Guy de Maupassant April 6, 1890
- "The Shadow of the Players". From The Weekend Guide to Wales, Edwin Morgan
- * Based on The Dream of Rhonabwy of the Mabinogion
- "The Cat". H. A. Murena
- "The Story of the Foxes". Niu Chiao
- "The Atonement". Silvina Ocampo, 1961
- "The Man Who Belonged to Me". Giovanni Papini; in Il Trangico Quoticliano, 1906.
- "Rani". Carlos Peralta
- "The Blind Spot". Barry Perowne, EQMM November ’45
- "The Wolf". From the Satyricon, Rome, 60 CE. Petronius
- "The Bust". Manuel Peyrou
- "The Cask of Amontillado", Edgar Allan Poe, Godey's Lady's Book November, 1846
- "The Tiger of Chao-ch’êng". From Liao Chai, 1679, P’u Sung Ling. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, De La Rue, 1880
- "How We Arrived at the Island of Tools". From Gargantua and Pantagruel. François Rabelais, 1564
- "". Saki, The Chronicles of Clovis, John Lane, 1911
- "Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched". May Sinclair, The English Review Oct ’22
- "The Cloth Which Weaves Itself". From Malay Magic. W. W. Skeat, 1900
- "Universal History". From Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon, London: Methuen, 1937
- "A Theologian in Death". Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia, Allen Lane, 1970
- "The Encounter". From the T’ang Dynasty
- "The Three Hermits". Leo Tolstoy, Twenty-Three Tales
- "Macario". B. Traven The Night Visitor, and Other Stories, 1966
- "The Infinite Dream of Pao-Yu". Ts’ao Chan, The Dream of the Red Chamber
- "The Mirror to Wind-and-Moon". Ts’ao Chan, The Dream of the Red Chamber
- "The Desire to Be a Man". Villiers de l’Isle-Adam Contes Cruels, 1883
- "Memnon, or Human Wisdom". Voltaire, 1749; from Romances, Tales and Smaller Pieces of M. de Voltaire, Vol. 1 1794
- "The Man Who Liked Dickens". Evelyn Waugh Hearst's International September ’33
- "Pomegranate Seed". Edith Wharton, The Saturday Evening Post, April 25 ’31
- "Lukundoo" 1907 Edward Lucas White, Weird Tales, November ’25
- "The Donguys". Juan Rodolfo Wilcock
- "". Oscar Wilde, Court and Society Review, May 11, 1887
- "The Sorcerer of the White Lotus Lodge". Richard Wilhelm; translated by F. H. Martens; in Chinesische Volksmaerchen, 1924
- "The Celestial Stag". G. Willoughby-Meade, Chinese Ghouls and Goblins, Constable, 1928
- "Saved by the Book". G. Willoughby-Meade, Chinese Ghouls and Goblins, Constable, 1928
- "The Reanimated Englishman". Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Roger Dodsworth, 1826
- "The Sentence" from Monkey, 16th century, Wu Ch’Eng En; translated by Arthur Waley, 1921
- "The Sorcerers". William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight, Lawrence & Bullen, 1893
- "Fragment" from Don Juan Tenorio'', 1844, José Zorrilla