|
|
|
|
|
American Fantastic Tales:Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (Library of America)
| Our Price |
$ 28.00
|
|
| Retail Value |
$ 35.00 |
|
| You Save |
$ 7.00 (20%) |
|
| Item Number |
781257 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Item Description...
Overview
Gathers a collection of horror tales from the Edwardian era through the pulp heyday of "Weird Tales."
Publishers Description
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 edgesA-if not in the unacknowledged heartA-A-of the everyday. Peter Straub, one of todayA'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 44 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 CramA's A"The Dead Valley,A" Emma Francis DawsonA's A"An Itinerant House,A" and Julian HawthorneA's A"Absolute Evil.A" American Fantastic Tales offers an unforgettable ride through strange and visionary realms.
A"A stupendous, spellbinding reading experience waiting to be had.A" A-Jonathan Lethem |
Item Specifications...
Pages 746
Dimensions: Length: 1.25" Width: 5.5" Height: 8.5"
Weight: 1.4 lbs.
Binding Hardcover
Release Date Oct 1, 2009
ISBN 159853047X
EAN 9781598530476
|
Availability 3 units.
Availability accurate as of May 30, 2012 05:58.
Usually ships within one to two business days from Commerce GA.
Orders shipping to an address other than a confirmed Credit Card / Paypal Billing address may incur and additional processing delay.
|
Product Categories
Similar Products
Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Good collection of Horror Stories...wait, can I say that? Oct 6, 2009 |
These volumes offer an immense amount of excellent material in an attractive and durable format and most horror / supernatural fans will have no doubts about snapping these up. There are a few caveats, some typical of Library of America volumes, and several specifically related to Straub's editorial choices but as long as you don't object too strenuously to these small issues, there is no serious impairment to purchase.
First, LoA never allocates enough space for editors. Straub has a wee tiny 3 page intro and a few biographical notes on the authors at the end of each volume, and there is no preface to each story or end notes on thematic topics. This means you the reader have no idea as to why this author or that specific story is included in the volume. Compared to say "The Dark Descent"'s approach, this parsimony is unfortunate and occasionally frustrating. Why for instance is the peculiar and cloying "Golden Baby" in here? How and why is Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids" a "fantastic tale"? Why select the given Lovecraft story over all others in his repertoire? The absence of thematic notes is a bit more annoying here than in a single author collection as the wide-ranging assortment of tales grouped together without explanation or context can seem especially puzzling due to the wide range of moods and styles found here. Anyway, these are minor issues - the appeal of most stories herein is straightforward, and the reader can always do some follow-up research to assess the reputation and impact of a given writer on the horror field..
Second LoA issue - the limited scope and convenience of textual notes. The LoA series never uses actual numbering of notes in text, so the reader has to flip ahead to the endnotes at the rear of the volume whenever he is confronted with a puzzling line of text. The end notes are pretty sparse and limited, so often one will flip to the end and find nothing. The reader soon tires of flipping back and forth, meaning most of the limited number of end notes are never read by the reader. You can look at the endnotes section after reading each story, but at that point getting info on allusions and references made is rather pointless. As suggested, there could probably be some more endnotes here, and those that are here should be properly numbered within the text - the S.T. Joshi approach found in his annotated Lovecraft for Penguin is still the gold standard.
First Straub issue - the usual "colonial cringe" phenomenon found in broadly scoped genre anthologies, where a mediocre piece by a "big name" gets chucked in to the mix to try to elevate the tone of the collection - "oh, look, John Steinbeck wrote a vampire story, let's include it to show that horror isn't the ghetto that the literati say that it is...". From the genre reader's perspective, if Mr. Steinbeck's hypothetical vampire tale is not a particularly good one, its inclusion is not at all worthwhile, and snooty intellectuals are unlikely to rethink their dearly held prejudices about genre work because a big name tried to pay the bills once by writing something supernatural. In the current volume, the works by Melville, Fitzgerald, and Dawson stand out as being both mediocre tales and also square pegs wedged into roundish holes.
Second Straub issue - as with other Straub anthologies ("Poe's Children"), his editorial tastes run to the more erudite and intellectual, so if your tastes run in a more pulpy direction, you may be saddened to see some works excluded and others included. Of the tales included, the pieces by Crane and Bangs are attempts at high-brow cleverness that fall flat, and the Julian Hawthorne piece is surely the most intellectual and arid approach to that old saw, the werewolf story, that could be imagined.
This content complaint would happen with virtually any anthology though, so this is hardly a significant issue. Finally though, bear in mind these tales are probably 90% what might be called "horror" so if you are hoping for jumping frogs or Rip Van Winkle, you are probably going to be disappointed. Calling this "American Horror Stories" or "American Supernatural Tales" would probably have been more honest, but I suppose "Fantastic Tales" is more upscale.
As with all LoA volumes, the binding, print and paper quality are impeccable and these books are heirloom class items that can readily be passed down to one's descendants. Volume I is highly worthwhile and although it could use more editorial material and more detailed notes better integrated into the text, this collection will provide many hours of good reading and even veteran horror buffs (oops, excuse me, fantastic tale connoisseurs) will find more than a few new delights herein.
| | | Write your own review about American Fantastic Tales:Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (Library of America)
|
Shopping Cart (0 Items)
