teodomo's review against another edition
4.0
Mis favoritos: "Sombras suele vestir" de José Bianco, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" de Jorge Luis Borges, "Un creyente" de George Loring Frost (Borges), "Un hogar sólido" de Elena Garro, "El brujo postergado" de Jorge Luis Borges (renarración del Ejemplo XI de El Conde Lucanor de don Juan Manuel), "Punto muerto" de Philip Atkey (bajo el seudónimo de Barry Perowne) y "El caso del difunto Míster Elvesham" de H. G. Wells.
robinbsmith's review against another edition
4.0
Many interesting stories and odds n ends. This is really more of 3 star for me, except that the highlights were so excellent I had to grant them an extra star. The stories by JG Ballard, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, and B Traven stood out among those I was unfamiliar with.
rolandosmedeiros's review against another edition
5.0
A antologia seminal da Literatura Fantástica, curada por três grandes do seu gênero, é muito mais do que um clássico argentino. A obra revela a pena de escritores escondidos e/ou obscuros que dificilmente você encontra normalmente. Escritores oclusos do Canon, mas que produzem contos par a par com grandes nomes da Literatura Mundial; Giovani Papini, Leopoldo Lugones, Santiago Dabove, May Sinclair, Villiers de L’Isle Adam e Ryunosuke Akutagawa dividem páginas (e não se ofuscam) com H.G Wells, Kipling, Joyce, Poe, Maupassant, Córtazar e muitas outras presenças ilustres; exemplo do refino da seleção dos organizadores.
Eles (Bioy, Ocampo e Borges) também aparecem, cada qual com um ou mais contos autorais (e até com pseudônimos que escrevem a quatro mãos); e não é surpresa para quem os conheça minimamente que também produzam histórias de imensa qualidade: não se auto-inserem apenas por vaidade. Tlon, Uqbar Orbius Tetius do Borges e A Lula Opta por sua Tinta do Bioy figuram as melhores histórias da antologia, e a Ocampo com seu cotidiano-disforme, não fica para trás.
Viaja-se na biblioteca destes três argentinos, através de autores das mais diversas nacionalidades e das mais diversas épocas, não só em contos, mas também em enxertos, microcontos, peças de teatro e até relatos que ficam na margem da ficção e da realidade. O livro perpassa pelos Contos Orientais, pela magia das Mil e Uma Noites, por Petronio e seu Satyricon, e estende-se até o modernismo, com Os Mortos, do Joyce. (No entanto, ele fica por aí. O Manguel por exemplo, inspirado por este livro, "pega" da onde nossos curadores pararam, no seu "Book of Fantastic Literature", de dois grandes volumes)
Os contos foram todos traduzidos (alguns inéditos) pelos autores da antologia, que também conta com uma ótima introdução do Bioy sobre como ela foi concebida e sobre a literatura fantástica como um todo; outras edições contam até com uma introdução da Úrsula K. Le Guin;
Só seguindo pelo sumário a lista de autores, e indo atrás de suas principais obras (fantásticas ou não), você já tem uma boa lista de leitura para praticamente o resto da vida. É um livro que eu recomendaria para qualquer um.
Eles (Bioy, Ocampo e Borges) também aparecem, cada qual com um ou mais contos autorais (e até com pseudônimos que escrevem a quatro mãos); e não é surpresa para quem os conheça minimamente que também produzam histórias de imensa qualidade: não se auto-inserem apenas por vaidade. Tlon, Uqbar Orbius Tetius do Borges e A Lula Opta por sua Tinta do Bioy figuram as melhores histórias da antologia, e a Ocampo com seu cotidiano-disforme, não fica para trás.
Viaja-se na biblioteca destes três argentinos, através de autores das mais diversas nacionalidades e das mais diversas épocas, não só em contos, mas também em enxertos, microcontos, peças de teatro e até relatos que ficam na margem da ficção e da realidade. O livro perpassa pelos Contos Orientais, pela magia das Mil e Uma Noites, por Petronio e seu Satyricon, e estende-se até o modernismo, com Os Mortos, do Joyce. (No entanto, ele fica por aí. O Manguel por exemplo, inspirado por este livro, "pega" da onde nossos curadores pararam, no seu "Book of Fantastic Literature", de dois grandes volumes)
Os contos foram todos traduzidos (alguns inéditos) pelos autores da antologia, que também conta com uma ótima introdução do Bioy sobre como ela foi concebida e sobre a literatura fantástica como um todo; outras edições contam até com uma introdução da Úrsula K. Le Guin;
Só seguindo pelo sumário a lista de autores, e indo atrás de suas principais obras (fantásticas ou não), você já tem uma boa lista de leitura para praticamente o resto da vida. É um livro que eu recomendaria para qualquer um.
lajuana_'s review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
Excelente compilación, textos diversos y muy bien elegidos.
megapolisomancy's review against another edition
3.0
81 stories in 384 pages. That averages out to 4.74 pages per story, but in fact half of the pieces here are roughly a page or less - fragments, folk tales, myths, very brief allegories, and so on. I can’t fully articulate why this was so disappointing to me, but it made the book feel rather empty and ephemeral. Of the remaining, fuller stories, many just fell flat for me, and several others I read relatively recently in Alberto Manguel’s [b:Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature|53080|Black Water The Book of Fantastic Literature|Alberto Manguel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327905055l/53080._SY75_.jpg|51764] (a collection about which I had similar reservations, and which appears to have been inspired by this one). It also bears noting that the 1988 English edition published by Carroll & Graf, with an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin, has a truly astounding number of typos, climaxing with the transposition of a number of pages at the end of the Oscar Wilde story.
The first edition of this book came out in Argentina in 1940 (Antología de la Literatura Fantástica), and I’ve seen it claimed that this is the first anthology to use the word “fantasy” to describe a collection of “genre” works, but I don’t know how accurate that is. I also don’t know if it was Le Guin or the original editors who selected the newer materials added to this edition - it appears that updated versions were published in 1965 and 1976.
Because I love quantifying things, I will also tell you that of these 81 pieces, 15 are by Latin American authors, 57 are by European/North Americans, 9 are by Asians, and 0 are by Africans, Australians, or Native Americans. Note that several of the European-written works are actually derived from Asian folklore, though.
Maybe “slight” is the word I’m looking for to describe many of these. Borges once said that there is “a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition," and while I’m not sure that this is a sentiment with which I agree, I can see how it would lead to a collection of this sort. For example, the following selection from James Frazer’s study of mythology, The Golden Bough, does not, in my view, add anything to the collection, or impart much of anything to the reader, it just proves how wide-ranging and useless the wisps collected here can be:
A fourth story, taken down near Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always. For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up, till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink. But die she could not. At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church. And there she still hangs, in the church of St Mary, at Lübeck. She is as small as a mouse, but once a year she stirs.
If you find reading something like that without any kind of context enjoyable, this book is for you - “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like,” and so on. This quote, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln for some reason, actually originates with Max Beerbohm, which brings me to the part of the review where I actually talk about the stories that resonated with me enough to bother writing about.
The stories are presented alphabetically by author, so just to give you a better idea of what we’re dealing with here, here’s what we start with:
We open with “Sennin,” (1952) by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, which is a 3-page reworked koan about a wanderer who wishes to become a sennin (a kind of wise, mystical hermit). A doctor and his wife lie and say they will teach him to do so if he acts as their slave for 20 years - after this period is over the wife tells him to leap from the top of a tree, but instead of killing him his belief transforms him into a sennin. Next is Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “A Woman Alone with Her Soul” (1912), about which you should read Maureen’s review. This is followed by Leonid Andreyev’s “Ben-Tobith” (1916, text available here as “On The Day of the Crucifixion”), which is the story of a man in Jerusalem who has a crippling toothache on the day of the Crucifixion. John Aubrey’s “The Phantom Basket” (1696) is another entry that I can just reproduce in its entirety:
Mr Trahern B.D. (Chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman Lord Keeper) a Learn’d and sober Person, was the Son of a Shoe-maker in Hereford: One night as he lay in Bed, the Moon shining very bright, he saw the Phantome of one of the Apprentices sitting in a Chair in his red Wastcoat, and Headband about his Head, and Strap upon his Knee; which Apprentice was really abed and asleep with another Fellow-apprentice in the same Chamber, and saw him. The Fellow was Living 1671. Another time, as he was in Bed he saw a Basket come Sailing in the Air along by the Valence of his Bed; I think he said there was Fruit in the Basket: It was a Phantome. From himself.
J. G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” (1964) examines, in a quintessentially Ballardian clinically-detached manner, the decay of a giant human corpse that washes up on the beach following a storm. Initially an object of great spectacle, it soon becomes just another part of the landscape, vandalized by teenagers, treated as a playground by children, dismantled by profiteers, then taken for granted and eventually forgotten altogether by everyone except for the narrator.
Which brings us back around to Max Beerbohm. His “Enoch Soames” (1916), also collected in Black Water, is a fantastic examination of a desperately untalented author who sells his soul to the devil in order to have a glimpse of his place in posterity by transporting him briefly to the reading room of the British Museum 100 years hence: June 3rd, 1997. It’s also a delightfully Borgesian approach to metafiction: the narrator of the story is Max Beerbohm of 1916 (a real person), looking back on his association with Enoch Soames (fiction) around the turn of the century. The artist William Rothenstein (real) also figures in the story, in which he draws a portrait of the fictional Soames, which the real Rothenstein actually did create in 1916, backdated to the 1890s. In the future, the one reference Soames can find to himself is as the fictional centerpiece of the story “Enoch Soames,” by Max Beerbohm.
From the vantage point of 2013 I can also report that on June 3rd, 1997, the magician Teller (of Penn and fame), waiting with a crowd of fellow Beerbohm fans in the Reading Room at the appointed time, saw a man matching the description of Soames looking desperately through the bookstacks (later reported in the article “Being a faithful account of the events of the designated day, when the man who had disappeared was expected briefly to return” - some have claimed this man was an actor hired by Teller, but Teller is keeping his mouth shut).
If only this collection had had more of this kind of labyrinthine metafiction, but I think it’s just this one, Aldrich’s story, and one other presented with a fictional author, which name is presumably a pseudonym for one of the editors.
I’ll write up some things about the other stories that stuck with me enough to invite comment later.
The first edition of this book came out in Argentina in 1940 (Antología de la Literatura Fantástica), and I’ve seen it claimed that this is the first anthology to use the word “fantasy” to describe a collection of “genre” works, but I don’t know how accurate that is. I also don’t know if it was Le Guin or the original editors who selected the newer materials added to this edition - it appears that updated versions were published in 1965 and 1976.
Because I love quantifying things, I will also tell you that of these 81 pieces, 15 are by Latin American authors, 57 are by European/North Americans, 9 are by Asians, and 0 are by Africans, Australians, or Native Americans. Note that several of the European-written works are actually derived from Asian folklore, though.
Maybe “slight” is the word I’m looking for to describe many of these. Borges once said that there is “a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition," and while I’m not sure that this is a sentiment with which I agree, I can see how it would lead to a collection of this sort. For example, the following selection from James Frazer’s study of mythology, The Golden Bough, does not, in my view, add anything to the collection, or impart much of anything to the reader, it just proves how wide-ranging and useless the wisps collected here can be:
A fourth story, taken down near Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always. For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up, till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink. But die she could not. At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church. And there she still hangs, in the church of St Mary, at Lübeck. She is as small as a mouse, but once a year she stirs.
If you find reading something like that without any kind of context enjoyable, this book is for you - “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like,” and so on. This quote, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln for some reason, actually originates with Max Beerbohm, which brings me to the part of the review where I actually talk about the stories that resonated with me enough to bother writing about.
The stories are presented alphabetically by author, so just to give you a better idea of what we’re dealing with here, here’s what we start with:
We open with “Sennin,” (1952) by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, which is a 3-page reworked koan about a wanderer who wishes to become a sennin (a kind of wise, mystical hermit). A doctor and his wife lie and say they will teach him to do so if he acts as their slave for 20 years - after this period is over the wife tells him to leap from the top of a tree, but instead of killing him his belief transforms him into a sennin. Next is Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “A Woman Alone with Her Soul” (1912), about which you should read Maureen’s review. This is followed by Leonid Andreyev’s “Ben-Tobith” (1916, text available here as “On The Day of the Crucifixion”), which is the story of a man in Jerusalem who has a crippling toothache on the day of the Crucifixion. John Aubrey’s “The Phantom Basket” (1696) is another entry that I can just reproduce in its entirety:
Mr Trahern B.D. (Chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman Lord Keeper) a Learn’d and sober Person, was the Son of a Shoe-maker in Hereford: One night as he lay in Bed, the Moon shining very bright, he saw the Phantome of one of the Apprentices sitting in a Chair in his red Wastcoat, and Headband about his Head, and Strap upon his Knee; which Apprentice was really abed and asleep with another Fellow-apprentice in the same Chamber, and saw him. The Fellow was Living 1671. Another time, as he was in Bed he saw a Basket come Sailing in the Air along by the Valence of his Bed; I think he said there was Fruit in the Basket: It was a Phantome. From himself.
J. G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” (1964) examines, in a quintessentially Ballardian clinically-detached manner, the decay of a giant human corpse that washes up on the beach following a storm. Initially an object of great spectacle, it soon becomes just another part of the landscape, vandalized by teenagers, treated as a playground by children, dismantled by profiteers, then taken for granted and eventually forgotten altogether by everyone except for the narrator.
Which brings us back around to Max Beerbohm. His “Enoch Soames” (1916), also collected in Black Water, is a fantastic examination of a desperately untalented author who sells his soul to the devil in order to have a glimpse of his place in posterity by transporting him briefly to the reading room of the British Museum 100 years hence: June 3rd, 1997. It’s also a delightfully Borgesian approach to metafiction: the narrator of the story is Max Beerbohm of 1916 (a real person), looking back on his association with Enoch Soames (fiction) around the turn of the century. The artist William Rothenstein (real) also figures in the story, in which he draws a portrait of the fictional Soames, which the real Rothenstein actually did create in 1916, backdated to the 1890s. In the future, the one reference Soames can find to himself is as the fictional centerpiece of the story “Enoch Soames,” by Max Beerbohm.
From the vantage point of 2013 I can also report that on June 3rd, 1997, the magician Teller (of Penn and fame), waiting with a crowd of fellow Beerbohm fans in the Reading Room at the appointed time, saw a man matching the description of Soames looking desperately through the bookstacks (later reported in the article “Being a faithful account of the events of the designated day, when the man who had disappeared was expected briefly to return” - some have claimed this man was an actor hired by Teller, but Teller is keeping his mouth shut).
If only this collection had had more of this kind of labyrinthine metafiction, but I think it’s just this one, Aldrich’s story, and one other presented with a fictional author, which name is presumably a pseudonym for one of the editors.
I’ll write up some things about the other stories that stuck with me enough to invite comment later.
fevi's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
4.0
Há muitos contos bons e existem aqueles que a gente ignora. No entanto, os contos bons chamaram tanto a minha atenção que acabaram apagando os que foram ruins ou insignificantes. Os autores fizeram uma seleção considerável. É uma leitura agradável. Há momentos de muita surpresa e/ou medo e o arrebatamento que só o fantástico consegue nos tirar. Fica a recomendação.
avinsh10's review against another edition
5.0
Besides Borges, I wasn't well acquainted with works of Ocampo or Casares. So, I was spellbound reading Casares's science fictionesque The Squid in its Own Ink and Silvina's dark romance The Atonement. They blended originality with tropes that came before to create such masterpieces. It's even more fascinating to learn about the stories that made such a strong impression on these writers. Ursula Le Guin's fantastic introduction lays the foundation for what to expect.But this book, surpasses even those expectations.
I'll try my best to express what fantasy means by categorizing these short stories.
Dreams:
Several stories here, blur the line between dreams and reality. Whether it be aspirational or REM state dreams.
1. Sennin by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
2. The Man Who collected the First of September, 1973 by Tor Age Bringsvaerd
3. The Tale and the Poet by Sir Richard Burton
4. The Red King's Dream by Lewis Carroll
5. The Dream of the Butterfly by Chuang Tzu
6. The Infinite Dream of Pao-yu by Tsao Hsueh-Chin
7. The Sentence-Wu Ch'eng En
Satirical & Witty Tales:
Some writers come up with such an absurd plot, that it might surprise you, make you laugh or even produce a melancholic response.
1. Enoach Soames by Max Beerbohm
2. Earth's Holocaust by Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse folk by Franz Kafka
4. Lord Arthur Saville's Crime by Oscar Wilde
5. Horses of Abdera by Leopoldo Lugones
Horror, Suspense and Psychological:
Sometimes you're stunned by either overwhelming sensation of dread or freakish apathy towards existential crisis. And, sometimes you may need to overcome the ghost's of one's past or fear of the unknown. Welcome to the twilight zone!!
1. The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacob
2. The Return of Imray by Rudyard Kipling
3. Pomegranate Seeds by Edith Wharton
4. House Taken Over by Julio Cortazar
5. Anything you want! by Leon Bloy
6. Macario by B. Traven
7. Ben-Tobith by Leonid Andreyev
8. The Music on the Hill by H.H. Munro(Saki)
9. Lukundoo by E.L White
10. The Donguys by Juan Rodolfo Wilcock
11. The Man who likes Dickens by Evelyn Waugh
12. The Drowned Giant by J.G. Ballard
13. Being Dust by Santiago Dabove
Though provoking & moralistic:
Last but not the least, these type stories are open to interpretation, they're left to our imagination.
1. Before the Law by Franz Kafka
2. The Riddle by Walter de la Mare
3. The Tree of Pride & Tower of Babel by G.K Chesterton
4. A Parable of Gluttony & The Persecution of the Master by Alexandra David-Neel
There are many more nuggets of phantasy in this precious encyclopedia that are waiting to be revisited. Categorizing them is just like scanning the human body with various tools, you only understand bits and pieces but not the whole.
Regards,
Vinay
I'll try my best to express what fantasy means by categorizing these short stories.
Dreams:
Several stories here, blur the line between dreams and reality. Whether it be aspirational or REM state dreams.
1. Sennin by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
2. The Man Who collected the First of September, 1973 by Tor Age Bringsvaerd
3. The Tale and the Poet by Sir Richard Burton
4. The Red King's Dream by Lewis Carroll
5. The Dream of the Butterfly by Chuang Tzu
6. The Infinite Dream of Pao-yu by Tsao Hsueh-Chin
7. The Sentence-Wu Ch'eng En
Satirical & Witty Tales:
Some writers come up with such an absurd plot, that it might surprise you, make you laugh or even produce a melancholic response.
1. Enoach Soames by Max Beerbohm
2. Earth's Holocaust by Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse folk by Franz Kafka
4. Lord Arthur Saville's Crime by Oscar Wilde
5. Horses of Abdera by Leopoldo Lugones
Horror, Suspense and Psychological:
Sometimes you're stunned by either overwhelming sensation of dread or freakish apathy towards existential crisis. And, sometimes you may need to overcome the ghost's of one's past or fear of the unknown. Welcome to the twilight zone!!
1. The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacob
2. The Return of Imray by Rudyard Kipling
3. Pomegranate Seeds by Edith Wharton
4. House Taken Over by Julio Cortazar
5. Anything you want! by Leon Bloy
6. Macario by B. Traven
7. Ben-Tobith by Leonid Andreyev
8. The Music on the Hill by H.H. Munro(Saki)
9. Lukundoo by E.L White
10. The Donguys by Juan Rodolfo Wilcock
11. The Man who likes Dickens by Evelyn Waugh
12. The Drowned Giant by J.G. Ballard
13. Being Dust by Santiago Dabove
Though provoking & moralistic:
Last but not the least, these type stories are open to interpretation, they're left to our imagination.
1. Before the Law by Franz Kafka
2. The Riddle by Walter de la Mare
3. The Tree of Pride & Tower of Babel by G.K Chesterton
4. A Parable of Gluttony & The Persecution of the Master by Alexandra David-Neel
There are many more nuggets of phantasy in this precious encyclopedia that are waiting to be revisited. Categorizing them is just like scanning the human body with various tools, you only understand bits and pieces but not the whole.
Regards,
Vinay
gio_shelves's review against another edition
2.0
C'è un motivo se ci ho messo una vita a finire questo libro. Purtroppo infatti per quanto alcuni dei racconti selezionati siano davvero interessanti molti mi sono sembrati piuttosto noiosi. Mi aspettavo molto di più.
nidwae's review against another edition
4.0
Sin duda, una gran antología, de mucha inventiva. Mi favorito ha sido el relato de Silvina Ocampo ❤️