little box … of no remarkable character: Edgar Allan Poe. “Berenice,” Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Vintage, 1975): 647.
To make strange, to defamiliarize. Paraphrased from Victor Shklovsky, translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. “Art as Technique” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965): 13.
devouring blaze of lights: Edith Wharton. “Pomegranate Seed” in The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973): 200.
the uncertain hold of a ship: Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann. “The Stoker,” in Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Penguin Group, 2007): 58.
If you wish to guess what our ancestors felt: Virginia Wolff. “The Supernatural in Fiction,” in Granite and Rainbow: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1975): 63.
ruins, or moonlight, or ghosts: ibid: 63.
But what is it that we are afraid of?: ibid: 63.
against the kingdom of the quotidian: Bruno Schulz, translated by Jerzy Ficowski. The Street of Crocodiles (New York: Penguin USA, 1997): 21.
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“The Sand-man,” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, translated by J. T. Bealby, Weird Tales, Vol. 1, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885.
“On the Water,” by Guy de Maupassant. English translation copyright © Edward Gauvin 2014. Used by permission of the translator.
“Oysters,” by Anton Chekhov. English translation copyright © 1922 by Constance Garnett. Reprinted by permission of A P Watt at United Agents on behalf of the Executor of the Estate of Constance Garnett.
“Pomegranate Seed,” by Edith Whaston. Copyright © 1931 by The Curtis Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.
“The Stoker,” from Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka. English translation copyright © 2007 by Michael Hofmann. Used by permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, and Penguin Books Ltd.
“Decay,” by Marjorie Bowen. Copyright © 1923. Used by permission of the Estate of Gabrielle Long.
“The Music of Erich Zann,” by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Originally published in National Amateur in 1922. Copyright © 1922 the Estate of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Used by permission of Arkham Publishing House, Inc.
“The Birds,” by Bruno Schulz. English translation copyright © 2013 by John Curran Davis. Used by permission of the translator.
“The Usher,” by Felisberto Hernández, from Piano Stories. Copyright © 1993, 2014 by the heirs of Felisberto Hernández; “El acomodador,” NADIE ENCENDÍA LAS LÁMPARAS, copyright © 2013 by the heirs of Felisberto Hernández. Translation copyright © 1993 by Luis Harss. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
“The Waiting Room,” by Robert Aickman. Copyright © Estate of Robert Aickman c/o Artellus Limited, www.artellusltd.co.uk. Used by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd., and Artellus Limited.
“Paranoia,” by Shirley Jackson. First published in The New Yorker, August 5, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Laurence Hyman, on behalf of the copyright proprietors, successors-in-interest of the author, Shirley Jackson. Used by permission.
“The Helper,” by Joan Aiken. From The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories. Copyright © 1979 by Joan Aiken Enterprises, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Small Beer Press.
“The Jesters,” by Joyce Carol Oates. Copyright © 2013 The Ontario Review, reprinted by permission of John Hawkins and Associates, Inc.
“The Devil and Dr. Tuberose,” by John Herdman, from Imelda and Other Stories. Copyright © 1993 by John Herdman. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Phantoms,” by Steven Millhauser. Copyright © 2010 by Steven Millhauser. Used by Permission. All rights reserved.
“On Jacob’s Ladder,” by Steve Stern, from The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories. Copyright © 2012 by Steve Stern. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
“The Panic Hand,” by Jonathan Carroll. Copyright © 1990 by Jonathan Carroll. Used by permission of The Richard Parks Agency and Open Road Media.
“Moriya,” by Dean Paschal, from By the Light of the Jukebox: Stories. Copyright © 2002 by Dean Paschal. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Puppets,” by Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris. “Les Marionettes” from Les Lettres du Baron by Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris. Copyright © 1994 by Julliard. Used by permission of Julliard. Translation copyright © 2014 by Edward Gauvin. Translation used by permission of the translator.
“Old Mrs. J,” by Yoko Ogawa, from Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, published by Picador and by Harvill Secker. English translation copyright © 2013 by Stephen Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Picador and by the Random House Group Limited.
“Whitework,” by Kate Bernheimer. Copyright © 2010 by Kate Bernheimer. Reprinted by permission from Horse, Flower, Bird (Coffee House Press, 2010).
“Stone Animals,” by Kelly Link, originally published in Conjunctions 43, and reprinted in Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners (Random House). Copyright © 2004 by Kelly Link. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Tiger Mending,” by Aimee Bender, from The Color Master: Stories, by Aimee Bender. Copyright © 2013 by Aimee Bender. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing group, a division of Random House LLC, and by Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner Literary Agency. All rights reserved.
“The Black Square,” by Chris Adrian. Originally appeared in McSweeney’s. Copyright © 2009 by Chris Adrian. Used by permission of the author.
“Foundation,” by China Miéville, from Looking for Jake: Stories, by China Miéville. Copyright © 2005 by China Miéville. Used by permission of Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, and Pan, an imprint of Panmacmillan. All rights reserved.
“Gothic Night,” by Mansoura Ez Eldin. “Layl Qouti.” Copyright © 2011, 2013 by Mansoura Ez Eldin. English translation copyright © 2011 by Wiam El-Tamami. Reprinted by Permission.
“Reindeer Mountain,” by Karin Tidbeck. Copyright © 2012 by Karin Tidbeck. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Muzungu,” by C. Namwali Serpell. Originally appeared in Callaloo. Copyright © 2007 by Namwali Serpell. Used by permission of the author.
“Haunting Olivia,” by Karen Russell, from St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories. Copyright © 2006 by Karen Russell. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC and by the Random House Group Limited. All rights reserved.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. In the event of inadvertent omissions or errors, the editor should be notified at the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CHRIS ADRIAN is the author of three novels: Gob’s Grief, The Children’s Hospital, and The Great Night, and a collection of short stories, A Better Angel. He lives in New York, where he works as a pediatric oncologist.
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ROBERT AICKMAN (1914–1981) was born in London into a literary family and sustained in his early writing efforts by his mother’s encouragement. Originally trained as an architect, he ultimately made his way into work in the literary and performing arts and became a major figure in English canal-system conservation and restoration. Over the span of this multifaceted career, he published nearly fifty “strange stories”—his own term for his work—and is today considered one of the modern masters of weird fiction. Fritz Leiber called him “weatherman of the unconscious.” Among Aickman’s other published works are two novels (The Late Breakfasters and The Model), two volumes of memoir (The Attempted Rescue and The River Runs Uphill), and two books on the canals of England (Know Your Waterways and The Story of Our Inland Waterways). Aickman’s story in this volume, “The Waiti
ng Room,” appeared in his first solo collection, Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories, in 1964.
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JOAN AIKEN (1924–2004) was born in Rye, Sussex, England, into a literary family: her father was the poet and writer Conrad Aiken; and her siblings, the novelists Jane Aiken Hodge and John Aiken. Aiken herself began writing at the age of five, and her first collection of stories, All You’ve Ever Wanted, was published in 1953. After her first husband’s death, Aiken supported her family by copyediting at Argosy and working at an advertising agency before turning to writing fiction full-time. She went on to write for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and many other magazines. She wrote over a hundred books and is perhaps best known for the dozen novels in the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. She won the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards for fiction and in 1999 she received an MBE from the Queen for her services to children’s literature. “The Helper” was originally published in Aiken’s 1979 collection, A Touch of Chill (Gollancz), and was reprinted in 2011 in the posthumous collection The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories (Small Beer Press).
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AIMEE BENDER is the author of five books, including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. The most recent, The Color Master, was recently named a New York Times Notable Book of 2013. “Tiger Mending” was inspired by a painting by Amy Cutler of the same name. The image and even tattoos of it are findable online.
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KATE BERNHEIMER is the author of the story collection Horse, Flower, Bird (Coffee House Press, 2010, with illustrations by Rikki Ducornet) and a novel trilogy that concluded recently with The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold (FC2, 2011). How a Mother Weaned a Girl from Fairy Tales, a new story collection, was published by Coffee House Press in 2014. She has also edited the World Fantasy Award–winning My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin, 2010) and xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (Penguin, 2013), among other books.
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AMBROSE BIERCE (1842–1914?) was born in Horse Cave, Ohio, and spent most of his childhood in Indiana. He fought in several of the major battles of the American Civil War and after the war headed west, settling in San Francisco, where in the years to come he would establish his reputation as one of the nation’s best—and fiercest—journalistic satirists. All the while he continued to produce and publish stories ranging from the realistic to the supernatural and macabre. Among his best-known works are the Civil War stories published in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891), and The Devil’s Dictionary (1906). “One of Twins” was originally published in The San Francisco Examiner on October 28, 1888, and was included in Bierce’s 1893 collection of supernatural tales, Can Such Things Be? In the last two decades of his life, Bierce suffered a series of personal tragedies, including the deaths of two of his children, and in 1909 he ended his relationship with The San Francisco Examiner and began to travel. In some of his last correspondence he suggested he might go to Mexico, and the postscript of his last known letter, dated December 26, 1913, and purportedly sent from Chihuahua, Mexico, says only this: “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.”
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MARJORIE BOWEN (GABRIELLE MARGARET VERE CAMPBELL LONG, 1885–1952) was born on Hayling Island, Hampshire, England. A self-taught writer who availed herself of libraries and museums from an early age, Bowen supported her family through the writing of more than 150 volumes ranging from tales of the weird and supernatural, historical novels, and mysteries to biography and popular history. She composed under several pen names, including Joseph Shearing and George Preedy. Although her work has fallen into obscurity, she was greatly admired by critics and writers of her day, including Graham Greene and Rebecca West. Greene, who read Bowen’s first novel, The Viper of Milan, when he was fourteen years old, considered it one of the great influences on his own writing career.
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JONATHAN CARROLL has written twenty books and lives in Vienna, Austria.
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ANTON CHEKHOV (1860–1904) was born in Taganrog, in the Russian Empire, the son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf. A practicing physician for most of his writing life, he once said, “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress.” Until his death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, he produced several hundred short stories, novellas, and works for the stage, among them such classic works as “The Lady with the Pet Dog” and “In the Ravine” and the plays Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, and The Seagull. “Oysters,” written in 1884 when Chekhov was in medical school, is almost hallucinatory in its evocation of an impoverished and hungry child’s first encounter with an unfamiliar word—and an equally unfamiliar food. Fames, a term that appears early in the story, is Latin for “hunger.” Uncannily, twenty years after this story was published, Chekhov’s body was returned to Moscow by train from Badenweiler, Germany, in a freight car labeled “For Oysters Only.”
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JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DUCHON-DORIS Trained as a lawyer and now a judge in Marseilles, Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris is the author of three story collections and seven novels. He is chiefly known for his popular literary historical mysteries featuring, in one instance, a Perrault copycat killer; and in another, Napoléon’s chef Antonin Carême, who is credited with inventing haute cuisine. The stories in Duchor-Doris’ Goncourt-winning Les Lettres du Baron (Juillard, 1994), an interconnected collection, take the form of dead letters to addresses that Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s renovations erased from Paris.
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MANSOURA EZ ELDIN is an Egyptian journalist and author of short stories and novels. Her work has been translated into a number of languages, including an English translation of Maryam’s Maze (AUC Press, 2007). In 2009, the Beirut39 project selected Ez Eldin as one of the 39 best Arab authors below the age of forty. In 2010, her second novel, Beyond Paradise, was shortlisted for the prestigious Arabic Booker Prize and was translated into German (Unions Verlag, 2011) and Italian (Piemme, 2011). Ez Eldin’s third novel, The Emerald Mountain, was out at the beginning of 2014 and her collection of short stories The Path to Madness won the award of the best Egyptian collection of short stories in 2013.
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JOHN HERDMAN was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated there and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read English and later took his Ph.D. He is a novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. His fiction includes A Truth Lover (1973), Pagan’s Pilgrimage (1978), Imelda and Other Stories (1993), Ghostwriting (1996), and The Sinister Cabaret (2001), and his most recent story collection is My Wife’s Lovers (2007). As a critic he has published a study of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Voice Without Restraint (1982) and The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1990), as well as much work on modern Scottish literature. Another Country (2013) is a memoir of literary-political life in Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s. John Herdman is a former Creative Writing Fellow at Edinburgh University and now lives with his wife in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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FELISBERTO HERNÁNDEZ (1902–1964) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. A talented (and self-taught) pianist, he began playing in the silent-screen movie theaters when he was twelve years old and later toured the small concert halls of Uruguay and Argentina. He married four times, published seven books, and died, impoverished, in 1964. His short stories went largely unnoticed during his lifetime, but his fiction has had a profound influence on many great twentieth-century authors, including Julie Cortásar, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. The latter once wrote: “If I hadn’t read the stories of Felisberto Hernández in 1950, I wouldn’t be the writer I am today.” “The Usher” is part of the collection Piano Stories, reissued by New Directions Publishing in January 2014.
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ERNST THEODOR AMADEUS HOFFMANN (1776–1822) Born in Königsberg, Prussia, Hoffmann was not only an accomplished writer of hallucinatory tales blurring the lines between the quotidian and the fantastic but also a composer, conductor
, music critic, theater director, and set designer. A civil servant by day, he lost several governmental posts due to his habit of making fun of the authorities in print. He died at the age of forty-six, paralyzed in his legs and hands, dictating his last story and telling jokes to his friends. He has influenced writers from Dostoyevsky to Barthelme and beyond. “The Sand-Man,” which first appeared in his book Nachtstücke (Night Pieces), vol. 1, is discussed at length in Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny.”
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SHIRLEY JACKSON (1916–1965) wrote more than one hundred novels, short stories, and plays, including the iconic “The Lottery.” In her works she often explored themes of psychological turmoil, isolation, prejudice, and the inequity of fate. Many of Jackson’s works take place in the small, xenophobic towns of New England, where she and her husband, Professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote and taught. Her major works include the novels We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, now regarded as “the quintessential haunted house tale.” Dorothy Parker called Jackson “unparalleled as a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders.” The Library of America recently honored Jackson by publishing an anthology of her literary works, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. The Jackson family has been carefully combing through the voluminous material that their mother had left behind—fifty-two cartons containing nearly seventy-five hundred items, which are archived at the Library of Congress. “Paranoia” is one of the previously unpublished stories that the Jackson family found; its publication in The New Yorker in August 2013 represented the first time that Jackson had been published in the magazine in sixty years.
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FRANZ KAFKA (1883–1924) is best known for such stories as Metamorphosis, “The Hunger Artist,” and “In the Penal Colony,” as well as the novels The Trial and The Castle. Critic Erich Heller once described him as “the creator of the most obscure lucidity in the history of literature,” and it is perhaps no accident that the term “Kafkaesque”—however misused—has so thoroughly entered the daily lexicon. Born into a Jewish family in Prague, Kafka studied at German-language schools and Charles University, earning a law degree there in 1906. An insurance official for most of his life, he pursued his writing late at night. “The Stoker” (1913) is one of the few of Kafka’s works to see publication during his lifetime and is the first chapter of his projected novel, Amerika/The Man Who Disappeared. That this novel and many other of Kafka’s works are with us today we owe to his friend Max Brod, who found himself unable to fulfill Kafka’s final wish: the destruction of all his unpublished and unfinished manuscripts.
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