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KELLY LINK is the author of the story collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters, as well as the founder, with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, of Small Beer Press. A fourth collection of stories, Get in Trouble, is forthcoming from Random House in 2015.
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H. P. LOVECRAFT (HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT, 1890–1937) is widely recognized as one of the most significant horror writers of the twentieth century. Lovecraft created the “Cthulhu Mythos,” a sprawling universe populated by insane, indifferent, and unknowable horrors. Lovecraft freely lent his creation to his many protégés and correspondents, among them Robert Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian) and Robert Bloch (author of Psycho). Lovecraft also penned Supernatural Horror in Literature, one of the first substantive examinations of the horror genre. In this seminal essay, Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Lovecraft died in poverty in 1937, but today his influence can be felt widely in popular culture and in the work of many of the finest contemporary writers of the weird and the supernatural.
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HENRI-RENÉ-ALBERT-GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850–1893) is considered a founding father of the modern short story. In a legendary dozen-year creative run from 1880 to his death, Maupassant penned more than three hundred short stories, of which just over a tenth are fantastical, as well as six novels, starting with Une Vie (A Woman’s Life). He was raised by his mother, who risked the then-public shame of divorce to escape his abusive father. At the age of eighteen, he saved Swinburne from drowning, for which the English poet, among other displays of gratitude, introduced him to that macabre artifact a dried human hand, which Maupassant later came to own and which features in no fewer than three of his tales. Flaubert took the author under his wing as a protégé. “On the Water” dates from the March 1876 issue of Le Bulletin Français, under the title “In a Dinghy,” and in 1881 was collected in the author’s first book of stories, La Maison Tellier. At a time when river life was favored by leisured society, Maupassant himself was an avid boater and a regular at the floating café La Grenouillère, depicted by both Monet and Renoir.
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CHINA MIÉVILLE is the award-winning author of several novels, including The City & the City, Embassytown, and Railsea, and of various short stories. His nonfiction includes the book Between Equal Rights, a study of international law; and the essay “London’s Overthrow,” on London after the riots of 2011.
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STEVEN MILLHAUSER is the author of twelve works of fiction, including Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, and, most recently, We Others: New and Selected Stories. His work has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and other publications. His story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist. He teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
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JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities, Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
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YOKO OGAWA is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collection Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, in which “Old Mrs. J” appears. Her novels include The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, and Hotel Iris. Her fiction has won every major Japanese literary award and has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor was adapted into a film, The Professor’s Beloved Equation. She lives in Ashiya, Japan, with her husband and son.
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DEAN PASCHAL, originally from Albany, Georgia, now lives in New Orleans, where he works as an emergency room physician. “Moriya,” included in this volume, was his first published story and was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 2003. He has a book of short stories, By the Light of the Jukebox, which was brought out by Ontario Review Press in 2002—the stories in which have appeared in many anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize, Press 53’s Surreal South, Norton’s New Sudden Fiction, and Portals Press’ Something in the Water. His novel, The Frog Surgeon, was released in September of 2013 by Portals Press, New Orleans.
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EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849) was born to traveling actors in Boston and, after their deaths, raised by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. He published his first book, Tamerlane, at the age of eighteen. After a brief period at West Point, Poe began his lifelong work as a writer, magazine editor, and critical reviewer for literary magazines. Widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story, a pioneer of modern science fiction, and the nation’s first great literary critic, Poe also helped usher the gothic tale into the modern era by shifting its settings from ancient castles to houses, libraries, and schools and by bringing a terrifying psychological realism to the horror story. “Berenice”—one of his most violent and disturbing stories—first appeared in 1835 in The Southern Literary Messenger and was later included in volume 2 of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, volume 1 of which contained such well-known stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” and “MS Found in a Bottle.” Poe died at the age of forty, under mysterious circumstances, in Baltimore, Maryland.
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KAREN RUSSELL is the author of three books, including the story collections St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006) and Vampires in the Lemon Grove (2013). Her novel, Swamplandia, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was included in the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in such publications as The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and Oxford American. Recipient of a 2013 MacArthur Foundation grant, she lives in New York and has taught writing and literature at several universities and colleges, including Columbia University, Williams College, Bard College, and Bryn Mawr.
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BRUNO SCHULZ (1892–1942) was born into a family of cloth merchants who owned a shop on the market square of Drohobycz. Schulz rarely left the town; although the town itself would pass in his lifetime from Austrian, to Polish, to Soviet, and to Nazi jurisdiction. Schulz became an art teacher there, at his old school. He wrote his stories there, mythologized accounts of his own childhood, which recount the progressive illness of his aging father and the family’s descent into financial ruin, stories populated by outré relatives and townspeople who testify richly to a way of life now gone, swept away in the Holocaust. Schulz would be murdered in the town in which he was born, by a Nazi officer who reportedly then went to a colleague to say, “You shot my Jew, so I have shot yours.” Schulz’s fame rests on his talents as both a visual artist and a writer. He first gained fame in 1922, when his Book of Idolatry, a collection of stylish and erotic cliché-verre pictures, was presented in Warsaw and L’vov. But it is his two volumes of short stories, Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, that have gained him immortality and a reputation as the greatest modern prose stylist of the Polish language.
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C. NAMWALI SERPELL was born in Zambia in 1980 and moved to the United States when she was eight. She is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her creative work has appeared in Callaloo, The Believer, Bidoun, Tin House, The Caine Prize Anthology, and a collection, Should I Go to Grad School? Her first short story, “Muzungu,” appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2009 (ed. Alice Sebold) and was short-listed for the 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing. In 2011 she won a R
ona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers, on the basis of excerpts from a novel in progress. She lives in San Francisco.
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STEVE STERN grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. His books include The Frozen Rabbi, a novel, and The Wedding Jester, a collection of stories for which he received the National Jewish Book Award. The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories was published by Graywolf Press in 2012. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations.
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KARIN TIDBECK is the award-winning author of Jagannath and Amatka. She lives and works in Malmö, Sweden, where she makes a living as a freelance teacher and consultant on all things fictional and interactive. She writes in Swedish and English and has published short stories and poetry in Swedish since 2002 and English since 2010. Her publication history includes Weird Tales, Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, and the anthologies Steampunk Revolution and The Time Travelers Almanac.
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EDITH WHARTON (EDITH NEWBOLD JONES, 1862–1937) published over forty volumes of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry over the course of her distinguished writing career and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for her novel The Age of Innocence. Acclaimed for her keenly observed fictional chronicles of upper-class New York society, Wharton moved to France in 1907 and lived there until the end of her life. She was awarded the Cross of the French Legion of Honor for her philanthropic work in that country during World War I. Along with her friend and mentor Henry James, Wharton had an abiding interest in the psychological ghost story. “Pomegranate Seed” originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on April 25, 1931. It was subsequently included in Wharton’s collection of short fiction The World Over (1936) and reprinted in her collection Ghosts, published the year of her death. In Wharton’s preface to Ghosts, she remarked that “the teller of supernatural tales should be well frightened in the telling; for if he is, he may perhaps communicate to his readers the sense of that strange something undreamt of in the philosophy of Horatio.”
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
J. T. (JOHN THOMAS) BEALBY (1858–1944) (ERNST THEODOR AMADEUS HOFFMANN’S “THE SAND-MAN”) Born in England and educated at Cambridge, J. T. Bealby translated an 1885 volume of Hoffmann’s stories, Weird Tales. A prolific writer and editor, Bealby edited the collected Dryburgh edition of The Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott, contributed to several editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica (collaborating on some items with noted anarchist Peter Kropotkin), edited The Scottish Geographical Magazine, and translated other works on a variety of subjects, including books about travel and explorations. He moved to British Columbia in 1907 and two years later published the classic Fruit Ranching in British Columbia, part memoir and part manual for prospective immigrants.
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JOHN CURRAN DAVIS (BRUNO SCHULZ’S “THE BIRDS”) was born in North East England and went at an early age to London to seek his fortune. He found instead an array of unconnected occupations from building work to political campaigning. In the wake of the Fall of Communism, John went to Poland, first as a mature student and later as a teacher of English, and there became fascinated by Polish language and literature.
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WIAM EL-TAMAMI (MANSOURA EZ ELDIN’S “GOTHIC NIGHT”) grew up in a yellow place where nothing grows and has been traveling since. She has lived in Kuwait, England, and Vietnam and is currently based in Egypt, where she writes, translates short stories and poetry, edits novels, cooks, explores, revolts, and tries to rest her itchy feet. Her work has been featured in Granta, Banipal, Jadaliyya, Alif, and several anthologies. In 2011 she was awarded the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize for her translation of “Gothic Night.”
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CONSTANCE GARNETT (1861–1946) (CHEKHOV’S “OYSTERS”) was one of the first English translators of nineteenth-century Russian literature. At the age of eighteen she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, and in 1883 she moved to London, where she began to work in publishing. Her career as a translator began when she was introduced to the Russian exile Felix Volkhovsky, with whom she studied Russian. The first to translate Chekhov and Dostoyevsky into English, Garnett also translated the complete works of Turgenev and Gogol and the major works of Tolstoy. Altogether she produced over seventy English-language volumes of Russian literary works.
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EDWARD GAUVIN (DUCHON-DORIS’ “THE PUPPETS” AND MAUPASSANT’S “ON THE WATER”) is the winner of the John Dryden Translation prize. A Clarion alum, he has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, the Fulbright Program, PEN England, PEN America, the Centre National du Livre, and the Lannan Foundation. His volume of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s selected stories, A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010), won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award and was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, and The Southern Review and elsewhere. The contributing editor for Francophone comics at Words Without Borders, he writes a bimonthly column on the Francophone fantastic at Weird Fiction Review.
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LUIS HARSS (FELISBERTO HERNÁNDEZ’S “THE USHER”) is a bilingual writer who has translated works by Julio Cortázar, José María Arguedas, and other Spanish American novelists and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Dream.
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MICHAEL HOFMANN (FRANZ KAFKA’S “THE STOKER”) is the author of six books of poetry and dozens of translations from the German, including works by Hans Fallada, Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, Joseph Roth, and Wim Wenders. Recent publications include a book of essays, Where Have You Been? and an edition of Gottfried Benn, Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose (both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He teaches at the University of Florida.
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STEPHEN SNYDER (YOKO OGAWA’S “OLD MRS. J”) teaches Japanese literature at Middlebury College. In addition to translating the work of Yoko Ogawa, he has also translated works by Kenzaburō Ōe, Ryū Murakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miri Yu.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Anthologies don’t arrive like Venus—let alone oysters—on the half shell, and this one is indebted to a long line of storytellers, teachers, scholars, students, family, and friends. My first thanks go to the late Francisca Rodriguez of Alhambra, California, who closed the curtains of our suburban home in the early sixties and told me ghost stories of the San Gabriel Valley, forever changing my picture of that suburban landscape and all places to follow. I am grateful to my amazing mother, Jeanne Sandor, who made readers of us all, and to my three older brothers, Jon, Richard, and David, who let me stay up late in the 1960s to watch The Innocents, The Haunting, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Thanks, guys.
It was Rory Watson, poet and professor emeritus of University of Stirling in Scotland, who introduced me to the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and who answered my letter-out-of-the-blue all these years later, to talk about the Scottish uncanny. John McNamara of the University of Houston helped me track down the origins of the word itself. Steven Millhauser gave this project a much-appreciated boost of encouragement early on and continued to lend his support throughout, and Joyce Carol Oates offered support, wisdom, and practical guidance at several key junctures along the way. Several literary compadres pointed the way to uncanny authors new to me, helped me through rough passages, offered valuable second opinions, and helped write the author bios of the dead. I give heartfelt thanks to them all: Jane Sandor, Deborah Eisenberg, Kelly Link, Michael Hofmann, Edward Gauvin, Patrick J. Clarke, Suzanne Berne, Susan Jackson Rodgers, Murray Weiss, and Matthew Burriesci.
I am indebted to Christopher Golden, Kate Bernheimer, Ellen Datlow, Gavin Grant, Jeff VanderMeer, Ray Russell, and S. T. Joshi for answering my questions so generously, and equally indebted to a small host of angels in the World of Permissions, for kindness to a greenhorn.
Thanks to the Oregon State University College of Liberal Arts and the School of Writing, Literature, and Film for a research grant and time to dev
elop this project and to my comrades in the School—and particularly in the MFA Program—for being the best friends and colleagues a person can rightly hope for. Nor would this anthology exist if it weren’t for the adventurous spirit of the MFA and MA students at Oregon State University, who have been going down the rabbit hole of the uncanny with me over the last several years. Two of that tribe deserve a special shout-out for their generous reading assistance: Patrick J. Clarke, composer, and Jon Ross, writer. To yet another OSU MFA alum, Adam Michaud, I owe thanks for the Herculean effort of transcribing squirrelly uncanny reprints.
Colleen Mohyde of The Doe Coover Agency helped me shape this idea into a viable proposal and has been a wonderful supporter for many years. Michael Homler at St. Martin’s Press took a chance on this project, then emanated great calm, patience, and fortitude in the aftermath. Thank you both.
My beloved daughter, Hannah, has my eternal admiration for the way she put up with terrifying stories and equally terrifying midges on bleak, beautiful Rannoch Moor in the Scottish Highlands and has grown up to be such an intrepid reader and person of the world. And finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my husband, Tracy Daugherty, who has been living with the Unheimliche in the house ever since we met and who has always been there to help incubate a dream.
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