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Nightshade: 20th Century Ghost Stories

A riveting collection of spectral chills and ghostly tales by twenty-seven masters of twentieth-century literature. The phantasms, shades, and specters in this volume of ghost stories by contemporary writers like Alison Lurie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joyce Carol Oates, and William Trevor as well as such modern literary giants as Henry James, Isak Dinesen, Franz Kafka, and Rudyard Kipling write letters, carry lanterns, ride bicycles, patrol halls, run motorboats, rake leaves, and deliver mail. They also inhabit dolls and sticks of furniture. Some of them merely haunt houses, while others invade the darkest corners of the soul. Throughout this expertly edited collection, a companion to Robert Phillips's equally successful anthology, the very popular Omnibus of 20th Century Ghost Stories, writers as distinctive of their decade as Edith Wharton and Muriel Spark or the incomparable Max Beerbohm and the up-and-coming Max Eberts explore the literary possibilities of the classic ghost story to deliver taut suspense, psychological terror, and eerie mystery. The irresistible mix of chills and artistry, of terror and genius, make every tale in this volume worth the visit.

CONTENTS

Ghosts On The Lake by Ilse Aichinger

Sonata For Harp And Bicycle by Joan Aiken

Enoch Soames by Max Beerbohm

The Happy Autumn Fields by Elizabeth Bowen

Oh Father, Father, Why Have You Come Back? by John Cheever

Dead Women's Things by Kathy Chwedyk

The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford

The Supper At Elsinore by Isak Dinesen

Lost Lives by Max Eberts

The Shadowy Third by Ellen Glasgow

A Shape Of Light by William Goyen

W.S. by L.P. Hartley

The Astral Body of a U.S. Mail Truck by James Leo Herlihy

The Bus by Shirley Jackson

The Friends Of The Friends by Henry James

Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor by Franz Kafka

"They" by Rudyard Kipling

The Highboy by Alison Lurie

The Ghosts Of August by Gabriel García Márquez

The Doll by Joyce Carol Oates

Wolfie by Robert Phillips

A Spiritualist by Jean Rhys

Owl by Elizabeth Spencer

A Gracious Rain by Christopher Tilghman

Mr. Acland's Ghost by William Trevor

The Leaf-Sweeper by Muriel Spark

Pomegranate Seed by Edith Wharton