Edited by Marjorie Sandor.
An anthology of literary fabulism practitioners: from iconic greats like Edgar Allen Poe to writers of today, Joyce Carol Oates and Karen
Russell — ghost stories, fairy tales, sci-fi, & fantasy.
From the deeply unsettling to the possibly supernatural, these
thirty-one border-crossing stories from around the world explore the
uncanny in literature, and delve into our increasingly unstable sense of self, home, and planet. The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows opens with “The Sand-man,” E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1817 tale of dopplegangers and automatons — a tale that inspired generations of writers and thinkers to come. Stories by 19th and 20th century masters of the
uncanny — including Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Shirley Jackson — form a foundation for sixteen award-winning contemporary authors,
established and new, whose work blurs the boundaries between the
familiar and the unknown. These writers come from Egypt, France,
Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia, Scotland, England, Sweden, the United
States, Uruguay, and Zambia — although their birthplaces are not always
the terrains they plumb in their stories, nor do they confine themselves to their own eras. Contemporary authors include: Chris Adrian, Aimee
Bender, Kate Bernheimer, Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris, Mansoura
Ez-Eldin, Jonathon Carroll, John Herdman, Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Yoko Ogawa, Dean Paschal, Karen Russell, Namwali
Serpell, Steve Stern and Karen Tidbeck.
