
Fantastic Tales
Visionary and Everyday
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Narrated by:
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Luis Moreno
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By:
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Italo Calvino
About this listen
"The true theme of the nineteenth-century fantastic tale is the reality of what we see: to believe or not to believe in phantasmagoric apparitions, to glimpse another world, enchanted or infernal, behind everyday appearances." (from Calvino's introduction to Fantastic Tales)
Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a 20th-century master of the speculative. This posthumously published anthology of enchanting, uncanny, terrifying, and immortally entertaining short stories includes E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman", Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose", Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp", and many more, each with an introduction by Calvino.
Fantastic Tales is a delight for the mind and a feast for the senses.
©1983 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A. , 1997 English translation Random House LLC (P)2019 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Overall
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-
-
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The Complete Cosmicomics
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Overall
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By: Italo Calvino
-
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- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here - spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism - are 36 immediately relevant, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.
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Perfect narrator and wonderful story
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Collection of Sand
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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The Cloven Viscount
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
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At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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The Rebel
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By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides, he reveals how inevitably the course of revolution leads to tyranny.
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This book is amazing
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Albert Camus (1913-1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Personal Writings brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus's writing career that reflect the scope and depth of his interior life. Grappling with an indifferent mother and an impoverished childhood in Algeria, an ever-present sense of exile, and an ongoing search for equilibrium, Camus's personal essays shed new light on the emotional and experiential foundations of his philosophical thought....
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Not philosophy, but art
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By: Albert Camus
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Collected Fictions
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- Abridged
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From his 1935 debut with "The Universal History of Iniquity", through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language.
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Good but incomplete
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A Christmas Carol: A Signature Performance by Tim Curry
- By: Charles Dickens
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- Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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A Signature Performance: Tim Curry rescues Charles Dickens from the jaws of Disney with his one-of-a-kind performance of the treasured classic. Our listeners loved this version so much that it inspired our whole line of Signature Classics.
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Wonderful!!!
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What listeners say about Fantastic Tales
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Grant
- 11-06-20
Unexpected pleasure
Ordered this on a whim and it is becoming one of my favorites. A nice variety of materials and authors, some well known some more obscure. Everyone will have their favorites but all are well done. Excellent narration. And kudos to the producer for making labeled track breaks correspond with works, which is great for an anthology.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Story
- Linda C.
- 08-24-23
Stories of ghosts and demons
A good way to find the great older stories of odd visions of reality. Many of these I had heard of but never read. Gogol and HG Wells were wonderful.
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