Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature
Edited by Alberto Manguel and first published in 1983, Black Water gathers more than seventy short stories of the fantastic from across centuries and continents. It pulls in canonical names such as Borges, Kafka, Cortazar, Calvino, Henry James, and Isak Dinesen, alongside writers less familiar to English language readers. The selection is wide in tone, ranging from ghost stories and quiet domestic uncanny to philosophical fables and surrealist parables. Manguel, an Argentine Canadian editor and essayist who once read to the blind Borges, treats the fantastic as a serious mode of literature rather than a marginal genre. The book has remained a touchstone anthology for readers interested in literary strangeness, and it works equally well read straight through or dipped into one story at a time.
What you might want to know about Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A door stopping anthology of fantastic short fiction from around the world, edited by Alberto Manguel.
Some stories edge into horror, but the anthology covers a wider sense of the fantastic, including fable, surrealism, and the uncanny.
Yes. Manguel later edited Black Water 2, gathering more fantastic stories in the same spirit.
Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature was written by Alberto Manguel.
Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.