The Oxford Book Of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories

The thrill and chill of the ghost story is displayed in all its variety and vitality through this marvellous anthology. Ranging from the early 19th century to the 1960s, the collection reveals the development of the genre, and showcases many of its greatest expositors - from Sir Walter Scott, H. G. Wells, M. R. James, T. H. White, Walter de la Mare, and Elizabeth Bowen in the UK to Edith Wharton in America. Though its heyday coincided with the golden age of Empire in the nineteenth century, the ghost story enjoyed a second flowering between the two World Wars and its popularity is as great as ever.

Tells stories about all kinds of ghosts, including children, snooker-players, ventriloquist's dummies, and warriors.

Collection of thirty-five English ghost stories written during the Victorian Era.

Three phantoms wander the desert; a ghostly lover claims his bride at an outback station; a dead man appears beside a blood-red waterhole; a jackaroo witnesses a ghostly struggle; a frightful monster haunts the Nullarbor Plain. This anthology of Australian ghost stories - from the 1850s to the present - draws together a neglected but striking genre of fiction that works to remind those who recently settled this country how unsettled it actually is. New arrivals stumble across empty houses with ghostly occupants; lonely bushmen fantasise about ghostly women; Aborigines tell of bunyips, bugeens and 'living ghosts'; the bush is full of beckoning spectral images; and Death himself is seen prowling the streets. In these stories Australia becomes the 'down-underworld', a place where the departed will inevitably be resurrected in time, and where the dead continue to make their presence felt.

Bringing together the work of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Eudora Welty, Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, Isak Dinesen, and Joyce Carol Oates, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales presents 37 sinister and unsettling tales for all lovers of ghost stories, fantasy, and horror.

"The inadequate acknowledgement of women short story writers in standard anthologies is a cause for wonder or affront. How else, indeed, can you view it, given the riches overlooked?" So states editor Patricia Craig in her introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories, a rich, wide-ranging collection that, at last, redresses this historical imbalance by bringing together forty examples of the very best women's stories--from established authors such as Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Mansfield, to such modern masters as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Bharati Mukherjee, and Amy Tan. Here readers will find humor, passion, eccentricity, forcefulness, elan, intellectual vigor, subversion--indeed every shading of tone and mood, from ironic detachment to full-blooded engagement. Each writer has her own, perfectly realized angle of vision, whether it's the zestfulness of Angela Carter, the breathtaking evocations of Willa Cather, the quirkiness of Grace Paley, or the pungency of Flannery O'Connor. Breaking with tradition, editor Patricia Craig offers few stories about traditional "women's" topics. Instead, the entries in this collection range from an unforgettable tale of racism in South Africa to explorations of adultery, immigration, the importance of cultural identity, and the rootlessness of American cities. Craig also includes some provocative offerings from outside the mainstream of twentieth century fiction--a ghost story by Edith Wharton, a delightful fairy tale, and several engaging historical pieces. Eloquent and captivating, The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories offers a dazzling assortment of classic stories and overlooked gems that will amuse, intrigue, and challenge every lover of fine fiction.

Victorian writers excelled at the ghost story. Here editor Michael Cox brings together well wrought tales of haunted houses, vengeful spirits, spectral warnings, invisible antagonists, and motiveless malignity from beyond the grave. Traditional in form but inventive and infused with a relish of the supernatural, these classic ghost stories still retain their original power to unsettle and surprise.