Compiled by Italo Calvino, this a historical overview of great fantastic literature of the 19th century. Many of the stores are from well-known authors (Sir Walter Scott, Honore de Balzac, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Ivan Turgenev, Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells), but Calvino largely avoided their best-known stories. The contributors range from moderately well-known to obscure. This is an intelligently annotated anthology of superb fiction, but, in one pleasant sense, a collection of mostly new stories.