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Synopsis

Joyce Carol Oates has a special perspective on the "gothic" in American short fiction, at least partially because her own horror yarns rank on the spine-tingling chart with the masters. She is able to see the unbroken link of the macabre that ties Edgar Allan Poe to Anne Rice and to recognize the dark psychological bonds between Henry James and Stephen King. This remarkable anthology of gothic fiction, spanning two centuries of American writing, gives us an intriguing and entertaining look at how the gothic imagination makes for great literature in the works of forty-six exceptional writers.

In showing us the gothic vision--a world askew where mankind's forbidden impulses are set free from the repressions of the psyche, and nature turns malevolent and lawless--Joyce Carol Oates includes Henry James's "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes," Herman Melville's horrific tale of factory women, "The Tartarus of Maids," and Edith Wharton's "Afterward," which are rarely collected and appear together here for the first time.

Added to these stories of the past are new ones that explore the wounded worlds of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Raymond Carver, and more than twenty other wonderful contemporary writers. This impressive collection reveals the astonishing scope of the gothic writer's subject matter, style, and incomparable genius for manipulating our emotions and penetrating our dreams. With Joyce Carol Oates's superb introduction, American Gothic Tales is destined to become the standard one-volume edition of the genre that American writers, if they didn't create it outright, have brought to its chilling zenith.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1996) - essay by Joyce Carol Oates
• From Wieland, or The Transformation (excerpt) - (1798) - shortfiction by Charles Brockden Brown
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - (1819) - novelette by Washington Irving
• The Man of Adamant - (1837) - shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Tartarus of Maids - (1855) - shortstory by Herman Melville
• Young Goodman Brown - (1835) - shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Black Cat - (1843) - shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Yellow Wallpaper - (1892) - novelette by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Romance of Certain Old Clothes - (1868) - shortstory by Henry James
• The Damned Thing - (1893) - shortstory by Ambrose Bierce
• Afterward - (1910) - novelette by Edith Wharton
• The Striding Place - (1896) - shortstory by Gertrude Atherton
• Death in the Woods - (1926) - shortstory by Sherwood Anderson
• The Outsider - (1926) - shortstory by H. P. Lovecraft
• A Rose for Emily - (1930) - shortstory by William Faulkner
• The Lonesome Place - (1941) - shortstory by August Derleth
• The Door - (1939) - shortstory by E. B. White
• The Lovely House - (1952) - novelette by Shirley Jackson
• Allal - (1977) - shortstory by Paul Bowles
• The Reencounter - (1982) - shortstory by Isaac Bashevis Singer
• In the Icebound Hothouse - (1985) - shortstory by William Goyen
• The Enormous Radio - (1947) - shortstory by John Cheever
• The Veldt - (1950) - shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Dachau Shoe - (1970) - shortstory by W. S. Merwin
• The Approved - (1970) - shortstory by W. S. Merwin
• Spiders I Have Known - (1970) - shortstory by W. S. Merwin
• Postcards from the Maginot Line - (1970) - shortstory by W. S. Merwin
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams - (1977) - shortstory by Sylvia Plath
• In Bed One Night - (1988) - shortstory by Robert Coover
• Schrödinger's Cat - (1974) - shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Waterworks - (1984) - shortstory by E. L. Doctorow
• Shattered Like a Glass Goblin - (1968) - shortstory by Harlan Ellison
• Human Moments in World War III - (1983) - shortstory by Don DeLillo
• The Anatomy of Desire - (1981) - shortstory by John L'Heureux
• Little Things - (1988) - shortstory by Raymond Carver
• The Temple - (1996) - shortstory by Joyce Carol Oates
• Freniere (from Interview with the Vampire) - (1976) - shortstory by Anne Rice
• A Short Guide to the City - (1990) - shortstory by Peter Straub
• In the Penny Arcade - (1984) - shortstory by Steven Millhauser
• The Reach - (1981) - shortstory by Stephen King
• Snow - (1985) - shortstory by John Crowley
• The Last Feast of Harlequin - (1990) - novelette by Thomas Ligotti
• Time and Again - (1983) - shortstory by Breece D'J Pancake
• Replacements - (1992) - novelette by Lisa Tuttle
• Spirit Seizures - (1987) - shortstory by Melissa Pritchard
• Cat in Glass - (1989) - shortstory by Nancy Etchemendy
• The Girl Who Loved Animals - (1988) - shortstory by Bruce McAllister
• Ursus Triad, Later - (1996) - shortstory by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg
• (from Geek Love) The Nuclear Family: His Talk, Her Teeth - (1989) - shortstory by Katherine Dunn
• Subsoil - (1994) - shortstory by Nicholson Baker

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