The fantastic and the strange

The fantastic is born of a hesitation: something happens that should not, and neither character nor reader knows whether to believe in the supernatural or in madness. The genre therefore needs an ordinary setting, a house, a governess, a Norman river, before the crack appears. It runs through the nineteenth century with Poe, Hoffmann and Maupassant, then shifts in the twentieth towards pure logic, when Borges builds infinite libraries and Cortázar tips the everyday over without warning.

works 11

• TaleThe Nutcracker and the Mouse KingNußknacker und MausekönigE.T.A. Hoffmann · 1816A Christmas tale of German Romanticism, in which the toys of a bourgeois drawing room do battle with mice while the house sleeps.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelFrankenstein; or, The Modern PrometheusMary Shelley · 1818What does a creator owe to what he has made, and by what right does he turn away from it?LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryThe RavenEdgar Allan Poe · 1845For its author, the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetic subject there is; these verses entrust the mourning to a bird that knows only one word.LiteraturePublic domain
• Short storiesThe HorlaLe HorlaGuy de Maupassant · 1887A solitary man records, day after day, the signs of a presence he cannot see.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelDraculaBram Stoker · 1897An English solicitor who has come to conclude a sale discovers that he is his client's prisoner.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe Turn of the ScrewHenry James · 1898The narrator is the only one who says she sees the apparitions, and her manuscript passes through two hands before reaching the reader, so that nothing guarantees what she reports.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe StrongholdIl deserto dei TartariDino Buzzati · 1940A novel of waiting: an officer watches for years, in a remote fortress, for an announced invasion.Literature
• Short storiesFictionsFiccionesJorge Luis Borges · 1944Short tales in which a library, an encyclopaedia or a memory that forgets nothing become vertigos.Literature
• CinemaDraculaTerence Fisher · 1958A librarian arrives at a count's castle with the secret intention of destroying him.Cinema
• Short storiesLas armas secretasJulio Cortázar · 1959not translated into EnglishFive stories, most of them in Paris, in which a letter, a photograph or an appointment opens onto something else.Literature
• NovelThe Master and MargaritaМастер и МаргаритаMikhail Bulgakov · 1967A posthumous novel, published in 1967: the devil on a visit to Moscow, and the Roman prosecutor of Judea.Literature