Compulsory Games
10 best books like Compulsory Games (Robert Aickman): Fancies and Goodnights, The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories, Tender, Don't Look Now, Nightmares of an Ether Drinker, The Stories of J.F. Powers, Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural, The Prank: The Best of Young Chekhov, Henri Duchemin and His Shadows, Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories
| Author | John Collier |
| ISBN | 1590170512 |
John Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are works of rare wit, curious insight, and scary implication. They stand out as one of the pinnacles in the critically neglected but perennially popular tradition of weird writing that includes E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Dickens as well as more recent masters...
The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories
| Author | Tove Jansson |
| ISBN | 1590177665 |
An NYRB Classics Original
Tove Jansson was a master of brevity, unfolding worlds at a touch. Her art flourished in small settings, as can be seen in her bestselling novel The Summer Book and in her internationally celebrated cartoon strips and books about the Moomins. It is only natural,...
| Author | Sofia Samatar |
| ISBN | 1618731262 |
This is a beautiful, original, often surprising, and yes, tender, short story collection by a fantastic author. Samatar’s novels are lovely, but I think she may excel even more in the short story format, which combines her exquisite writing with compressed plots that necessarily move briskly....
| Author | Daphne du Maurier |
| ISBN | 1590172884 |
An NYRB Original
Daphne du Maurier wrote some of the most compelling and creepy novels of the twentieth century. In books like Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn she transformed the small dramas of everyday life—love, grief, jealousy—into the stuff of nightmares. Less known, though...
| Author | Jean Lorrain |
| ISBN | 1872621651 |
Contents:
-Introduction by Brian Stableford
-Early Stories: The Egregore/ Funeral Oration/ The Locked Room/ Magic Lantern/ The Glass of Blood/ Beyond/ Glaucous Eyes
-Sensations: One of Them/An Undesirable Residence/ A Troubled Night/ A Posthumous Protest/ An Uncanny Crime/...
| Author | J.F. Powers |
| ISBN | 0940322226 |
Hailed by Frank O'Connor as one of "the greatest living storytellers," J. F. Powers, who died in 1999, stands with Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver among the authors who have given the short story an unmistakably American cast. In three slim collections of perfectly crafted stories,...
Collection of 17 short stories.
1. The Lonesome Place by August Derleth c. 1947 by All-Fiction Field, Inc. and c. 1962 by August Derleth. Reprinted by permission of Arkham House.
2. In The Vault by H. P. Lovecraft c. 1932 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company, c. 1939, 1945 by August...
An NYRB Classics Original
The Prank is Chekhov’s own selection of the best of his early work, the first book he put together and the first book he hoped to publish. Assembled in 1882, with illustrations by Nikolay Chekhov, the book was then presented to the censor for approval—which was...
| Author | Emmanuel Bove |
| ISBN | 1590178327 |
Emmanuel Bove was one of the most original writers to come out of twentieth-century France and a popular success in his day. Discovered by Colette, who arranged for the publication of his first novel, My Friends, Bove enjoyed a busy literary career, until the German occupation silenced him. During...
| Author | Robert Walser |
| ISBN | 1681370166 |
Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories brings together eighty-one brief texts spanning Robert Walser’s career, from pieces conceived amid his early triumphs to later works written at a psychiatric clinic in Bern. Many were published in the feuilleton sections of newspapers during Walser’s...
| Author | Mavis Gallant |
| ISBN | 1590173279 |
A New York Review Books Original
Mavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected work presents stories from 1951 to 1971 and shows Gallant's progression from precocious virtuosity, to accomplished...
| Author | Robert Sheckley |
| ISBN | 1590174941 |
Robert Sheckley was an eccentric master of the American short story, and his tales, whether set in dystopic cityscapes, ultramodern advertising agencies, or aboard spaceships lighting out for hostile planets, are among the most startlingly original of the twentieth century. Today, as the new...
| Author | H.P. Lovecraft |
| ISBN | 1590178734 |
From the fictional land of Carcosa that inspired the HBO show True Detective to H. P. Lovecraft’s accursed New England hills, this collection features some of the most legendary landscapes of the cosmic horror genre. The collection includes the following twelve stories:
Edgar Allan...
| Author | Elizabeth Hardwick |
| ISBN | 1590172876 |
Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such...
| Author | Arthur Machen |
| ISBN | 0198813163 |
Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle... Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal...
| Author | Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer |
| ISBN | 0933050461 |
The Farm in the Green Mountains is the story of a family finding home halfway across the world from their homeland.
Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer, lived at the heart of intellectual life in Weimar, Germany, counting among their circle Stefan Zweig, Alma...
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
| ISBN | 0802128106 |
In the title story of her taut new fiction collection, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, Joyce Carol Oates writes: Life was not of the surface like the glossy skin of an apple, but deep inside the fruit where seeds are harbored. There is no writer more capable of picking out those seeds and exposing...
| Author | Kenji Miyazawa |
| ISBN | 4770021844 |
It is time that Kenji Miyazawa, long recognized as a writer of genius in his own country, enjoyed the same reputation abroad. Are his fables, in which acorns quarrel and flowers fret about losing their looks, written for children or adults? They are for both: for adventurous young minds, but also for...
The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror
| Author | William Sloane |
| ISBN | 1590179064 |
In the 1930s, William Sloane wrote two brilliant novels that gave a whole new meaning to cosmic horror. In To Walk the Night, Bark Jones and his college buddy Jerry Lister, a science whiz, head back to their alma mater to visit a cherished professor of astronomy. They discover his body, consumed by fire,...
| Author | L. Annette Binder |
| ISBN | 1936747316 |
Have you ever seen something so amazing, so incredible, that you know you'll never find the words to describe it?
It happened to me a few weeks ago on one of those perfect fall mornings that start out foggy and eerie before the clouds clear away and it turns into an unbelievably lovely day. It was...
| Author | Paula Guran |
| ISBN | 1607013541 |
The spirits of the dead have walked among our legends, myths, and stories since before recorded history. Ghostly visitations, hauntings, unquiet souls seeking the living, vengeful wraiths, the possibility of life beyond the grave that can somehow reach out and touch us…these are some of literature’s...
| Author | Leanne Shapton |
| ISBN | 0399158189 |
What haunts us? What can’t we let go of? A tennis prodigy collapses after his wins, crediting them to an invisible, not entirely benevolent presence, until one day he vanishes. A series of ghosts appear at their former bedsides, some distraught, some fascinated, to witness their unfamiliar occupants....
Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories
| Author | Giovanni Verga |
| ISBN | 0140447415 |
The stories of Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) are wonderful evocations of ordinary Italian life, focusing in particular on his native Sicily. In an original and dynamic prose style, he portrays such eternal human themes as love, honour and adultery with rich and colourful language. The inspiration...
| Author | Ivo Andrić |
| ISBN | 2842611470 |
Andric's final novel has moments of insight and beauty, but at times its incompleteness is obvious. In his introduction, Vollmann calls it a strange novel and I would have to agree. Ostensibly about the titular character, this novel is really a collection of stories about individuals within the Pasha's...
