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Black Water #2
Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic
Short stories by authors including Julian Barnes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Isabelle Allende deal with prophetic dreams, strange creatures, and bizarre occurences
941 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1990
About the author
Alberto Manguel
216 books1,724 followersAlberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991).
Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves.
Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 1, 2007
The sequel to Manguel’s collection Black Water: An Anthology of Fantastic Literature, this book maintains the level of excellence of the previous one. The stories in this volume, taken from a wide array of impressive authors, are disturbing, funny, grotesque, terrifying, thought-provoking, erotic, and just plain weird—everything a full blooded fantasy fan could want. Includes stories by E.B. White, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur C. Clarke, Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Isaac Bashevis Singer, A.S. Byatt, Julian Barnes, Herman Melville, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Luigi Pirandello, V.S. Naipaul and George Bernard Shaw, among many others.
December 21, 2021
PLACEHOLDER REVIEW (for this EXCELLENT but ENORMOUS collection I hope to re-read someday)
"A Short Trip Home" by F. Scott Fitzgerald - A wealthy young man, attending Yale but home in St. Paul MN for the holidays, moves among his circle of "bright, young things" at parties and cotillions and the like. But he begins to worry about a female friend of his, whom he secretly loves, who is keeping time with a sneering, criminal type - and so he involves himself in her affairs, discovering that her train trip to Chicago involves an assignation with this criminal fellow, and eventually, on another train trip back, finds himself in a direct contest of wills with the sinister individual...
Oddly enough, in the supernatural/fantasy genre it is not often you read a story by Fitzgerald ("Benjamin Button" being the other of which I am aware) and, oddly enough, in the horror genre, you do not read many stories so directly involving "unspoken moral corruption". We are never actually told just what the sinister Joe Varland intends of Ellen, but it is not doubt something more than what you normally might expect from these scenarios, as Varland himself is... compromised in his worldly existence (trying not to spoiler) and Ellen seems not only in his thrall, but herself struggling to make arguments for him, so we don't know just how much control he has. The final confrontation scene is quiet, low-key and powerful. There are some notable class conflict details as well (I appreciated that Fitzgerald was aware enough of this to actually have our main character momentarily reflect on how lucky he was to be well off). A different kind of thing, to be sure, but charmingly effective.
"A Short Trip Home" by F. Scott Fitzgerald - A wealthy young man, attending Yale but home in St. Paul MN for the holidays, moves among his circle of "bright, young things" at parties and cotillions and the like. But he begins to worry about a female friend of his, whom he secretly loves, who is keeping time with a sneering, criminal type - and so he involves himself in her affairs, discovering that her train trip to Chicago involves an assignation with this criminal fellow, and eventually, on another train trip back, finds himself in a direct contest of wills with the sinister individual...
Oddly enough, in the supernatural/fantasy genre it is not often you read a story by Fitzgerald ("Benjamin Button" being the other of which I am aware) and, oddly enough, in the horror genre, you do not read many stories so directly involving "unspoken moral corruption". We are never actually told just what the sinister Joe Varland intends of Ellen, but it is not doubt something more than what you normally might expect from these scenarios, as Varland himself is... compromised in his worldly existence (trying not to spoiler) and Ellen seems not only in his thrall, but herself struggling to make arguments for him, so we don't know just how much control he has. The final confrontation scene is quiet, low-key and powerful. There are some notable class conflict details as well (I appreciated that Fitzgerald was aware enough of this to actually have our main character momentarily reflect on how lucky he was to be well off). A different kind of thing, to be sure, but charmingly effective.
September 19, 2014
I love fantastic literature .... this anthology and the one before it are just plain wonderful.
May 30, 2020
A sequel to one of the best anthologies of fantastic literature that just might be better than the first. This volume introduced me to some of my very favourite short stories: "The Troll" by T.H. White; "The Professor and the Mermaid" by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; "The Dead Fish" by Boris Vian; "The Complete Gentleman" by Amos Tutuola. The volume also does a decent job of breaking out of the sphere of North American and European literature, with a number of stories from Asia, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and South America. Highly recommended.
December 9, 2018
Another 900+ pages of fantastical shorts, with a similar batting average. Between the two volumes (72+65 = 137 stories), my top 3 are:
- Certain Distant Suns, by Joanne Greenberg (1979)
- A Woman Seldom Found, by William Sansom (1956)
- Aghwee the Sky Monster, by Kenzaburo Oe (1964)
- Certain Distant Suns, by Joanne Greenberg (1979)
- A Woman Seldom Found, by William Sansom (1956)
- Aghwee the Sky Monster, by Kenzaburo Oe (1964)
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews