As Scheherezade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime
entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the
storyteller's art, with its ancient roots in fantastical legends and
tales told around a fire.
In Bedtime Stories, great writers of the past two centuries explore
the boundaries between the real and the unreal, between waking and
dreaming. From the surreal night visions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young
Goodman Brown" to the unspeakable horror that haunts two little girls in
A. S. Byatt's "The Thing in the Forest," from Washington Irving's
comical "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" to Ursula K. LeGuin's sly
perspective on Sleeping Beauty in "The Poacher," these spellbinding
stories transform the stuff of fables and fairy tales into high art.
Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, Julio Cortázar, Steven
Millhauser, Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami, and many more mingle their
voices in this one-volume gateway to dreams--the perfect bedside
companion for fiction lovers everywhere.