The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy
The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000, edited and translated by Mike Mitchell / ISBN 9781903517130 / 416-page paperback
For this series, read “fantasy” as “the fantastic.”
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Ever since the fin de siecle Austrian literature has been fertile ground for fantasy in the widest sense and the genre was taken up again by new generations after the Second World War.
The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000 contains stories from authors of the 1890s (Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal), the years around the First World War (Kafka, Meyrink), the post-war era, when Kafka was rediscovered, (Jeannie Ebner, Ilse Aichinger) to the present day (H C Artmann, Michael Koehlmeier). The stories range from the ‘freudian’ to the ‘kafkaesque’, to the surreal, grotesque, comic, occult and straightforwardly supernatural.
A.S.Byatt described it in The Guardian as one of the best anthologies she has ever read.
