Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

Abram Tertz is the pseudonym of Andrei Sinyavsky, the exile Soviet dissident writer whose works have been compared to fabulists like Kafka and Borges. Tertz's settings are exotic but familiar and as compelling as those of lunatics and mystics. This edition contains the nightmarish "Pkhentz," a story missing from the first English edition.

Years ago, with special fondness, I hunted near the village of Glinnoje, which is about twenty versts from my estate. It is probably the best hunting area in the whole counties. After searching all the fields and bushes for game, I went regularly to evening evening to the moorland - it was the only moorland in the whole area - and only went from there to my hospitable innkeeper, the village school of Glinnoje, where I in the hunting season always took place. From the moor I had scarcely two versts to go to the village; the path led through a lowland, and only half way up I had to climb over a not very high hill. On this hill is a small country estate, which consists of an uninhabited mansion and a garden. I almost always passed by at sunset, and the house, with the boarded-up shutters, bathed in the rays of the evening sun, always reminded me of a blind old man who had crawled out of his closet to warm himself in the sun.

Seventeen fantasies by one of the field's most prolific short story authors, including tales of...mad gods, specters returning from the beyond, inexplicable enigmas from outer space, a romantic and surreal interlude of the legendary madman, Tom O'Bedlam, time travel to allow an irate professor to settle the Shakespearean authorship controversy, and the King Arthur legend--plus genuinely frightening horror, including the celebrated story, "The Dead Kid." Mike Ashley calls the author "today's supreme stylist" of fantasy, and Tanith Lee says that "Schweitzer is a story-teller, by whose smoky fire one may sit spellbound." First-rate stories of the fantastic by a World Fantasy Award winner!