The Uncanny Reader (70 page)

“The Panic Hand,” by Jonathan Carroll. Copyright © 1990 by Jonathan Carroll. Used by permission of The Richard Parks Agency and Open Road Media.

“Moriya,” by Dean Paschal, from
By the Light of the Jukebox: Stories
. Copyright © 2002 by Dean Paschal. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Puppets,” by Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris. “Les Marionettes” from
Les Lettres du Baron
by Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris. Copyright © 1994 by Julliard. Used by permission of Julliard. Translation copyright © 2014 by Edward Gauvin. Translation used by permission of the translator.

“Old Mrs. J,” by Yoko Ogawa, from
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales,
published by Picador and by Harvill Secker. English translation copyright © 2013 by Stephen Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Picador and by the Random House Group Limited.

“Whitework,” by Kate Bernheimer. Copyright © 2010 by Kate Bernheimer. Reprinted by permission from
Horse, Flower, Bird
(Coffee House Press, 2010).

“Stone Animals,” by Kelly Link, originally published in
Conjunctions
43, and reprinted in Kelly Link's
Magic for Beginners
(Random House). Copyright © 2004 by Kelly Link. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Tiger Mending,” by Aimee Bender, from
The Color Master: Stories,
by Aimee Bender. Copyright © 2013 by Aimee Bender. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing group, a division of Random House LLC, and by Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner Literary Agency. All rights reserved.

“The Black Square,” by Chris Adrian. Originally appeared in
McSweeney's.
Copyright © 2009 by Chris Adrian. Used by permission of the author.

“Foundation,” by China Miéville, from
Looking for Jake: Stories
, by China Miéville. Copyright © 2005 by China Miéville. Used by permission of Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, and Pan, an imprint of Panmacmillan. All rights reserved.

“Gothic Night,” by Mansoura Ez Eldin. “Layl Qouti.” Copyright © 2011, 2013 by Mansoura Ez Eldin. English translation copyright © 2011 by Wiam El-Tamami. Reprinted by Permission.

“Reindeer Mountain,” by Karin Tidbeck. Copyright © 2012 by Karin Tidbeck. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Muzungu,” by C. Namwali Serpell. Originally appeared in
Callaloo.
Copyright © 2007 by Namwali Serpell. Used by permission of the author.

“Haunting Olivia,” by Karen Russell, from
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories.
Copyright © 2006 by Karen Russell. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC and by the Random House Group Limited. All rights reserved.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. In the event of inadvertent omissions or errors, the editor should be notified at the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

CHRIS ADRIAN
is the author of three novels:
Gob's Grief
,
The Children's Hospital
, and
The Great Night
, and a collection of short stories,
A Better Angel
. He lives in New York, where he works as a pediatric oncologist.

*   *   *

ROBERT AICKMAN (1914–1981)
was born in London into a literary family and sustained in his early writing efforts by his mother's encouragement. Originally trained as an architect, he ultimately made his way into work in the literary and performing arts and became a major figure in English canal-system conservation and restoration. Over the span of this multifaceted career, he published nearly fifty “strange stories”—his own term for his work—and is today considered one of the modern masters of weird fiction. Fritz Leiber called him “weatherman of the unconscious.” Among Aickman's other published works are two novels (
The Late Breakfasters
and
The Model
), two volumes of memoir (
The Attempted Rescue
and
The River Runs Uphill
), and two books on the canals of England (
Know Your Waterways
and
The Story of Our Inland Waterways
). Aickman's story in this volume, “The Waiting Room,” appeared in his first solo collection,
Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories,
in 1964.

*   *   *

JOAN AIKEN (1924–2004)
was born in Rye, Sussex, England, into a literary family: her father was the poet and writer Conrad Aiken; and her siblings, the novelists Jane Aiken Hodge and John Aiken. Aiken herself began writing at the age of five, and her first collection of stories,
All You've Ever Wanted
, was published in 1953. After her first husband's death, Aiken supported her family by copyediting at
Argosy
and working at an advertising agency before turning to writing fiction full-time. She went on to write for
Vogue,
Vanity Fair,
and many other magazines. She wrote over a hundred books and is perhaps best known for the dozen novels in the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. She won the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards for fiction and in 1999 she received an MBE from the Queen for her services to children's literature. “The Helper” was originally published in Aiken's 1979 collection,
A Touch of Chill
(Gollancz), and was reprinted in 2011 in the posthumous collection
The Monkey's Wedding and Other Stories (
Small Beer Press).

*   *   *

AIMEE BENDER
is the author of five books, including
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
and
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
. The most recent,
The Color Master,
was recently named a
New York Times
Notable Book of 2013. “Tiger Mending” was inspired by a painting by Amy Cutler of the same name. The image and even tattoos of it are findable online.

*   *   *

KATE BERNHEIMER
is the author of the story collection
Horse, Flower, Bird
(Coffee House Press, 2010, with illustrations by Rikki Ducornet) and a novel trilogy that concluded recently with
The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold
(FC2, 2011).
How a Mother Weaned a Girl from Fairy Tales,
a new story collection, was published by Coffee House Press in 2014. She has also edited the World Fantasy Award–winning
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
(Penguin, 2010) and
xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths
(Penguin, 2013), among other books.

*   *   *

AMBROSE BIERCE (1842–1914?)
was born in Horse Cave, Ohio, and spent most of his childhood in Indiana. He fought in several of the major battles of the American Civil War and after the war headed west, settling in San Francisco, where in the years to come he would establish his reputation as one of the nation's best—and fiercest—journalistic satirists. All the while he continued to produce and publish stories ranging from the realistic to the supernatural and macabre. Among his best-known works are the Civil War stories published in
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
(1891), and
The Devil's Dictionary
(1906). “One of Twins” was originally published in
The San Francisco Examiner
on October 28, 1888, and was included in Bierce's 1893 collection of supernatural tales,
Can Such Things Be?
In the last two decades of his life, Bierce suffered a series of personal tragedies, including the deaths of two of his children, and in 1909 he ended his relationship with
The San Francisco Examiner
and began to travel. In some of his last correspondence he suggested he might go to Mexico, and the postscript of his last known letter, dated December 26, 1913, and purportedly sent from Chihuahua, Mexico, says only this: “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.”

*   *   *

MARJORIE BOWEN (GABRIELLE MARGARET VERE CAMPBELL LONG, 1885–1952)
was born on Hayling Island, Hampshire, England. A self-taught writer who availed herself of libraries and museums from an early age, Bowen supported her family through the writing of more than 150 volumes ranging from tales of the weird and supernatural, historical novels, and mysteries to biography and popular history. She composed under several pen names, including Joseph Shearing and George Preedy. Although her work has fallen into obscurity, she was greatly admired by critics and writers of her day, including Graham Greene and Rebecca West. Greene, who read Bowen's first novel,
The Viper of Milan,
when he was fourteen years old, considered it one of the great influences on his own writing career.

*   *   *

JONATHAN CARROLL
has written twenty books and lives in Vienna, Austria.

*   *   *

ANTON CHEKHOV (1860–1904)
was born in Taganrog, in the Russian Empire, the son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf. A practicing physician for most of his writing life, he once said, “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress.” Until his death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, he produced several hundred short stories, novellas, and works for the stage, among them such classic works as “The Lady with the Pet Dog” and “In the Ravine” and the plays
Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters,
and
The Seagull
. “Oysters,” written in 1884 when Chekhov was in medical school, is almost hallucinatory in its evocation of an impoverished and hungry child's first encounter with an unfamiliar word—and an equally unfamiliar food.
Fames,
a term that appears early in the story, is Latin for “hunger.” Uncannily, twenty years after this story was published, Chekhov's body was returned to Moscow by train from Badenweiler, Germany, in a freight car labeled “For Oysters Only.”

*   *   *

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DUCHON-DORIS
Trained as a lawyer and now a judge in Marseilles, Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris is the author of three story collections and seven novels. He is chiefly known for his popular literary historical mysteries featuring, in one instance, a Perrault copycat killer; and in another, Napoléon's chef Antonin Carême, who is credited with inventing haute cuisine. The stories in Duchor-Doris' Goncourt-winning
Les Lettres du Baron
(Juillard, 1994), an interconnected collection, take the form of dead letters to addresses that Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's renovations erased from Paris.

*   *   *

MANSOURA EZ ELDIN
is an Egyptian journalist and author of short stories and novels. Her work has been translated into a number of languages, including an English translation of
Maryam's Maze
(AUC Press, 2007). In 2009, the Beirut39 project selected Ez Eldin as one of the 39 best Arab authors below the age of forty. In 2010, her second novel,
Beyond Paradise
, was shortlisted for the prestigious Arabic Booker Prize and was translated into German (Unions Verlag, 2011) and Italian (Piemme, 2011). Ez Eldin's third novel,
The Emerald Mountain,
was out at the beginning of 2014 and her collection of short stories
The Path to Madness
won the award of the best Egyptian collection of short stories in 2013.

*   *   *

JOHN HERDMAN
was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated there and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read English and later took his Ph.D. He is a novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. His fiction includes
A Truth Lover
(1973),
Pagan's Pilgrimage
(1978),
Imelda and Other Stories
(1993),
Ghostwriting
(1996), and
The Sinister Cabaret
(2001), and his most recent story collection is
My Wife's Lovers
(2007). As a critic he has published a study of Bob Dylan's lyrics,
Voice Without Restraint
(1982) and
The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
(1990), as well as much work on modern Scottish literature.
Another Country
(2013) is a memoir of literary-political life in Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s. John Herdman is a former Creative Writing Fellow at Edinburgh University and now lives with his wife in Edinburgh, Scotland.

*   *   *

FELISBERTO HERNÁNDEZ
(1902–1964)
was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. A talented (and self-taught) pianist, he began playing in the silent-screen movie theaters when he was twelve years old and later toured the small concert halls of Uruguay and Argentina. He married four times, published seven books, and died, impoverished, in 1964. His short stories went largely unnoticed during his lifetime, but his fiction has had a profound influence on many great twentieth-century authors, including Julie Cortásar, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. The latter once wrote: “If I hadn't read the stories of Felisberto Hernández in 1950, I wouldn't be the writer I am today.” “The Usher” is part of the collection
Piano Stories,
reissued by New Directions Publishing in January 2014.

*   *   *

ERNST THEODOR AMADEUS HOFFMANN (1776–1822)
Born in Königsberg, Prussia, Hoffmann was not only an accomplished writer of hallucinatory tales blurring the lines between the quotidian and the fantastic but also a composer, conductor, music critic, theater director, and set designer. A civil servant by day, he lost several governmental posts due to his habit of making fun of the authorities in print. He died at the age of forty-six, paralyzed in his legs and hands, dictating his last story and telling jokes to his friends. He has influenced writers from Dostoyevsky to Barthelme and beyond. “The Sand-Man,” which first appeared in his book
Nachtstücke
(Night Pieces), vol. 1, is discussed at length in Freud's 1919 essay “
The Uncanny
.”