Bedtime Stories (Everyman's Pocket Classics) (edition 2011)

Most of these stories are based on fairy tales, but the original tales are manipulated to such a wide extant as to elicit the grossly bizarre. The best story in the book iss Washinton Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," both for its content as well as Irving's writing style The only supernatural aspect of this story is in the imaginations of its characters. For most of the stories though, magic, or the unexplained, plays a starring role. Death is also a favorite theme. If you like bizarre stories, you'll probably like this book. ( )

Another excellent collection of short stories from Everyman's Pocket Classics (I previously read their Detective Stories and have on-and-off been reading Ghost Stories and Stories of the Sea).

Don't be mislead by the title, these are not gentle, innocuous stories to put you to bed. Instead, Bedtime Stories weave in and out of dreams, the real, the unreal and the surreal, often with unclear boundaries between them. Some are psychological, some magical, some a combination of both.

The book has a number of old stand-by's that were good to re-read (including Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown", Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp" and Wells' "The Country of the Blind"). Particularly good was A.S. Byatt's "The Thing in the Forest" which will send me running to read the rest of the collection that came from, LeGuin's "The Poacher" and Nabokov's "The Dragon", which showed yet another side of that author. Steven Millhauser's "A Visit," a seemingly realistic story that includes a character's dream (described as such and clearly delineated from the waking) takes on a new aspect when read in juxtaposition to a collection like this. And many others. ( )