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Black Water #2
Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic
Short stories by authors including Julian Barnes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Isabelle Allende deal with prophetic dreams, strange creatures, and bizarre occurences
941 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1990
14 people are currently reading
617 people want to read
About the author
Alberto Manguel
253 books1,810 followersAlberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991).
Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves.
Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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November 15, 2025Short Story Club, round 3: I read and revied one story a week, along with The Short Story Club, starting spring 2025 and pausing/stopping after story 27 in November 2025.
You can join the group here.
About the collection
Black Water was published in 1983. See my review of those stories here.
Black Water 2 was published in 1990. The format is much the same as the first book. A wide range of authors, including plenty of ones I've never heard of, and tantalising titles. Each story is prefaced with a few paragraphs about the author. As with volume 1, rather than take the easy and obvious route of publishing them alphabetically by author or chronologically, there's a delicate daisy chain of themes.
I'm in awe at Manguel's achievement in compiling two such large, high-quality, and varied collections. This has a simple dedication:
"To my mother,
For an imaginary life."
I take it as a tribute to his mother for nurturing his imagination via literature, but also as a nod to alternative layers of reality, as explored by many of the stories, and also films like The Truman Show, Being John Malkovich, Synedoche, New York, and now Severance.
On the meaning of ‘fantastic’, from the foreword
Stories and reviews
1. The Child who Believed, Grace Amundson, 4*. Review HERE.
2. It's a Good Life, Jerome Bixby, 4*. Review HERE.
3. The Door, EB White, 4*. Review HERE.
4. Mysterious Kôr, Elizabeth Bowen, 4*. Review HERE.
5. Nights at Serampore, Mercea Eliade, 4*. Review HERE.
6. The Dead Fiddler, Isaac Bashevis Singer, 2*. Review HERE.
7. The Phoenix, Sylvia Townsend Warner, 2*. Review HERE.
8. The Spider, Hanns Heinz Ewers, 4*. Review HERE.
9. The Changeling, Dorothy K Haynes, 4*. Review HERE.
10. The July Ghost, AS Byatt, 4*. Review HERE.
11. Poor Girl, Elizabeth Taylor, 4*. Review HERE.
12. Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched, May Sinclair, 4*. Review HERE.
13. The Complete Gentleman, Amos Tutuola, 3*. Review HERE.
14. The Professor and the Siren, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 2*. Review HERE.
15. The Sausage ("Die Wurst"), Friedrich Durrenmatt, 3*. Review HERE.
16. A Woman Seldom Found, William Sansom, 4*. Review HERE.
17. Mummy to the Rescue, Angus Wilson, 2*. Review HERE.
18. Aghwee the Sky Monster, Kenzaburō Ōe, 3*. Review HERE.
19. Bishop Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe, Liliana Heker, 4*. Review HERE.
20. The Saint, Antonia White, 3*. Review HERE.
21. The Ghost of Firozsha Baag, Rohinton Mistry, 4*. Review HERE.
22. The Miracle of Ash Wednesday, Yevgeny Zamyatin, 4*. Review HERE.
23. Heartburn, Hortense Calisher, 3*. Review HERE.
24. The Accident, Ann Bridge, 3*. Review HERE.
25. The Old Woman, Joyce Marshall, 4*. Review HERE.
26. A Short Trip Home, F Scott Fitzgerald, 3*. Review HERE.
27. The Brute, Joseph Conrad, 2*. Review HERE.
Pause/stop?
Story 27 is almost half-way. At this point, the group put this volume aside as too few of the stories were available online, and switched to members picking a story to share each week.
I will probably dip in and out of some of the remaining stories, but may not review them all.
Short Story Club
Short Story Club, round 1: we read Gioia's The Art of the Short Story, which I reviewed HERE.
Short Story Club, round 12: we read Manguel's Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, which I reviewed HERE.
You can join the group here.
About the collection
Black Water was published in 1983. See my review of those stories here.
Black Water 2 was published in 1990. The format is much the same as the first book. A wide range of authors, including plenty of ones I've never heard of, and tantalising titles. Each story is prefaced with a few paragraphs about the author. As with volume 1, rather than take the easy and obvious route of publishing them alphabetically by author or chronologically, there's a delicate daisy chain of themes.
I'm in awe at Manguel's achievement in compiling two such large, high-quality, and varied collections. This has a simple dedication:
"To my mother,
For an imaginary life."
I take it as a tribute to his mother for nurturing his imagination via literature, but also as a nod to alternative layers of reality, as explored by many of the stories, and also films like The Truman Show, Being John Malkovich, Synedoche, New York, and now Severance.
On the meaning of ‘fantastic’, from the foreword
Unlike the literature of fantasy, in which the world itself — Narnia or Middle Earth — is unreal, fantastic literature finds its bearings in our own landscapes, our cities, our living-rooms, our beds, where suddenly something happens which demands not so much our belief as our lack of disbelief.
Once I defined fantastic literature as 'the impossible seeping into the possible' and found an echo of that definition in a line by Wallace Stevens: 'black water breaking into reality'. It is on this sodden reality that fantastic literature flourishes. The ghost, the wrinkle in time, the mingling of dream and vigil flow into this liquid realm, a realm readers recognize as home, a place where they feel oddly familiar. It is there that readers are at their most vulnerable and there that the fantastic becomes most effective.
Stories and reviews
1. The Child who Believed, Grace Amundson, 4*. Review HERE.
2. It's a Good Life, Jerome Bixby, 4*. Review HERE.
3. The Door, EB White, 4*. Review HERE.
4. Mysterious Kôr, Elizabeth Bowen, 4*. Review HERE.
5. Nights at Serampore, Mercea Eliade, 4*. Review HERE.
6. The Dead Fiddler, Isaac Bashevis Singer, 2*. Review HERE.
7. The Phoenix, Sylvia Townsend Warner, 2*. Review HERE.
8. The Spider, Hanns Heinz Ewers, 4*. Review HERE.
9. The Changeling, Dorothy K Haynes, 4*. Review HERE.
10. The July Ghost, AS Byatt, 4*. Review HERE.
11. Poor Girl, Elizabeth Taylor, 4*. Review HERE.
12. Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched, May Sinclair, 4*. Review HERE.
13. The Complete Gentleman, Amos Tutuola, 3*. Review HERE.
14. The Professor and the Siren, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 2*. Review HERE.
15. The Sausage ("Die Wurst"), Friedrich Durrenmatt, 3*. Review HERE.
16. A Woman Seldom Found, William Sansom, 4*. Review HERE.
17. Mummy to the Rescue, Angus Wilson, 2*. Review HERE.
18. Aghwee the Sky Monster, Kenzaburō Ōe, 3*. Review HERE.
19. Bishop Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe, Liliana Heker, 4*. Review HERE.
20. The Saint, Antonia White, 3*. Review HERE.
21. The Ghost of Firozsha Baag, Rohinton Mistry, 4*. Review HERE.
22. The Miracle of Ash Wednesday, Yevgeny Zamyatin, 4*. Review HERE.
23. Heartburn, Hortense Calisher, 3*. Review HERE.
24. The Accident, Ann Bridge, 3*. Review HERE.
25. The Old Woman, Joyce Marshall, 4*. Review HERE.
26. A Short Trip Home, F Scott Fitzgerald, 3*. Review HERE.
27. The Brute, Joseph Conrad, 2*. Review HERE.
Pause/stop?
Story 27 is almost half-way. At this point, the group put this volume aside as too few of the stories were available online, and switched to members picking a story to share each week.
I will probably dip in and out of some of the remaining stories, but may not review them all.
Short Story Club
Short Story Club, round 1: we read Gioia's The Art of the Short Story, which I reviewed HERE.
Short Story Club, round 12: we read Manguel's Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, which I reviewed HERE.
August 1, 2007
The sequel to Manguel’s collection Black Water: An Anthology of Fantastic Literature, this book maintains the level of excellence of the previous one. The stories in this volume, taken from a wide array of impressive authors, are disturbing, funny, grotesque, terrifying, thought-provoking, erotic, and just plain weird—everything a full blooded fantasy fan could want. Includes stories by E.B. White, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur C. Clarke, Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Isaac Bashevis Singer, A.S. Byatt, Julian Barnes, Herman Melville, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Luigi Pirandello, V.S. Naipaul and George Bernard Shaw, among many others.
December 21, 2021
PLACEHOLDER REVIEW (for this EXCELLENT but ENORMOUS collection I hope to re-read someday)
"A Short Trip Home" by F. Scott Fitzgerald - A wealthy young man, attending Yale but home in St. Paul MN for the holidays, moves among his circle of "bright, young things" at parties and cotillions and the like. But he begins to worry about a female friend of his, whom he secretly loves, who is keeping time with a sneering, criminal type - and so he involves himself in her affairs, discovering that her train trip to Chicago involves an assignation with this criminal fellow, and eventually, on another train trip back, finds himself in a direct contest of wills with the sinister individual...
Oddly enough, in the supernatural/fantasy genre it is not often you read a story by Fitzgerald ("Benjamin Button" being the other of which I am aware) and, oddly enough, in the horror genre, you do not read many stories so directly involving "unspoken moral corruption". We are never actually told just what the sinister Joe Varland intends of Ellen, but it is not doubt something more than what you normally might expect from these scenarios, as Varland himself is... compromised in his worldly existence (trying not to spoiler) and Ellen seems not only in his thrall, but herself struggling to make arguments for him, so we don't know just how much control he has. The final confrontation scene is quiet, low-key and powerful. There are some notable class conflict details as well (I appreciated that Fitzgerald was aware enough of this to actually have our main character momentarily reflect on how lucky he was to be well off). A different kind of thing, to be sure, but charmingly effective.
"A Short Trip Home" by F. Scott Fitzgerald - A wealthy young man, attending Yale but home in St. Paul MN for the holidays, moves among his circle of "bright, young things" at parties and cotillions and the like. But he begins to worry about a female friend of his, whom he secretly loves, who is keeping time with a sneering, criminal type - and so he involves himself in her affairs, discovering that her train trip to Chicago involves an assignation with this criminal fellow, and eventually, on another train trip back, finds himself in a direct contest of wills with the sinister individual...
Oddly enough, in the supernatural/fantasy genre it is not often you read a story by Fitzgerald ("Benjamin Button" being the other of which I am aware) and, oddly enough, in the horror genre, you do not read many stories so directly involving "unspoken moral corruption". We are never actually told just what the sinister Joe Varland intends of Ellen, but it is not doubt something more than what you normally might expect from these scenarios, as Varland himself is... compromised in his worldly existence (trying not to spoiler) and Ellen seems not only in his thrall, but herself struggling to make arguments for him, so we don't know just how much control he has. The final confrontation scene is quiet, low-key and powerful. There are some notable class conflict details as well (I appreciated that Fitzgerald was aware enough of this to actually have our main character momentarily reflect on how lucky he was to be well off). A different kind of thing, to be sure, but charmingly effective.
September 19, 2014
I love fantastic literature .... this anthology and the one before it are just plain wonderful.
December 9, 2018
Another 900+ pages of fantastical shorts, with a similar batting average. Between the two volumes (72+65 = 137 stories), my top 3 are:
- Certain Distant Suns, by Joanne Greenberg (1979)
- A Woman Seldom Found, by William Sansom (1956)
- Aghwee the Sky Monster, by Kenzaburo Oe (1964)
- Certain Distant Suns, by Joanne Greenberg (1979)
- A Woman Seldom Found, by William Sansom (1956)
- Aghwee the Sky Monster, by Kenzaburo Oe (1964)
May 30, 2020
A sequel to one of the best anthologies of fantastic literature that just might be better than the first. This volume introduced me to some of my very favourite short stories: "The Troll" by T.H. White; "The Professor and the Mermaid" by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; "The Dead Fish" by Boris Vian; "The Complete Gentleman" by Amos Tutuola. The volume also does a decent job of breaking out of the sphere of North American and European literature, with a number of stories from Asia, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and South America. Highly recommended.
current-long-rolling
September 7, 2025In progress....started Apr 1, 2025, last updated Sep 7, 2025
Reading this excellent anthology with The Short Story Club, one story per week. Lots of lively discussions there! Come join us at https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/.... Currently we have read 18 of the 65 stories.
Stories we have read thus far and links to my review on each:
Grace Amundson, The Child Who Believed
Jerome Bixby, It's a Good Life
E.B. White, The Door
Elizabeth Bowen, Mysterious Kor
Mircea Eliade, Nights at Serampore
Isaac Bashevis Singer, ✦The Dead Fiddler
Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Phoenix
Heinz Ewers, The Spider
Dorothy K Haynes, ✦The Changeling
A.S. Byatt, The July Ghost
Elizabeth Taylor, Poor Girl
May Sinclair, Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched
Amos Tutuloa, The Complete Gentleman
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, The Professor and the Siren
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, ✦The Sausage
William Sansom, A Woman Seldom Found
Angus Wilson, Mummy to the Rescue
Kenzaburō Ōe, Aghwee the Sky Monster
✦ denotes that there was not a short story edition to review in GR, so instead I selected an anthology the story was in and put my review there.
Reading this excellent anthology with The Short Story Club, one story per week. Lots of lively discussions there! Come join us at https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/.... Currently we have read 18 of the 65 stories.
Stories we have read thus far and links to my review on each:
Grace Amundson, The Child Who Believed
Jerome Bixby, It's a Good Life
E.B. White, The Door
Elizabeth Bowen, Mysterious Kor
Mircea Eliade, Nights at Serampore
Isaac Bashevis Singer, ✦The Dead Fiddler
Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Phoenix
Heinz Ewers, The Spider
Dorothy K Haynes, ✦The Changeling
A.S. Byatt, The July Ghost
Elizabeth Taylor, Poor Girl
May Sinclair, Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched
Amos Tutuloa, The Complete Gentleman
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, The Professor and the Siren
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, ✦The Sausage
William Sansom, A Woman Seldom Found
Angus Wilson, Mummy to the Rescue
Kenzaburō Ōe, Aghwee the Sky Monster
✦ denotes that there was not a short story edition to review in GR, so instead I selected an anthology the story was in and put my review there.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews