The phantasms, shades and specters in this volume of ghost stories by contemporary writers and acknowledged masters of twentieth century literature may haunt houses or a flat in Paris, but they write letters, too, and carry lanterns, patrol halls, run motorboats, inhabit dolls, and deliver mail. They also invade the darkest corners of the soul.

As this expertly edited anthology shows, the genre of the ghost story attracts an unusual number of first-rate "realistic" fiction writers. What occasional ghost story writer Henry James called "the terror of the unusual," instead of bogeymen from around the campfire, haunts the outstanding stories collected here.

Contents:

• Ghosts on the Lake by Ilse Aichinger
• Sonata for Harp and Bicycle by Joan Aiken
• Enoch Soames by Max Beerbohm
• The Happy Autumn Fields by Elizabeth Bowen
• Oh Father, Father, Why Have You Come Back? by John Cheever
• Dead Women’s Things by Kathy Chwedyk
• The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford
• The Supper at Elsinore by Isak Dinesen
• Lost Lives by Max Eberts
• The Shadowy Third by Ellen Glasgow
• A Shape of Light by William Goyen
• W.S. by L.P. Hartley
• The Astral Body of a U.S. Mail Truck by James Leo Herlihy
• The Bus by Shirley Jackson
• The Friends of the Friends by Henry James
• Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor by Franz Kafka
• "They" by Rudyard Kipling
• The Highboy by Alison Lurie
• The Ghosts of August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Doll by Joyce Carol Oates
• Wolfie by Robert Phillips
• A Spiritualist by Jean Rhys
• Owl by Elizabeth Spencer
• A Gracious Rain by Christopher Tilghman
• Mrs. Acland’s Ghosts by William Trevor
• The Leaf-Sweeper by Muriel Spark
• Pomegranate Seed by Edith Wharton