Ghosts, Paperback Book, By: Edith Wharton

An elegantly hair-raising collection of Edith Whartons ghost stories, selected and with a preface written by the author herself. No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Whartons most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Whartons final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937. In The Ladys Maids Bell, the earliest tale included here, a servants dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in All Souls, the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter. In all her writing, Whartons great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such worldly matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of ones own soul. These are stories to send a cold shiver down ones spine, not to terrify, and as Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter the hard grind of modern speeding-up by preserving that ineffable space of silence and continuity, which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but in the fun of the shudder its delight. ContentsAll SoulsThe EyesAfterwardThe Ladys Maids BellKerfolThe Triumph of NightMiss Mary PaskBewitchedMr. JonesPomegranate SeedA Bottle of Perrier. About the Author Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and designer. Among the most famous of her many novels are The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, the first woman to do so. In 2007 NYRB Classics published a collection of her short stories, The New York Stories of Edith Wharton.