Black Water Book Club

Alberto Manguel’s Black Water: The Book of the Fantastic is an anthology of world literature from 1983 that’s considered a pioneering book for the weird genre. It’s cited as influential by others, in particular Ann and Jeff VanderMeer who put together their own anthology of weird literature. While Black Water‘s still leans Eurocentric, Manguel succeeded in pulling heavily from outside the English language, paying particular attention to the South American writers who formed his own background. At close to a thousand pages long Black Water does an admirable job at providing an overview of the fantastic as written around the world. Certainly its seventy-two stories excel in scope beyond other omnibus anthologies of weird stories from earlier eras. Used copies go for around ten dollars on Amazon, but I found my copy for half that back in 2017 at a used bookstore in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I bring all this up because one project I will work on this 2020 is a read through of the book over the course of the entire year, writing capsule reviews of the stories here at a rate of six stories per month.

I hope you’ll join me, or at least follow along.