A spectacular collection of ghost stories by one of the masters of the genre, introduced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon.
"The central story of M.R. James, reiterated with inexhaustible inventiveness, is ultimately the breathtaking fragility of life, of "reality", of all the structures that we have erected to defend ourselves from our constant nagging suspicion that underlying everything is chaos, brutal and unreasoning. It is hard to conceive of a more serious theme, or a more contemporary plot, than this.... The stories are, unmistakably, works of art." - Michael Chabon, from the Introduction
