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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9691912" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Irving" target="_blank">Washington Irving</a>'s Tales of the Supernatural, a 1982 collection of some of the eponymous author's short stories, and enjoyed it quite a bit!I'll admit that I knew very little about Irving prior to this, mostly by way of knowing his two most popular tales: "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (though I'm sure I read "The Devil and Tom Walker" at some point also). However, I was surprised to learn (from this book's introduction, written by Edward Wagenknecht) that not only did Irving travel a great deal and have a storied political career, but he also wrote numerous other short stories (many of which, after a stint in Spain, were set in and around the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra" target="_blank">Alhambra</a>).What's in this book, then, is a selection of Irving's work, though I confess to being somewhat unclear regarding the criteria for why certain stories were chosen over others. While all of his most famous stories are here (i.e. the three I mentioned previously), along with a few others from Irving's infamous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diedrich_Knickerbocker" target="_blank">Diedrich Knickerbocker</a> hoax (which is where the New York Knicks would eventually get their name), there's a large contingent of his Alhambra stories, as well as a scattering of tales set in Germany. Amusingly enough, at least one of the stories here has nothing to do with the supernatural at all, making me wonder what the compiler was thinking.But issues of thematic cohesion aside, there's a lot to enjoy in these classic old tales. Irving's writing has been preserved as-is, so there were quite a few times when I had to look up some old word (and occasionally a Dutch term) that casually appeared in a sentence, along with quite a few Spanish references when it came to the Alhambra tales (I'd never heard of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_del_Carpio" target="_blank">Bernardo del Carpio</a>, for instance), which was often an unexpected bonus as it led me down some interesting new tangent. Collections like this are why I continually find myself drawn to older works rather than newer ones.</blockquote>

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