{"product_id":"compulsory-games-isbn-9781681371894","title":"Compulsory Games","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe best and most interesting stories by Robert Aickman, a master of the supernatural tale, the uncanny, and the truly weird.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eRobert Aickman’s self-described “strange stories” are confoundingly and   uniquely his own. These superbly written tales terrify not with  standard  thrills and gore but through a radical overturning of the laws  of nature  and everyday life. His territory of the strange, of the  “void behind  the face of order,” is a surreal region that grotesquely  mimics the  quotidian: Is that river the Thames, or is it even a river?  What does it  mean when a prospective lover removes one dress, and then  another—and  then another? Does a herd of cows in a peaceful churchyard  contain the  souls of jilted women preparing to trample a cruel lover to  death?  Published for the first time under one cover, the stories in  this  collection offer an unequaled introduction to a profoundly  original  modern master of the uncanny.\u003ci\u003eCompulsory Games\u003c\/i\u003e by Robert Aickman\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e PROVISIONAL TABLE OF CONTENTS\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Compulsory Games\u003cbr\u003e Le Miroir\u003cbr\u003e Raising the Wind\u003cbr\u003e Residents Only\u003cbr\u003e Hands in Glove\u003cbr\u003e Wood\u003cbr\u003e Laura\u003cbr\u003e Just a Song at Twilight\u003cbr\u003e Letters to the Postman\u003cbr\u003e Marriage\u003cbr\u003e No Time Is Passing\u003cbr\u003e The Strangers\u003cbr\u003e The Fully-Conducted Tour\u003cbr\u003e A Disciple of Plato\u003cbr\u003e The Coffin House\"Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very  often I’m not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it  beautifully.\" —Neil Gaiman \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In Aickman's fiction, peculiarity is intertwined with a drab twentieth-century realism that is very English and sometimes dryly funny. Think Philip Larkin, or Barbara Pym, gone eldritch.\" —Anwen Crawford, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e “Aickman was a master of the 'strange story’ whose nearly unclassifiable output relies neither on ghosts nor creaking castles. Each story in this collection is a small masterpiece of unease and  psychological perplexity….Aickman’s stories present dreamlike, inexplicable realities in prose both strangely sensual and entirely disarming, making this collection a treasure for fans of Poe, Kafka, and Lovecraft.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Among this year’s most rewarding rediscoveries, for those who treasure the supernatural, there’s \u003ci\u003eCompulsory Games\u003c\/i\u003e by Robert Aickman, a lifetime’s sinister and uncanny short stories, all ending darkly.\" —David Sexton, \u003ci\u003eEvening Standard\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \"A collection of dark, eerie tales from a master of weird fiction. English author Aickman is regarded as a forefather of horror, and this reissue of his fiction by NYRB Classics shows that his reputation is justified….With these 15 stories, four of which are previously unpublished, Aickman creates a disquieting universe in which everything is just off, a wall covered in pictures hung at imperceptibly crooked angles. His command of tone and tension far outstrips that of H.P. Lovecraft and presents a serious challenge to Henry James...As unnerving as it is sinuous; an absolute delight.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Robert Aickman is one of the twentieth century's finest practitioners of the short story and his name should be placed among the greats—Flannery O'Connor, Irwin Shaw, Raymond Carver. Aickman wrote what he called 'strange stories'—the sort of thing that gets the dreaded genre fiction tag attached to you, so it's mainly horror fans who know his work. But make no mistake. The number of short story writers in English who are or were Aickman's equal is a low single digit. You will never forget the first Aickman story you read, nor be satisfied when you've read them all; and so this new collection is a feast for those of us who'd sought out the out-of-print volumes in second-hand stores over the years. I have hoped for years to see Aickman's writing gain the broad readership it deserves. May this new collection unnerve an entire generation of readers the way I got permanently unnerved when I first read 'Le Miroir' in \u003ci\u003eWhispers \u003c\/i\u003emagazine in 1977.\" —John Darnielle, author of \u003ci\u003eWolf in White Van\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Of all the authors of uncanny tales, Aickman is the best ever.... His  tales literally haunt me; his plots and his turns of phrase run through  my head at the most unlikely moments.\" —Russell Kirk\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This century’s most profound writer of what we call horror stories.\" —Peter Straub\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Robert Aickman has a gift for depicting the eerie areas of inner  space, the churning storms and silent overcasts that engulf the minds of  lonely and alienated people. He is a weatherman of the subconscious.\" —Fritz Lieber\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Unsettling is a key description for Aickman’s writing, not merely in  the sense of creating anxiety, but in the sense of undoing what has been  settled: his stories unsettle the ideas you bring to them about how  fictional reality and consensus reality should fit together. The  supernatural is never far from the surreal. He was drawn to ghost  stories because they provided him with conventions for unmaking the  conventional world, but he was about as much of a traditional ghost  story writer as Salvador Dalí was a typical designer of pocket watches.\" —Matthew Cheney, \u003ci\u003eElectric Literature\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"His prose style—supple, urbane, sophisticated, restrained, yet  capable of surprisingly powerful emotive effects—never falters from the  beginning to the end of his work. There are few writers who are as  purely pleasurable to read, regardless of their subject matter or the  success or failure of their actual work, as Robert Aickman.\" —S. T. Joshi\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"To interact with Aickman on any meaningful level is to experience a  form of quantum entanglement. His ideas entrain the subconscious and  mutate it in the fashion that transgressive art must. And yes, I’m  implying that the old boy has fucked your mind. Buttoned down or not,  it’s just what he liked to do.\" —Laid Barron, \u003ci\u003eWeird Fiction Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eRobert Aickman\u003c\/b\u003e (1914–1981) was the son of an architect and grandson of the Victorian Gothic novelist Richard Marsh (author of the occult bestseller \u003ci\u003eThe Beetle\u003c\/i\u003e). He did not attend university and subsisted on a small family income in London, working variously as a literary agent, editor, and theater and art critic. A prominent advocate for preserving and restoring England’s extensive network of canals, he was cofounder, in 1946, of the influential Inland Waterways Association. Above all, Aickman wanted to be an author, and he realized this desire with an extensive oeuvre of quasi-supernatural tales. In addition to eight collections of “strange stories,” as he dubbed them (the first, \u003ci\u003eWe Are For the Dark\u003c\/i\u003e, included stories written by the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard), his writing includes a short novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Late Breakfasters\u003c\/i\u003e (1965), a posthumously published novella, \u003ci\u003eThe Model\u003c\/i\u003e (1987), and various unpublished fiction, dramatic, and nonfiction works. He published two memoirs, \u003ci\u003eThe Attempted Rescue\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe River Runs Uphill\u003c\/i\u003e, and two popular nonfiction books about the inland waterways. Aickman won the World Fantasy Award in 1975 for his story “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” and edited eight volumes of \u003ci\u003eThe Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories\u003c\/i\u003e, writing introductions for six. He died of cancer in 1981.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eVictoria Nelson\u003c\/b\u003e is a writer of fiction, criticism, and memoir. Her books include \u003ci\u003eGothicka\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Secret Life of Puppets\u003c\/i\u003e, a study of the supernatural grotesque in Western culture that won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies in 2001, and \u003ci\u003eWild California\u003c\/i\u003e, a collection of stories. She teaches in Goddard College’s MFA creative writing program.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303043584229,"sku":"NP9781681371894","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681371894.jpg?v=1767724013","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/compulsory-games-isbn-9781681371894","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}