Introduction

There is a particular kind of pleasure that comes from opening a book and discovering that its author refuses to be confined by the boundaries we usually draw between the possible and the impossible. We tend to sort our reading into tidy categories: realistic fiction over here, fantasy over there, and never the two shall meet. Yet some of the most enduring storytellers have understood that the most fertile ground for imagination lies precisely at the border—where the recognizable streets of a great city suddenly open onto something stranger, where the ordinary conversations of ordinary people brush against the inexplicable, and where the laws that govern our daily lives bend just enough to let wonder slip through. The collection you are about to read lives squarely in that borderland, and it does so with a wit, an elegance, and a sly self-awareness that have kept it quietly alluring across the decades.

Brander Matthews, the author of these stories, was a man who spent his life thinking carefully about how stories work. He was not only a writer of fiction but also one of the most influential American literary critics and theorists of his era, a professor who helped establish the serious academic study of drama and the short story in the United States. This dual identity—craftsman and critic, practitioner and theorist—gives his fiction a distinctive flavor. He writes with the confidence of someone who has examined the machinery of storytelling from the inside, who knows exactly what a reader expects and takes a connoisseur’s delight in fulfilling, frustrating, or playfully subverting those expectations. Reading him is a little like watching a master magician who lets you glimpse, just for a moment, the mechanics of the trick—and finds that the wonder survives the revelation, perhaps even deepens because of it.

The tales gathered here, as the title promises, weave together fantasy and fact. But that phrase deserves a closer look before we go further, because it hints at something more sophisticated than a simple mixing of the magical and the mundane. For Matthews, “fact” was not merely the dull backdrop against which fantastical events occurred. Fact was itself a subject of fascination—the textures of modern urban life, the rhythms of professional ambition, the social rituals of a rapidly changing world, the way technology was beginning to reshape human experience. And “fantasy” was not always a matter of dragons and enchantments. Sometimes it was the intrusion of the genuinely supernatural; sometimes it was the eruption of the dreamlike into waking life; sometimes it was a thought experiment carried to its logical and unsettling conclusion. The genius of the collection lies in the way these elements are never crudely fused but rather allowed to converse with one another, each illuminating the other, so that the reader is left contemplating the curious truth that reality itself is a far stranger and more pliable thing than we usually allow.

This modern translation and adaptation has been prepared with a clear purpose: to bring these stories fully alive for the contemporary reader without sacrificing the qualities that make them worth reading in the first place. Matthews wrote in a prose style that was graceful and precise by the standards of his day, but the conventions of language, sentence construction, and reference have shifted considerably since then. Certain turns of phrase that once seemed natural now strike the ear as ornate or remote; certain assumptions about shared knowledge no longer hold; certain rhythms of dialogue feel dated. The work of adaptation has been to smooth these obstacles gently, to clarify where clarification serves the reader, and to allow the energy and humor of the original to come through unobstructed. What has been preserved—indeed, what has been protected with great care—is the author’s voice: that urbane, observant, faintly ironic intelligence that presides over every page. You are meeting Brander Matthews on his own terms, but spoken in a register your own ear will find immediately welcoming.

To read these tales with the fullest appreciation, it helps to understand a little about the world that produced them and the remarkable mind that shaped them. Brander Matthews moved through the literary and intellectual life of his time with extraordinary ease and influence. He was a fixture of the clubs and salons where writers, artists, and thinkers gathered; he counted among his friends and correspondents many of the leading literary figures of the English-speaking world. He was a tireless advocate for taking popular and emerging forms seriously, championing the short story as a distinct art with its own demands and possibilities at a moment when such an argument was far from settled. He wrote essays that helped define how generations of students and writers would think about narrative craft, and he brought that same analytical rigor to his own creative work.

This matters for the reader because it explains the peculiar pleasure of his fiction. There is a constant sense of an author who knows precisely what he is doing, who is in complete control of his materials, and who invites you to share in the fun of watching a well-made thing unfold. Matthews never bludgeons the reader. He suggests, he implies, he sets a scene with a few deft strokes and then lets the situation develop with an inevitability that feels both surprising and, in retrospect, perfectly logical. His stories have the satisfying architecture of a problem elegantly posed and elegantly resolved—even when, as in the more fantastical pieces, the “resolution” leaves you with a delicious uncertainty about what you have just witnessed.

The era in which these tales were written was one of dizzying transformation. Cities were expanding and modernizing at an unprecedented pace. New technologies were altering the fabric of everyday existence—the telephone, the electric light, faster transportation, the machinery of mass communication. Old certainties about science, religion, and the natural order were being challenged on every front. It was, in short, a moment supremely well suited to fiction that probed the boundary between the known and the unknown. When the very ground beneath your feet seems to be shifting, the line between the possible and the impossible becomes a subject of intense and immediate interest. Matthews was acutely attuned to this atmosphere. His fantasies are not escapes from modern life but rather meditations upon it, ways of asking what happens to the human imagination when the world itself begins to behave in unfamiliar ways.

You will notice, too, that Matthews was deeply cosmopolitan in his sensibilities. He had spent significant time abroad, particularly in Europe, and he carried an awareness of literary traditions beyond his own borders. This gives his work a worldliness, a refusal of provincialism, that still feels fresh. He was interested in how stories were told in different cultures and in different ages, and he borrowed and adapted with the cheerful magpie instinct of a true man of letters. Some of the tales here will remind you, in their structure or their flavor, of the great traditions of the fable, the ghost story, the satirical fantasy, and the philosophical conte. Matthews was conscious of all these lineages and played within them knowingly, even affectionately.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on his sense of humor, because it is one of the chief delights of this collection and one of the qualities most easily underestimated. Matthews was a witty man, and his wit is woven throughout these stories—sometimes in the gentle absurdity of a premise, sometimes in the sly observation of human folly, sometimes in the knowing wink with which he acknowledges the conventions he is employing. This is not slapstick, and it is rarely loud. It is the humor of a sophisticated observer who finds the comedy in human pretension, in the gap between what people say and what they mean, in the elaborate seriousness with which we conduct our small affairs. Even in his more eerie or unsettling pieces, there is often a thread of irony, a sense that the author is regarding the proceedings with a raised eyebrow as well as a sympathetic eye. This balance—between wonder and skepticism, between sincerity and irony—is what keeps the stories from ever feeling either naive or cynical. Matthews believes in the power of the imagination, but he is too clever to be solemn about it.

The heart of this collection, and the source of its lasting fascination, is the particular way it handles the relationship between the fantastic and the real. This is a delicate art, and many writers fail at it in one of two directions. Some lean so heavily on the fantastic that the reality dissolves entirely, leaving us in a weightless dream-world where nothing is at stake because nothing is grounded. Others cling so anxiously to realism that the fantastic, when it finally arrives, feels like an intrusion or a cheat. Matthews avoids both pitfalls through a technique that is worth understanding in advance, because recognizing it will sharpen your enjoyment of every page.

His method, broadly speaking, is to build his fantastical elements upon an absolutely solid foundation of the real. He establishes his characters as recognizable human beings with believable motives, situated in fully realized settings, going about plausible business. He spends his careful prose on making the ordinary world convincing—the sights and sounds of the city, the textures of social life, the small details of profession and personality. And then, into this carefully constructed reality, he introduces the element of the strange. Because the foundation is so secure, the intrusion of the fantastic carries genuine weight. It matters. We feel it, because we have been persuaded that the world it is disturbing is real.

This approach has a further, subtler effect. By grounding his fantasies in the recognizable, Matthews invites the reader to take them seriously not merely as entertainments but as inquiries. What would it actually mean if such a thing were possible? How would real people respond? What would the consequences be, not in some far-off enchanted kingdom, but right here, in the world of telephones and offices and dinner parties? The fantastic becomes a kind of lens through which the real is examined anew. We come to see our own world, and our own assumptions about it, in a different light.

There is also, running through these stories, a fascination with the unreliable boundary between the inner and outer worlds—between what happens in the mind and what happens outside it. Matthews was writing at a time when the new science of psychology was beginning to reveal the depths and strangeness of human consciousness, and his fiction reflects a keen interest in dreams, in states of altered perception, in the way the mind can transform and distort experience. Some of the most haunting moments in the collection arise from the uncertainty about whether what we are witnessing is “really” happening or is the product of a troubled or transported imagination. This ambiguity is not a flaw or an evasion; it is precisely the point. Matthews understood that the most powerful kind of fantasy is the kind that refuses to be neatly categorized, that leaves a residue of doubt, that sends the reader away still turning the question over.

I want to be careful here not to reveal the particular surprises and turns that await you in these pages, because much of the pleasure of this collection lies in encountering its inventions fresh. But I can say, in general terms, that you will find a remarkable range of approaches to the central theme. Some stories operate by introducing a single fantastical premise and then exploring its ramifications with rigorous logic, in the manner of the best speculative fiction. Others trade in atmosphere and suggestion, building a mood of unease or wonder without ever fully committing to a supernatural explanation. Still others use the fantastic as a vehicle for satire, holding up a distorting mirror to the follies and vanities of the age. And some are pure flights of imaginative play, delighting in the sheer pleasure of invention for its own sake. What unites them is the consistent intelligence of the author’s voice and the unwavering craftsmanship of the execution.