Horace Walpole 36 min read

Wildly absurd, surreal little fables, the wisdom of the future, dressed as ancient learning, from the author of the first Gothic novel in a gleefully nonsensical mood.

Horace Walpole's 1785 collection is a set of deliberately outrageous, proto-surreal tales, mocking the fashions of his age. Strange, funny, ahead of its time. Read it for a genuinely bizarre eighteenth-century experiment in nonsense fantasy, from the father of the Gothic novel.

In its time

Published in 1785, during the Pre-1800, voyages to the moon, subterranean worlds, and philosophical utopias, the deep roots of the imaginative tradition, from kepler and cyrano to the enlightenment.

Reading it

36 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).