Last Tales.

DINESEN, Isak [Karen Blixen].

$40.00

Item Number: 145706

New York: Random House, 1957.

First edition of this classic collection of short stories. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a good dust jacket, bookplate to the front free endpaper with loss and closed tears to the spine and extremities. Jacket design by Jeanyee Wong.

Last Tales was written over a period of some years beginning in the 1930s. Simultaneously, Blixen was working on a novel, Albondocani, which would remain unpublished, and three other story collections Anecdotes of Destiny, New Gothic Tales and New Winter's Tales. She moved between the various collections, never completing any of them in their entirety. In 1957, she took seven stories from Albondocani and combined them with two stories from New Gothic Tales and three stories from New Winter's Tales for publication. As she was compiling the stories in 1953, Blixen originally planned for Anecdotes of Destiny to be a final part of the Last Tales collection, but as she neared publication, she decided to release Anecdotes as a separate volume, published the following year. Some reviewers noted individual tales as meritorious, such as "The Cardinal's First Tale", "Copenhagen Season", "A Country Tale", and "Echoes", but overall critical response was not overly enthusiastic. Time magazine's review described the collection as a group of Gothic fiction, which combined a mixture of grotesque and sublime themes in which the romantic plot is obscured by the supernatural and "tragically turns on the concept of honor."