Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen - Penguin Modern Classics Paperback | Gothic Fiction Collection for Book Lovers & Literary Enthusiasts | Perfect for Reading at Home, Book Clubs & Classic Literature Studies

Unusually for a book I read so long ago, I remember exactly when and why I read Seven Gothic Tales. It was the spring of 1973. I was 17 years old and in my second semester at Cornell University. All Cornell freshmen were required to take one of a large selection of courses called freshmen seminars in each of our first semesters. (I gather they still do something like this.) The freshman seminars (now called First-Year- Writing Seminars) had a simple purpose. Someone had noticed that new college students couldn't write worth a damn. "Someone" in this case means virtually every single professor and teaching assistant who had the chore of wading through prose written by said students. The main requirement for a student in a freshman seminar was to write, *A LOT*. The typical requirement was a five-page paper every week, plus ten-page midterm and final papers. (At an estimated 500 words/page, that's 45000 words/semester -- a novella. The instructors had to read all this dreck.)There were classes that met in small classrooms, too. You might think that the classes would be about writing, but they were not. They were about some other subject, which we discussed in class, and wrote about in our papers. The freshman seminar I took in my second semester was a literary analysis class. (Not my first choice! And yes, that is a sentence fragment, and I would have been marked down for including it in a paper.) We read books chosen by the instructors (two grad students), and also additional books of our choosing and wrote our papers about them.Seven Gothic Tales was one of the books we were all required to read. I had never heard of it, or of Isak Dinesen. In fact, I remember being surprised when one of our instructors referred to her with the feminine pronoun. (Of course Isak Dinesen is the pen-name of the Danish baroness Karen Blixen.)I have actually forgotten all the stories -- I probably ought to reread the book. But I still remember the impression they left on me. They were weird and vivid. Reading Seven Gothic Tales was not like reading a book of stories -- it was like watching a movie. We also read Gustave Flaubert's Three Tales, which left a similar impression on me. (I recently reread Trois Contes, this time in the original French, and confirmed my 50-year-old impression.)it was not until years later that I got around to reading Blixen's memoir Out of Africa. It's a good book, but not the outstanding work that Seven Gothic Tales is.