Transformation of the werewolf in literature made its greatest strides in the 19th century when the shape-shifting monster leapt from poetry to the short story. It happened when this shorter form of literature was morphing into darker shapes thanks in no small part to Edgar Allan Poe, Honore de Balzac, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Prosper Merimee, James Hogg, and so many others in Europe and the United States.The fifty year period between 1800 and 1849 is truly the cradle of all werewolf short stories. For the first time in one anthology, Andrew Barger has compiled the best...

After reading War & Peace, Fyodor Dostoevsky put the book down and said, "The fool hath said in heart there is no God." Yet, Tolstoy's shorter novels (i.e., novellas) are filled with all the war, adventure, comedy, religion, tragedy, and Russian tradition that inhabit the longer novels of the Russian bear of literature. Andrew Barger, editor of the best selling anthology, "Leo Tolstoy's 20 Greatest Short Stories Annotated," has gathered the very best of Tolstoy's novellas into one remarkable collection that includes hundreds of annotations of difficult Russian terms and sheds light on...