A review by elizafiedler
Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature by Hilaire Belloc, Bruno Schulz, João Guimarães Rosa, L.P. Hartley, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Graham Greene, Don Juan Manuel, Alex Comfort, Robert Smythe Hichens, Vladimir Nabokov, M.R. James, Julio Cortázar, Francis King, Charles Dickens, Adolfo Bioy Casares, I.A. Ireland, Jean Cocteau, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Charles Williams, Jules Verne, Howard Fast, Flann O'Brien, Giovanni Papini, Silvina Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges, Léon Bloy, Virgilio Piñera, Brian Moore, George Hitchcock, Hermann Hesse, Joanne Greenburg, Daphne du Maurier, David Garnett, Marcel Aymé, Edith Wharton, Tennessee Williams, Max Beerbohm, Saki, Marguerite Yourcenar, E.M. Forster, Cynthia Ozick, Horacio Quiroga, Italo Calvino, Ray Bradbury, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Alberto Manguel, Marco Denevi

2.0

Hard to imagine that even in 1991 this passed as a diverse collection of stories. I don't even think the title is accurate. It's not really a collection of fantastic literature. It's a collection of solidly white canonical authors who happened to write a ghost story or a mildly unsettling story that one time, with a few token stories by women and people of color. Occasionally there's a piece of genuine supernatural horror, but they're few and far between. And even among white cis male authors, Tolkien and Lewis are missing. Because they're too popular for 1991? There are too many other obvious omissions to name. I grant you Lavalle, LeGuin, Bradbury, and one or two others.

It's also guilty of egregious orientalism. There are a few stories with origins in East Asia and the Middle East, but they're not translations from stories in those languages. They're English translations of adaptations in French, Spanish, etc., with no claim to accuracy to the source text or oral tradition. Even for 30 years ago, this is not a good look.