I really really really loved the stories, but the translation and the selection was terrible. I picked up this edition because it looked 'scholarly', but the style of the whole thing was just really awkward and felt contrived and annoying. I liked the supernatural stories (especially 'The Golden Pot', 'The Sandman' and 'Councillor Krespel') much better than the ones that don't seem to have magic in them, 'Mademoiselle de Scuderi' and 'The Doubles' I thought were especially dull and confusing, but that might have just been the translation. I really wish I had gotten a different translation, since from the imagery and plot it's clear that the stories are exceptional and fascinating, but the language is just horrible and unwieldy, and ruined a great deal of the experience of reading them for me. The stories are delightfully bizarre and creepy, and completely bewildering. Parts of them are also really funny and ironic, even at the most seemingly tragic and inappropriate moments. They seem to be somewhere between literary fairy tales and the Gothic, and since I enjoy most things in those two genres, and everything in between, these stories were delightful to read, and would have been more delightful still in a proper translation.
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