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A djinn, sealed in a jar for three thousand years, has been found by Horace Ventimore, a young and not very flourishing architect. Upon his release the djinn expresses his gratitude by seeking to grant his benefactor's every wish--generally with results the very opposite to those desired!

A rediscovered classic of madness and possession by the author of the famous bodyswap novel Vice Versa

After her father loses his fortune, Stella Maberly is forced to go into service as a paid companion to her former schoolfellow, Evelyn Heseltine. When Stella finds Evelyn one morning apparently dead from an accidental--or perhaps intentional--poisoning, she is shocked and horrified. But it is nothing compared to her horror when Evelyn reawakens. Stella believes her friend's body is animated by something evil. Is Stella insane, or has a spirit of darkness actually taken possession of Evelyn?

When originally published in 1896, The Statement of Stella Maberly was subtitled 'Written by Herself' and presented as the real-life confession of a possibly mad woman, but the identity of the book's true author, F. Anstey (1856-1934), famous for his oft-filmed bodyswap novel Vice Versa (1882), was soon revealed. This first-ever scholarly edition of Anstey's lost classic features a new introduction and notes by Peter Merchant, plus the first-ever appearance of unpublished manuscripts pertaining to the novel, including a 1916 screenplay for a never-produced film version, An Evil Spirit.

A young man commits the classic error of jokingly placing his engagement Ring on a park's statue of Aphrodite - which the Goddess animates, loftily accepting his presumed love and causing predictable fiancée trouble.

A comic adventure in which a father and son switch bodies -- a young boy becomes his father and vice-versa.

This was the original changing places comedy, first published in 1882. Anstey's fantasy spawned a number of imitations, but this tale came first. This famous story has been adapted for television at least three times, and for film at least five times.

The plot concerns Paul Bultitude and his son Dick, who, as a result of a magic stone talisman, find that their roles are reversed. Mr. Bultitude has to go to his son's boarding school, whilst Dick finds himself out of his depth in attempting to run his father's business. Paul (as Dick) finds it difficult to adapt to school life and earns a reputation with his fellow pupils as both a sneak and a coward, whilst Dick (as Paul) almost ruins his father's business. These are problems that they both have to deal with at the time -- as well as later when they are returned to their own bodies.

Anstey's work comes closest to SF in Tourmalin's Time Cheques (A Farcical Extravagance) (1891; vt The Time Bargain; or, Tourmalin's Cheque Book 1905), one of the earliest Time-Paradox stories and a pioneering example of Time Out of Sequence complications, though in the end, resolved as a dream.