Book excerpt: "Last Tales" is a collection of twelve of the last tales that Karen Blixen wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen, before her death in 1962. They include seven tales from Albondocani, a projected novel that was never completed; “The Caryatids,” an unfinished Gothic tale of a couple bedeviled by an old letter and a gypsy’s spell; and three tales of winter, including “Converse at Night in Copenhagen,” a drunken, allnight conversation between a boyking, a prostitute, and a poor young poet.