From Simon & Schuster, Classic Crews is a collection of works from the master Harry Crews, including his memoir and short stories.Collected here is the best of Harry Crews: his astoundingly beautiful memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place; two if his most memorable novels, Car and The Gypsy's Curse; and three masterly essays, "Climbing the Tower," "The Car," and "Fathers, Sons and Blood," as well as a new introduction to these works by Crews himself.

    The series follows a group of soldiers through the war and home as they seek to build their lives. Shiloh Autumn, the novel is also related to these books.

    In addition to the title story (about Irma and Ernie Lundeen's traveling flock of acrobatic, bible-reciting birds), contents include:Pastor Ingquist's Trip to OrlandoMammoth Concert Tickets Bruno, the Fishing DogGospel BirdsMeeting Donny Hart at the Bus StopA Day at the Circus with MazumboThe Tollerud's Korean BabySylvester Krueger's DeskBabe Ruth visits Lake WobegonGospel Birds is Garrison Keillor at his very best—endearing insights, gentle humor and warm affection for the human foibles we all share.

    Through the eyes of a man recollecting three episodes from his youth, William Styron explores with new eloquence death, loss, war and racism.

    Fleeing the chaotic,  ruined city, he instinctively travels north toward a frozen, desolate sanctuary he is certain will assure this survival--and freedom. Making his way through enemy terrain, on the lookout for both danger and  opportunity, Muldrow's journey becomes the flight of a pure predator. Moving through the darkness,  bombarded by haunting visions that consume his  imagination, every step in his violent odyssey brings  him closer to a harrowing climax that is pure  James Dickey.

    A closely reasoned and fearlessly self-revealing account of a struggle to reconcile the ancient archetypes of the hero-tale with a true estimate of the value of, and values of, women and men in a world whose stories now need to celebrate the private as well as the public virtues, and many different kinds of courage.

    Calculating the infinite in the finite, tracing geometries of desire, placing the obdurate world in an uncustomary light, each of these stories opens out its own world. Without giving up the plot or character of the traditional short story, Guy Davenport's inventions are complex events in which ideas and cultural history are a kind of music to which the characters dance. Despite the fractal, syncopated collage of his narrative style, Davenport's prose is objective, terse, and transparent. A constant theme in this book is the transmission of the past as an imaginative act; hence the title, Falstaff's dying vision of "a table of green fields," probably a mishearing of his recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, corrected by editors to "he babbled of green fields," a symbol of all fiction, an art that must be exact about the uncertain.

    Ulla E. Dydo's textual scholarship demonstrates Stein's constant questioning of convention, and A Stein Reader changes the balance of work in print, concentrating on Stein's experimental work and including many key works that are virtually unknown or unavailable.A Stein Reader includes unpublished work, such as the portrait "Article"; shows the astonishing stylistic change in the neglected "A Long Gay Book"; draws attention to the many unknown plays such as "Reread Another;" and offers fascinating portraits of Matisse, Picasso, and Sitwell. Illuminating headnotes bring out connections between pieces and provide invaluable keys to Stein's motifs and thought patterns.