K. Narayan’s centennialIntroducing this collection of stories, R. K. Narayan describes how in India “the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story.” Composed of powerful, magical portraits of all kinds of people, and comprising stories written over almost forty years, Malgudi Days presents Narayan’s imaginary city in full color, revealing the essence of India and of human experience. This edition includes an introduction by Pulitzer Prize- winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    But few of those fans know that Capra’s film was based on a short story by author Philip Van Doren Stern, which came to Stern in a dream one night. Unable at first to find a publisher for his evocative tale about a man named George Pratt who ponders suicide until he receives an opportunity to see what the world would be like without him, Stern ultimately published the story in a small pamphlet and sent it out as his 1943 Christmas card. One of those 200 cards found its way into the hands of Frank Capra, who shared it with Jimmy Stewart, and the film that resulted became the holiday tradition we cherish today.Now fans of It’s a Wonderful Life, or anyone who loves the spirit of Christmas, can own the story that started it all in an elegant, illustrated edition that’s perfect for holiday giving. It includes an Afterword by Stern’s daughter, Marguerite Stern Robinson, that tells the story of how her father’s Christmas card became the movie beloved by generations of people around the world.

    A collection of folk tales from the southern Appalachians that center on a single character, the irrepressible Jack.

    John W. Campbell Jr.)The Weapon Makers, Part 1 of 3 (Weapon Shops of Isher #) / A.E. van Vogt; interior artwork by Frank Kramer In Times to Come / essay by unknownFlight into Darkness / Webb Marlowe (i.e. J. Francis McComas); interior artwork by Frank KramerMimsy Were the Borogoves / Lewis Padgett (i.e. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore); interior artwork by KollikerThe Man in the Moon / Henry A. Norton; interior artwork by KollikerGod's Footstool / essay by Malcolm JamesonThe Analytical Laboratory: December 1942 / essay by The Editor (i.e. John W. Campbell Jr.)Blue Ice (Probability Zero series) / Henry KuttnerProbability Zero! / essay by L. Sprague de Camp and Fox B. Holden and Colin Keith and Henry KuttnerEfficiency (Probability Zero series) / Colin Keith (i.e. Malcolm Jameson)Noise is Beautiful! (Probability Zero series) / Fox B. HoldenThe Anecdote of the Movable Ears (Probability Zero series) / L. Sprague de CampBrass Tacks / essay by The Editor (i.e. John W. Campbell Jr.)Opposites—React!, Part 2 of 2 (Seetee serial) / Willi Stewart (i.e. Jack Williamson); interior artwork by Kolliker

    It was originally published in the July, 1943issue of Weird Tales . It was first collected in Bradbury'santhology Dark Carnival and later collected in TheOctober Country and The Stories of Ray Bradbury .

    When the box fails to return, he constructs another and tests it the same way, but it also fails to return. Believing the entire experiment to be a failure, he discontinues his efforts and gives up on time machines. The first box arrives in the middle of the twentieth century and the second in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Both have had their time-travel circuitry irreparably damaged by the journey.Originally published in the February 1943 issue of "Astounding Science Fiction Magazine.Novelette, Classic science fiction, the basis for the film "The Last Mimsy"

    Haircut, The Golden Honeymoon, Champion, Alibi Ike, Horseshoes and 20 other stories.

    It was first published in the magazine Sur in February 1943. The main character of the story is a playwright named Jaromir Hladík, who is living in Prague when it is occupied by the Nazis during World War II. Hladík is arrested and charged with being Jewish as well as opposing the Anschluss, and sentenced to die by firing squad.

    http://janice142.com/JoyPage/Appointm...

    They are empty and black, but will not remain so. They are great portholes opening onto a world not yet born. Worlds that are born, like those that die, are full of dread."Trapped within its own circular prison of the Occupation and severed from contact with Paris and other countries, Belgian publishing turned inward, and forgotten authors such as Jean Ray were given new leases on literary life. Embracing the influence of American pulp fiction, Ray’s short stories found a new audience in those dark years of World War II, and what would come to be known as the Belgian School of the Strange gave voice to a realm of fear and unease that blended fantasy with a Catholic heritage and a prosaic, distinctly bourgeois everyday.Circles of Dread, Ray’s fourth short-story collection, was first published in 1943, the same year that saw the first appearance of his best-known work, the novel Malpertuis. This collection’s portholes onto sinister fantasy include such stories as 'The Marlyweck Cemetery', 'The Inn of the Specters', and 'The Story of the Wûkh'. Ray takes the reader from the quiet streets of Ghent to the scrambled streets of London to the Flinders river in Australia, with tales spun from such materials as the iron hand of Götz von Berlichingen, the black mirror of John Dee, a Moustiers ceramic plate, and the shifting, extra-dimensional menace of a predatory cemetery. All to illustrate, in the language of pulp fiction, that what constitutes dread is what lies outside our metaphysical prisons, some of which we may escape only at our own peril.Jean Ray (1887–1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the “Belgian Poe” and the “Flemish Jack London,” Ray delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer. A pivotal figure in the “Belgian School of the Strange,” Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the prohibition era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales of fantastical fear.

    Written alongside Bataille’s major work, Guilty, and only loosely narrative in any conventional sense, these audaciously experimental pieces of pornographic chamber music commingle prose and poetry, fiction and autobiography, philosophical and theological meditations, abstract artifice and intimate confession, bound together by the mysterious pseudonym at their center. Jean-Jacques Pauvert claimed that The Little One was the most “shattering” text that Bataille ever wrote and André Breton remarked that The Little One “offers the most hungering, most moving aspect of [Bataille’s] thought and attests to the importance that that thought will have in the near future.” The future is now as these texts appear in English for the first time. An extended postface by the translator places the works in biographical, historical, and critical perspective as assemblages constellated around the disappearance of the discursive real.Stuart Kendall is a writer, editor, and translator working at the intersections of poetics, modern and contemporary visual culture, theology, ecology, and design. His books include Georges Bataille (Reaktion Books, Critical Lives, 2007), The Ends of Art and Design (Infrathin, 2011), and eight book-length translations of French poetry, philosophy, and visual and cultural criticism, including books by Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Éluard, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and René Char. In 2012, Contra Mundum published his Gilgamesh, a new version of the eponymous Mesopotamian poems.

    

    He was, as he often remarked, a casual genius. Sometimes he'd start with a twist of wire, a few batteries, and a button hook, and before he finished, he might contrive a new type of refrigerating unit.At the moment he was nursing a hangover. A disjointed, lanky, vaguely boneless man with a lock of dark hair falling untidily over his forehead, he lay on the couch in the lab and manipulated his mechanical liquor bar. A very dry Martini drizzled slowly from the spigot into his receptive mouth.He was trying to remember something, but not trying too hard. It had to do with the robot, of course. Well, it didn't matter."Hey, Joe," Gallegher said.The robot stood proudly before the mirror and examined its innards. Its hull was transparent, and wheels were going around at a great rate inside.Joe remarked. "And get that cat out of here.""Your ears aren't that good.""They are. I can hear the cat walking about, all right.""What does it sound like?" Gallegher inquired, interested."Jest like drums," said the robot, with a put-upon air. "And when you talk, it's like thunder." Joe's voice was a discordant squeak, so Gallegher meditated on saying something about glass houses and casting the first stone. He brought his attention, with some effort, to the luminous door panel, where a shadow loomed-a familiar shadow, Gallegher thought."It's Brock," the annunciator said. "Harrison Brock. Let me in!""The door's unlocked." Gallegher didn't stir. He looked gravely at the well-dressed, middle-aged man who came in, and tried to remember. Brock was between forty and fifty; he had a smoothly massaged, cleanshaven face, and wore an expression of harassed intolerance. Probably Gallegher knew the man. He wasn't sure. Oh, well.

    They loved doing things together, and in these stories that run through all the months of the year, they have old-fashioned fun together in New England during the 1940s.On a wintry day in January, they share ice cream cones in a snow cave dug out by Father. February brings a sleigh ride—accompanied by the magical sound of jingling bells, they drive to the country as twilight descends, filling the air with hushed wonder.When Father buys a red second-hand car, which the children name the Dragon, they are off on more day trips and adventures. In spring they help a farmer with sugaring—collecting sap from maple trees as the Iroquois did, and on Easter morning this close family watches the sunrise over Nantasket beach. So on through the seasons, til it is winter again and they spend Christmas in a cottage by the sea.Illustrated by Marguerite Davis. New cover by Bethie Engstrom.

    

    

    

    Here the commonplace wind is personified as a sinister kind of monster who tracks its victims to the ends of the earth and sucks away their lives.