Best of
Short-Stories

1944

Ficciones


Jorge Luis Borges - 1944
    Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything else in between. Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths Prologue Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition) Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) The Circular Ruins (1940) The Lottery in Babylon (1941) An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941) The Library of Babel (1941) The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) Part Two: Artifices Prologue Funes the Memorious (1942) The Form of the Sword (1942) Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944) Death and the Compass (1942) The Secret Miracle (1943) Three Versions of Judas (1944) The End (1953, 2nd edition only) The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only) The South (1953, 2nd edition only)

The Portable Dorothy Parker


Dorothy Parker - 1944
    This collection ranges over the verse, stories, essays, and journalism of one of the twentieth century's most quotable authors.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth And Other Stories Of Horror


H.P. Lovecraft - 1944
    "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is a short novel about a weird hybrid race of humans and creatures resembling a cross between a fish and a frog, which lives in the seaside village of Innsmouth.

Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural


Herbert A. WiseWalter de la Mare - 1944
    Represented in the anthology are such distinguished spell weavers as Edgar Allen Poe ("The Black Cat"), Wilkie Collins ("A Terribly Strange Bed"), Henry James ("Sir Edmund Orme"), Guy de Maupassant ("Was It a Dream?"), O. Henry ("The Furnished Room"), Rudyard Kipling ("They"), and H.G. Wells ("Pollock and the Porroh Man"). Included as well are such modern masters as Algernon Blackwood ("Ancient Sorceries"), Walter de la Mare ("Out of the Deep"), E.M. Forster ("The Celestial Omnibus"), Isak Dinesen ("The Sailor-Boys Tale"), H.P. Lovecraft ("The Dunwich Horror"), Dorothy L. Sayers ("Suspicion"), and Ernest Hemingway ("The Killers"). "There is not a story in this collection that does not have the breath of life, achieve the full suspension of disbelief that is so particularly important in [this] type of fiction," wrote the Saturday Review. With an introduction and notes by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise.

The Collected Dorothy Parker


Dorothy Parker - 1944
    The decadent 1920s and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. In the bitingly witty poems and stories collected here, along with her articles and reviews, she brilliantly captures the spirit of the decadent Jazz Age in New York, exposing both the dazzle and the darkness. But beneath the sharp perceptions and acidic humour, much of her work poignantly expresses the deep vulnerability of a troubled, self-destructive woman who, in the words of philosopher Irwin Edman, was 'a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack'.Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was born in West End, New Jersey, and grew up in New York. In 1916 she sold some of her poetry to the editor of Vogue, and was subsequently given an editorial position on the magazine. She then became drama critic of Vanity Fair and the central figure of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, whose members included George S. Kaufman and Harpo Marx. Her collections of poems included Enough Rope (1926) and Not So Deep as a Well (1936), and her collections of stories included Here Lies (1939); in addition, she collaborated on and wrote screenplays including the Oscar-winning A Star is Born (1937), and Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942).If you enjoyed The Collected Dorothy Parker, you might like Truman Capote's The Complete Stories, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'She managed to express her real feelings in stanzas which snap and glitter like a Chanel handbag'Peter Ackroyd, The Times

The Simple Art of Murder


Raymond Chandler - 1944
    Contains Chandler's essay on the art of detective stories and a collection of 8 classic Chandler mysteries.

McSorley's Wonderful Saloon


Joseph Mitchell - 1944
    These books, which form the bulk of current writing, always make you feel as if you had paid for looking into the wrong end of a telescope. Mitchell, on the other hand, likes to start with an unimportant hero, but he collects all the facts about him, arranges them to give the desired effects, and usually ends by describing the customs of a whole community. Commodore Dutch, the subject of one portrait, ‘is a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself.’ Mitchell doesn’t try to present him as anything more than a barroom scrounger; but in telling the story of his career, he also gives a picture of New York sporting life since the days of Big Tim Sullivan. The story called ‘King of the Gypsies’ is even better. It sets out to describe Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the spokesman or king of thirty-eight gypsy families, but it soon becomes a Gibbon’s decline and fall of the American gypsies; and it ends with an apocalyptic vision that is not only comic but also, in its proper context, more imaginative than anything to be found in recent novels. “Reading some of his portraits a second time, you catch an emotion beneath them that curiously resembles Dickens’: a continual wonder at the sights and sounds of a big city, a continual devouring interest in all the strange people who live there, a continual impulse to burst into praise of kind hearts and good food and down with hypocrisy.” —Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic

Damon Runyon Omnibus


Damon Runyon - 1944
    A world of speakeasies and dancing girls where a gambler or bootlegger is perfectly normal and respectable in every way. Those familiar with "Guys and Dolls" know what to expect!

The Spinoza of Market Street


Isaac Bashevis Singer - 1944
    Literature - Singer's second collection of stories, eleven in all, including the title story, "A Tale of Two Liars", and "The Destruction of Kreshev."

The Lake


Ray Bradbury - 1944
    It was first published in the May 1944 edition of Weird Tales, and later collected in Bradbury's collections Dark Carnival, The October Country, and The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Bradbury believed it was one of the finest stories he'd ever written.

Arena


Fredric Brown - 1944
    He rolled over to his side, off the rock, and then pushed himself up to a sitting position.'I'm crazy,' he thought. 'Crazy -- or dead -- or something.' The sand was blue, bright blue. And there wasn't any such thing as bright blue sand on Earth or any of the planets. Blue sand under a blue dome that wasn't the sky nor yet a room, but a circumscribed area -- somehow he knew it was circumscribed and finite even though he couldn't see to the top of it.He picked up some of the sand in his hand and let it run through his fingers. It trickled down on to his bare leg. Bare?

Desertion


Clifford D. Simak - 1944
    The administrator can’t in good conscience send another volunteer to look for them, so he transforms himself and his faithful dog into Lopers.

Damon Runyon Favorites


Damon Runyon - 1944
    Included are many of the stories that have made him famous. There are "Little Miss Marker," "The Hottest Guy in the World," and "Madame La Gimp," who went Hollywood and became the celebrated Lady for a Day.You'll enjoy meeting some of Mr. Runyon's friends, socially. You'll like Harry the Horse and Spanish John and Little Isadore - hard characters, perhaps, but they would be hurt if you called them kidnapers. Then there's Big False Face, the Beer Baron. The police sent him to college at a place called Auburn, N.Y., and he also did post-graduate work at Ossining and Dannemora. And you'll meet Princess O'Hara and Goldberg, her horse, named after a guy who runs a delicatessen store on Tenth Avenue, and Last Card Louie, and The Brain himself. A veritable banquet in these pages for all those who like their Runyon straight.

The royal game. Amok. Letter from an unknown woman


Stefan Zweig - 1944
    W. Huebsch. Amok ... and Letter from an unknown woman ... translated by Eden and Cedar Paul.

The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes


Ellery QueenStuart Palmer - 1944
    First published in 1944, this is an anthology of parodies and pastiches, and comprises of a collection of more than 30 stories—written by detective story writers, famous literary figures, humorists and others—of burlesques and pastiches of the famous detective that represent the highlights of character, style, idiosyncrasies, deduction associated with Sherlock Holmes.

The World Over: Collected Short Stories, Volume 1


W. Somerset Maugham - 1944
    1, 1934) and The World Over (Vol. 2, 1952). The Reprint Society published the same collection, again in two volumes, but dropped the individual titles, and instead calls the whole collection "The World Over: Collected Short Stories". The "East and West" title apparently is not used at all in the Reprint Society's collection. In addition, there is some redistribution of stories between the two volumes.

Tales and More Tales from Mountain


Miguel Torga - 1944
    The author speaks of the men and women living there, complex in emotion and thought, and elusive and thrifty with words.

The Adventures of Sam Spade and Other Stories


Dashiell Hammett - 1944
    Contents:Too many have livedThey can only hang you onceA man called SpadeThe assistant murdererNight shadeThe judge laughed lastHis brother's keeper

The Best of William Irish


Cornell Woolrich - 1944