But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

    This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.

    Who but Bradbury could imagine the playroom in which children's fantasies become real enough to kill? The beautiful white suit that turns six down-and-out Chicanos into their ideal selves? Only Bradbury could make us identify with a man who lives in terror of his own skeleton. And if a generic science fiction writer might describe a spaceship landing on Mars, only Bradbury can tell us how the Martians see it--and the dreamlike visitors from Planet Earth.

    The Tomb and other Tales-

    He makes his characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and even have a love life.During the course of these stories Calvino toys with continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. He succeeds in relating complex scientific concepts to the ordinary reactions of common humanity.William Weaver's excellent translation won a National Book Award in 1969“Naturally, we were all there," old Qfwfq said, "where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?”The distance of the moon --At daybreak --A sign in space --All at one point --Without colors --Games without end --The aquatic uncle --How much shall we bet? --The dinosaurs --The form of space --The light-years --The spiral.

    Ranging from the prophetic to the surreal, these stories demonstrate Stanislaw Lem's vast talent and remarkable ability to blend meaning and magic into a wholly entertaining and captivating work.

    A rebel inhabits a world where conformity and punctuality are top priorities and the Ticktockman cannot accept the Harlequin's presence in his perfectly ordered world.

    Henry first lived a checkered life as a cowhand, bank teller, reporter, embezzler, and convict. Then, in a last-minute reversal worthy of one of his own stories, he turned to fiction, and became a celebrated author of ironic miniatures. "The Gift of the Magi" is perhaps his most famous creation. And while this exploration of love and gift-giving doesn't exactly plumb the depths of human behavior, it does leave us with the final picture of Jim (sans watch) and Della (sans hair, or most of it), which has induced even the crankiest readers to shed a tear since it first appeared in 1906. Get out your handkerchiefs!

    Passion is the keynote as you encounter the Harlequin and his nemesis, the dreaded Tictockman, in one of the most reprinted and widely taught stories in the English language; a pyretic who creates fire merely by willing it; the last surgeon in a world of robot physicians; a spaceship filled with hideous mutants rejected by the world that gave them birth. Touching and gentle and shocking stories from an incomparable master of impossible dreams and troubling truths.Contents:7 · New Introduction: Your Basic Crown of Thorns · in 19 · Spero Meliora · in 24 · Paingod · ss Fantastic Jun ’64 35 · “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman · ss Galaxy Dec ’65 49 · The Crackpots [Kyben] · nv If Jun ’56 89 · Sleeping Dogs · ss Analog Oct ’74 100 · Bright Eyes · ss Fantastic Apr ’65 112 · The Discarded [“The Abnormals”] · ss Fantastic Apr ’59 125 · Wanted in Surgery · nv If Aug ’57 156 · Deeper Than the Darkness · nv Infinity Science Fiction Apr ’57

    They show him as a master of compression and a probing analyst, unmasking the mediocrity, lack of ideals, and spiritual and physical inertia of his generation. In these grim pictures of peasant life, and telling portraits of men and women enmeshed in trivialities, in the finely observed, suffocating atmosphere of provincial towns with their pompous officials, frustrated, self-seeking wives, spineless husbands, Chekhov does not expound any system of morality, but leaves the reader to draw what conclusion he will.

    Miss Jane Marple cycles into a viper's nest of danger and intrigue. Mr. Parker Pyne takes a train to a mansion where a dance of diabolical deceit awaits him. Harley Quin motors to an isolated country inn for a rendezvous with eerie evil. — And the one and only Agatha Christie offers thirteen unforgettable journeys from bewildering bafflement to startling solution for all who love a mystery.

    In "The Old Man Who Said Why" a wise fairy's kind nature is taxed when one old man's questions throw the entire heavens into madness. In "The Elephant and the Butterfly" and "The House That Ate Mosquito Pie" shyness is overcome by the compelling love of new friends. "The Little Girl Named I" is a conversation between the author and a small girl, in the manner of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh.Clever, insightful, and magical, peopled with vivid characters—a house that prefers one bird to any human inhabitants, an elephant paralyzed with delight, a fairy who "always breakfasted on light and silence"here are tales as only Cummings could write them. A delightful and surprising gift for anyone, young or old.

    This volume brings together the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book form.Go little book... --Flowering Judas and other stories: María Concepción ; Virgin Violeta ; The martyr ; Magic ; Rope ; He ; Theft ; That tree ; The jilting of Granny Weatherall ; Flowering Judas ; The cracked looking-glass ; Hacienda --Pale horse, pale rider: Old mortality ; Noon wine ; Pale horse, pale rider --The leaning tower and other stories: The old order : The source ; The journey ; The Witness ; The circus ; The last leaf ; The fig tree ; The grave. The downward path to wisdom ; A day's work ; Holiday ; The leaning tower

    Found in a Bottle  - A Tale of the Ragged Mountains - The Sphinx -  The Murders in the Rue Morgue - The Tell-Tale Heart  - The Gold-Bug - The System of Dr. Tarr and  Prof. Fether - The Man That Was Used Up - The Balloon  Hoax - A Descent Into the Maelstrom - The  Purloined Letter - The Pit and The Pendulum - The Cask of  Amontillado

    A collection of short stories, including: Prelude / Yes, But Today Is Tuesday / The Frozen Cuckoo / Sweet Singeing in the Choir / Harriet's Hairloom / The Ghostly Governess / The Land of Trees and Heroes / The Stolen Quince Tree / A Batch of Magic Wands / The Apple of Trouble / The Serial Garden.

    Simak (1904-1988). When the Science Fiction Writers of America began bestowing their Grand Master awards, Simak was the third writer so honored. Only Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson preceded him, and he received his award before such luminaries as Fritz Leiber, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. Simak earned this distinction by producing, over a long period of time, a significant body of popular, respected, often award-winning work, including his classics City and Way Station, and many shorter works, eight of which are contained in this collection. Readers unfamiliar with Simak are in for a treat. More than half of the stories here were among the best stories of their respective years. "The Big Front Yard" (1958) won a Hugo. "A Death in the House" (1959) was selected by Judith Merril for Year's Best SF: Fifth Annual Edition. "Over the River and Through the Woods" (1965) made the cut for World's Best Science Fiction: 1966 edited by Donald Wollheim.Contents: A Death in the House The Big Front Yard Goodnight Mr. James Dusty Zebra Neighbor Over the River & Through the Woods Construction Shack Grotto of the Dancing Deer [He] wrote for so long and always so well that his excellence came to be taken for granted, as we take sunlight for granted until we go blind. - Poul Anderson I read Cliff's stories with particular attention, and I couldn't help but notice the simplicity and directness of the writing - the utter clarity of it. I made up my mind to imitate it, and I labored over the years to make my writing simpler, clearer, more uncluttered, to present my scenes on a bare stage. - Isaac Asimov Without Simak, science fiction would have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to the land. - James Gunn Good fantasy - and that includes science fiction - takes off from the known for its flights into the new. Cliff Simak was a master of the art. His known was the rural Midwest that he loved. His new could reach to the ends of space and time, but never beyond reality. Even his cosmic aliens always had half human dimensions that made them believable. I loved him, as so many did, for his unfailing warmth and a wit that was keen but never cruel. I heard from him often during the painful time after his wife's death. His own death touched me deeply, and I'm happy to see him remembered with this collection of his best-loved stories. - Jack Williamson I always loved his stories, short or long. He made me love them -and the rural America of his childhood - as much as he did. - Lester del Rey Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that a volume of the best stories of Clifford Simak (author of the classic City) would not have been published by Putnam or Del Rey, but today we have to be grateful to the one-man firm of Tachyon Publications for preserving Over the River and Through the Woods, which includes some of Simak's best stories, including two Hugo Award winners. After all, Simak is dead, which means his career is flatlined, even if Robert Heinlein said, "to read science fiction is to read Simak. The reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all." Simak was a master of a special kind of nostalgic science fiction that reconciled the values of his youth (the rural Midwest of the 1920s) with the larger universe. Material that became ludicrous cliche in the hands of lesser writers - all those endless flying saucers landing in the hillbilly's back acre - was by Simak handled with elegance and dignity."A Death in the House" is typical: A farmer finds a dying alien. He does what he can, but that's very little. The farmer conceals the grave, wanting to give his "guest" that much dignity. But the alien is plantlike. It (or its young) sprouts out of the corpse. Human and alien struggle toward understanding. In "The Big Front Yard," a rural handyman finds his house transformed into a gateway to other worlds. The common people have the good sense; trouble starts when profiteers and the government get involved. The tone is light, friendly and clever. This is not to suggest that Simak was a writer with no hard edges. "Good Night Mr. James" is a horror story, about a duplicate human being created to destroy a particularly nasty alien illegally smuggled to Earth. But the gentler mode was more typical, and he could also write humor. "Dusty Zebra" is a long technological joke, maybe a bit slight to be included when a 50-year career must be distilled into 218 pages. Simak's last story, the last in the book, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," is about an immortal caveman, quite different from de Camp's "Gnarly Man." He is the original artist who painted that cave art the scientists keep finding; after all this time, he just has to tell someone. The story won both the Hugo and the Nebula for 1980, because both readers and fellow professionals wanted to say "thank you." - The Washington Post Book World Clifford D. Simak is another classic SF writer who staked out a distinctive territory based on his rural midwestern roots - only a couple hundred miles north of Bradbury's - but he never strayed very far from a few classic SF themes which he treated with considerably more rigor than Bradbury, if sometimes with as much sentimentality. Simak's City is at least as important to the history of SF as Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles - some would say more so, given its more challenging conceptual framework - and his other short stories are among the most enduring in the genre, as Over the River & Through the Woods, a new limited edition from Tachyon Publications, attests. Yet Simak, like Sturgeon, seems in danger of fading into the limbo of historical anthologies; while his work was once as widely available as that of any of the giants, today these stories seem almost like new discoveries - and are just as fresh. Part of the reason may be not that Simak's folksy language seems to belie the underlying sense of alienation and tragedy that characterizes much of his work; part may be due to the rediscovery of American regional idioms among younger SF writers from Terry Bisson to Nancy Kress . . . 'Over the River & Through the Woods' contains eight Simak stories from 1951 through 1980 - which means it includes none of the classic stories like "Desertion" or "Huddling Place", which later went to make up City, but does include his late Hugo and Nebula-winning masterpiece "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer" and the Hugo-winning "The Big Front Yard." One of the first things that comes to mind when rereading the latter story after several years - it concerns a characteristically laconic farmer with a dog named Towser (the only name Simak seems to have permitted for dogs) who finds on his property a gateway to distant worlds - is that few contemporary writers would have let such a simple and elegant premise be confined to a novella. Simak's focus is on the unimpressed rustic whose very lack of response to the wonder at his doorstep intensifies our own. When a rustic is impressed by an alien presence, such as in "A Death in the House," it is less likely to be from a sense of wonder than from a sense of companionship. Simak's roots may be firmly in SF, but he writes of alien encounters in a way Willa Cather might have written of them. Aliens are strange but unthreatening, and in some cases (as in "Neighbor") they can turn the entire neighborhood into a pastoral Shangri-la, isolated from the outside in a way that encapsulates what must be Simak's own drams of lost innocence. But Simak could write about more than wonderful things happening to remote farmers. "Good Night, Mr. James" is a very early treatment (1951) of what we would today call a cloning story, done with the kind of cynical humor that is needed for what is essentially a double- and triple-cross tale. It reveals Simak's healthy streak of humor, as does "Dusty Zebra," in which trivial objects are zapped into another dimension in return for high-tech wonders. "Construction Shack" ironically explores an almost Stapledonian notion of whole solar systems being engineered by ancient aliens (Pluto is the construction shack of the title), cast in terms of the matter-of-fact space jockeys so familiar from pulp SF. Simak may be at his best, however, when his theme is isolation and abandonment. The title story concerns children from the future sent back to the refuge of the 1890s. The best tale in the collection and one of the high points of Simak's late career, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," concerns an anthropologist who comes to realize that his assistant seems to know far too much about certain ancient cave paintings, and may in fact have been their creator. Simak's evocation, in a few pages, of the sheer loneliness of immortality and the daunting perspectives of time involved, again could be a lesson to a generation of younger writers, and reminds us brilliantly of what Simak was capable of. - Locus

    Twelve enchanting stories about magic and magicians, starlight and sorcery.

    Here, as she sees them, are the complexities, the agonies and joys, the textures of African life and society.The collection, bridging as it does Mrs. Lessing's entire writing career, contains much of her most extraordinary work. Beyond that, it is a brilliant portrait of a world that is vital to all of us, shadowy to most of us - perceived by an artist of the first rank writing with passion and honesty about her native land.It is a central book in the work of one of the most important of today's writers.

    Among them are some of Stanley Elkin's finest, including the fabulistic "On a Field, Rampant," the farcical "Perlmutter at the East Pole," and the stylized "A Poetics for Bullies." Despite the diversity of their form and matter, each of these stories shares Elkin's nimble, comic, antic imagination, a dedication to the value of form and language, and a concern with a single theme: the tragic inadequacy of a simplistic response to life.

    Fifty-two Yiddish short stories describe life in the shetl and other aspects of the Jewish experience, and include works produced by Jewish writers during the last two centuries.

    He had written over thirty novels, eighteen plays, and twenty volumes of short stories. During his lifetime, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times and had seen almost all of his major novels appear in English. While the flamboyance of his life and the apparent fanaticism of his death have dominated the public's perception of his achievement, Japanese and Western critics alike are in agreement that his literary gifts were prodigious.Mishima is arguably at his best in the shorter forms, and it is the flower of these that appears here for the first time in English. Each story has its own distinctive atmosphere and each is brilliantly organized, yielding deeper layers of meaning with repeated readings. The psychological observation, particularly in what it reveals of the turmoil of adolescence, is meticulous.The style, with its skillful blending of colors and surfaces, shows Mishima in top form, and no further proof is needed to remind us that he was a consummate writer whose work is an irreplaceable part of world literature.

    Contains the novels Sweet Danger, The Fashion in Shrouds and Traitor's Purse, plus an additional short story featuring Albert Campion and Amanda Fitton.

    Check out Virge Whitfield, who combined wisdom with a limitless love of dogs; or Pat Craddock, whose skill at cooking whiskey cost him a leg; or Jack Hillhouse, the one-armed giant beach-dweller who had an unusual way of obtaining fresh eggs. Hale takes us along with him, down winter beaches from Galveston to Port Aransas, deep into the Piney Woods of East Texas, through the bottom lands of the Trinity, the Brazos, and the Colorado Rivers, as he searches for the unique characters who inhabit the part of Texas you don't find in guide books.http://www.leonhale.com/Many of the places and most of the people chronicled in this delightful Texas classic have vanished by now, and we are the poorer for it. Fortunately for us, however, Hale has captured with warm affection the language and spirit of this memorable part of his state's social and oral history, in the shape of stories and characters you won't forget.

    A touching tale of estrangement from the human swarm, "Seoul-1964-Winter" tells the emotional story of a sad and lonely man, a man who has lost more than just his wife in his descent into utter and complete failure, who goes so far as to contemplate suicide when he realizes he has no one and nothing left in this world.

    And they cover diverse themes, including music and opera, revenge, love's ultimate sacrifice, murder and ghosts, humanity and courage, the loss of loved ones and rebirth, faith, and the absolute horror of war. THE LILY HAND AND OTHER STORIES is a classic collection of sixteen tales from master storyteller Edith Pargeter, creator of the Brother Cadfael Chronicles under the name of Ellis Peters.

    Nee Vol. 1

    Clarke Machine Made • (1951) • shortstory by J. T. McIntosh Trip One • (1949) • shortstory by Edward Grendon Venus Is a Man's World • (1951) • novelette by William Tenn Good-Bye, Ilha! • (1952) • shortstory by Laurence Manning Misbegotten Missionary • (1950) • shortstory by Isaac Asimov (aka Green Patches)The Ethical Equations • (1945) • shortstory by Murray Leinster Misfit • (1939) • novelette by Robert A. Heinlein Genius • (1948) • novelette by Poul Anderson Basic Right • (1958) • novelette by Eric Frank Russell

    The story follows John Cupertino, a man seemingly under medical care, and his quest to find the truth behind the memory of him killing his wife.

    Smith --Night / John W. Campbell --A logic named Joe / Murray Leinster --Requiem / Edmond Hamilton --With folded hands / Jack Williamson --Adaptation / John Wyndham --The witness / Eric Frank Russell --The command / L. Sprague de Camp --Kindness / Lester del Rey ----We also walk dogs / Robert A. Heinlein --The enchanted village / A.E. van Vogt --Liar! / Isaac Asimov --Microcosmic God / Theodore Sturgeon --Huddling place / Clifford D. Simak --Coming attraction / Fritz Leiber --Doorway into time / C.L. Moore --We guard the black planet! / Henry Kuttner --The strange flight of Richard Clayton / Robert Bloch --Wake for the living / Ray Bradbury --Before Eden / Arthur C. Clarke --Mother / Philip JoseFarmer.

    Bates employs a deceptive delicateness of touch in his descriptions and character sketches, here mastering the true essentials of the art of the short story; he says much by saying little, what is left out more poignant than the words on the page.With a host of larger than life characters, we meet the scheming and eccentric Aunt Leonora, who fibs her way through the comic tale 'The Picnic'. The collection also unites two loveable rogues Captain Poopdeck and Uncle Silas, and brings us the farcical tale 'Early One Morning' which provide a sharp contrast with the sombre and haunting tones of pieces like 'The Primrose Place' and 'The Winter Sound', and the lyrical but bitter episode of 'The Wedding Party' itself.

    The main impulse behind The Realm of Fiction, as with any anthology, is of course the pursuit of literary excellence--to provide a fresh collection of fiction of the highest merit. The text includes five new translations, all commissioned specifically for this anthology and all but the last appearing in English for the first time. Along with memorable fiction by the major modern writers--Kafka and Mann, Joyce and Lawrence, Faulkner and Hemingway--other significant stories, such as those by Katayev, Vasconcelos, and Rosenfeld, appear for the first time in any known anthology text. Established or new, these stories serve the same purpose: to quicken interest in all literature, past and present.

    Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

    Contains:The veldtLet's play poisonFever dreamZero hourThe FoghornA sound of thunderThe windThe scytheMarionettes IncThe other footThe pedestrianThe trolleyThe smileThe giftThe last night of the world

    

    They are reminiscent of Thoreau's The Maine Woods, though they are seldom philosophical--or even well-knit as stories. Smith Jigsaws each chapter out of bits and pieces from the lumber room of nostalgia. Humorously, the Maine twang appears in little diary excerpts: ""Pappy an Ed worked till dark again cuttin firewood in hardwood stand acrost dam...Crewill wind and now."" Subjects range from minor items such as Old-Come-and-Get-It, a frying pan the author bought in 1917 and still uses, to an expedition by Justice William O. Douglas. Throughout these stories is what Smith, in describing a log dam, refers to as ""the architecture of loneliness."" One story relates the life of a determined deep-woods hermit. When the old hermit's dog took to chasing deer (which is illegal), the hermit shot first his dog, then himself in atonement. This is a book for outdoorsmen indoors who may find themselves reaching for the Kleenex.— Kirkus Review Issued: June 1, 1965

    In his The Wayward Horizon, Casper devoted one chapter to a discussion of this short story."Flowers of May" won a Palanca prize in 1951. "The Mats," published before the war in Philippine Magazine has appeared in several anthologies.

    Dick; Unreasonable Facsimile by Lester del Rey; Heav'n Heav'n by Eric Frank Russell; Venus Trap by Robert Silverberg; Telestassis by M. C. Pease; Wapshot's Demon by Frederik Pohl; The Case for Earth by Eric Frank Russell; and The Outcasts by George H. Smith.

    Each one — whether about a Navajo Indian, queer hustler or used-car salesman — is an exact refraction of the beliefs, conventions and behaviour patterns of a people in a state of change.This change is reflected in the writers' styles. A freedom and individuality new to American writing informs them all — from the explosive 'wordscapes' of Kerouac and Burroughs to the taut power of Robert Creeley and Hubert Selby Jr.Some of the stories are concerned with a middle class trapped in a world of advertising and TV; some, the victims of race, perversion and poverty. Some eschew plot to exploit myth, symbol and language; many have messages that are hard to take...

    Clair13 at Table · Lord Dunsany · The Judge’s House · Bram StokerPodolo · L. P. HartleyThe Squaw · Bram StokerRevelations in Black · Carl Jacobi Moonlight Sonata · Alexander WoollcottThe Thing in the Cellar · David H. Keller, M.D. · Impulse · Eric Frank Russell ·The Novel of the White Powder · Arthur Machen · The Refugee · Jane Rice ·The Lost Room · Fitz-James O’Brien ·The Tell-Tale Heart · Edgar Allan Poe

    Includes:Founding Father (1957)Immigrant (1954)New Folks' Home (1963)Crying Jag (1960)All the Traps of Earth (1960)Lulu (1957)Neighbor (1954)

    

    First published in 1965, this second collection of short fiction by Doris Betts evinces her breathtaking mastery of the genre.