Lovecraft inspired the work of Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Clive Barker. As he perfected his mastery of the macabre, his works developed from seminal fragments into acknowledged masterpieces of terror. This volume traces his chilling career and includes:IMPRISONED WITH THE PHARAOHS--Houdini seeks to reveal the demons that inhabit the Egyptian night.AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS--An unsuspecting expedition uncovers a city of untold terror, buried beneath an Antarctic wasteland.Plus, for the first time in any Del Rey edition:HERBERT WEST: REANIMATOR--Mad experiments yield hideous results in this, the inspiration for the cult film Re-Animator.COOL AIR--An icy apartment hides secrets no man dares unlock.THE TERRIBLE OLD MAN--The intruders seek a fortune but find only death!AND TWENTY-FOUR MORE BLOOD-CHILLING TALES

    He is Morpheus, the lord of story. Older than humankind itself, he inhabits -- along with Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium, his Endless sisters and brothers -- the realm of human consciousness. His powers are myth and nightmare -- inspirations, pleasures, and punishments manifested beneath the blanketing mist of sleep.Surrender to him now.A stunning collection of visions, wonders, horrors, hallucinations, and revelations from Clive Barker, Barbara Hambly, Tad Williams, Gene Wolfe, Nancy A. Collins, and sixteen other incomparable dreamers -- inspired by the groundbreaking, bestselling graphic novel phenomenon by Neil Gaiman.

    In six stories and the novella, Bounty, Saunders introduces readers to people struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world.

    Taking its place next to Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood on the Modern Library bookshelf is this new and original edition of Capote's most famous short stories: "A Christmas Memory, " "One Christmas, " and "The Thanksgiving Visitor." All three stories are distinguished by Capote's delicate interplay of childhood sensibility and recollective vision, evoking a strong sense of place.

    She is an artist who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti--and the enduring strength of Haiti's women--with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage.When Haitians tell a story, they say "Krik?" and the eager listeners answer "Krak!" In Krik? Krak! Danticat establishes herself as the latest heir to that narrative tradition with nine stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. They tell of women who continue loving behind prison walls and in the face of unfathomable loss; of a people who resist the brutality of their rulers through the powers of imagination. The result is a collection that outrages, saddens, and transports the reader with its sheer beauty.

    Fortunately, "Buk" left plenty of unpublished manuscript behind that, judging from this culling from it, is of a piece with the published stuff. That is, it consists of quasi-autobiographical poems and stories. The poems' lines are only one to six words long, and the stories' sentences aren't much longer. Poems and stories relay the adventures and attitudes, at all stages of his life, of loafer and lumpen intellectual Henry Chinaski. They are occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally laughable because Henry and his women and pals are such a bunch of slobs, and occasionally as boring as Henry and company claim their lives are. And, to tell the truth, they are effortlessly, magnetically readable, especially if you are susceptible to their bargain-basement existentialist charm. Plenty are. Ray Olson

    Soon after her untimely death in 1965, Jackson’s children discovered a treasure trove of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, many of which are brought together in this remarkable collection. Here are tales of torment, psychological aberration, and the macabre, as well as those that display her lighter touch with humorous scenes of domestic life. Reflecting the range and complexity of Jackson’s talent, Just an Ordinary Day reaffirms her enduring influence and celebrates her singular voice, rich with magic and resonance.  Praise for Just an Ordinary Day   “Jackson at her best: plumbing the extraordinary from the depths of mid-twentieth-century common. [Just an Ordinary Day] is a gift to a new generation.”—San Francisco Chronicle  Praise for Shirley Jackson   “[Jackson’s] work exerts an enduring spell.”—Joyce Carol Oates   “Shirley Jackson’s stories are among the most terrifying ever written.”—Donna Tartt   “An amazing writer . . . If you haven’t read [Jackson] you have missed out on something marvelous.”—Neil Gaiman   “Shirley Jackson is unparalleled as a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders.”—Dorothy Parker   “An author who not only writes beautifully but who knows what there is, in this world, to be scared of.”—Francine Prose   “The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable.”—A. M. Homes   “Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name.”—Victor LaValle

    Here we encounter a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation. Trevor is, in his own words, 'a storyteller. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so.' Conscious or not, he touches us in ways that few writers even dare to try.

    In these fourteen stories, Dubus depicts ordinary men and women confronting injury and loneliness, the lack of love and the terror of actually having it. Out of his characters' struggles and small failures--and their unexpected moments of redemption--Dubus creates fiction that bears comparison to the short story's greatest creators--Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor. "A master of the short story...It's good to have Andre Dubus back. More than ever, he is an object of hope."--Philadelphia Inquirer"Dubus's detailed creation of three-dimensional characters is propelled by his ability to turn a quiet but perfect phrase...[This] kind of writing raises gooseflesh of admiration."--San Francisco Chronicle

    Gallant was never afraid to push the boundaries of the form: many of her longer stories stray into novella territory, and even her shortest pieces often defy the expectations created in the first few pages. Gallant's characters are almost all exiles of one sort or another, 20th century seekers often marked by World War II and its aftermath. Gallant, a Canadian expatriate, spent much of her life in Paris, and that city of exiles and emigres provides the setting for some of her most memorable stories.

    The comic persona he invented, a modern citydweller whose zaniest flights of free association are tinged with anxiety, is as hilarious now as when he first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker—and his troubled side is even more striking. Here, The Library of America presents the best and most extensive Thurber collection ever assembled.Only a book of this scope can do justice to Thurber’s extraordinary career and to the many unexpected turns of his comic genius. Here are the acknowledged masterpieces: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “The Catbird Seat,” the anti-war parable The Last Flower, the brilliantly satirical Fables for Our Time, the children’s classic The 13 Clocks, and My Life and Hard Times, which Russell Baker calls “possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written.” Here too are the best pieces from The Owl in the Attic, Let Your Mind Alone!, My World—And Welcome To It, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals. From his other famous collections are included such favorites as “The Pet Department,” “The Black Magic of Barney Haller,” "Nine Needles,’ “the Macbeth Murder Mystery,” and “File and Forget,” revealing an astonishingly diverse mix of literary parodies, eccentric portraits, stories of domestic warfare and inner terror, reminiscences both tender and farcical, extravagant feats of wordplay, freewheeling burlesques of popular culture (from detective novels to self-help fads), and exasperated protests against the mechanized impersonality of the modern world.Thurber’s wonderful drawings—spontaneous creations of which he once said, “I don’t think any drawing ever took me more than three minutes”—are here in profusion, with their population of husbands, wives, dogs, seals, and various species of Thurber’s own invention. His first great cartoon collection, The Seal in the Bedroom, is presented complete, along with such celebrated sequences like “The Masculine Approach” and “The War Between Men and Women,” and his devastatingly straightforward illustrated versions of once-canonical poems such as “Barbara Frietchie” and “Excelsior.”Rounding out this volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, his memoir of New Yorker publisher Harold Ross, and a number of pieces, previously uncollected by Thurber, including some early work never before reprinted.

    Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In "Ship Fever," the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. And in "The Littoral Zone," two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, "science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material" (Boston Globe).

    She is able to see the unbroken link of the macabre that ties Edgar Allan Poe to Anne Rice and to recognize the dark psychological bonds between Henry James and Stephen King. This remarkable anthology of gothic fiction, spanning two centuries of American writing, gives us an intriguing and entertaining look at how the gothic imagination makes for great literature in the works of forty-six exceptional writers. In showing us the gothic vision—a world askew where mankind’s forbidden impulses are set free from the repressions of the psyche, and nature turns malevolent and lawless—Joyce Carol Oates includes Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” Herman Melville’s horrific tale of factory women, “The Tartarus of Maids,” and Edith Wharton’s “Afterward,” which are rarely collected and appear together here for the first time.Added to these stories of the past are new ones that explore the wounded worlds of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Raymond Carver, and more than twenty other wonderful contemporary writers. This impressive collection reveals the astonishing scope of the gothic writer’s subject matter, style, and incomparable genius for manipulating our emotions and penetrating our dreams. With Joyce Carol Oates’s superb introduction, American Gothic Tales is destined to become the standard one-volume edition of the genre that American writers, if they didn’t create it outright, have brought to its chilling zenith.rom Wieland, or The transformation / Charles Brockden Brown --The legend of Sleepy Hollow / Washington Irving --The man of adamant / Nathaniel Hawthorne --Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne --The Tartarus of maids / Herman Melville --The black cat / Edgar Allan Poe --The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman --The romance of certain old clothes / Henry James --The damned thing / Ambrose Bierce --Afterward / Edith Wharton --The striding place / Gertrude Atherton --Death in the woods / Sherwood Anderson --The outsider / H.P. Lovecraft --A rose for Emily / William Faulkner --The lonesome place / August Derleth --The door / E.B. White --The lovely house / Shirley Jackson --Allal / Paul Bowles --The reencounter / Isaac Bashevis Singer --In the icebound hothouse / William Goyen --The enormous radio / John Cheever --The veldt / Ray Bradbury --The Dachau shoe / W.S. Merwin --The approved / W.S. Merwin --Spiders I have known / W.S. Merwin --Postcards from the Maginot Line / W.S. Merwin --Johnny Panic and the Bible of dreams / Sylvia Plath --In bed one night / Robert Coover --Schrödinger's cat / Ursula K. Le Guin --The waterworks / E.L. Doctorow --Shattered like a glass goblin / Harlan Ellison --Human moments in World War III / Don DeLillo --The anatomy of desire / John L'Heureux --Little things / Raymond Carver --The temple / Joyce Carol Oates --Freniere (from Interview with the Vampires) / Anne Rice --A short guide to the city / Peter Straub --In the penny arcade / Steven Millhauser --The reach / Stephen King --Exchange value / Charles Johnson --Snow / John Crowley --The last feast of Harlequin / Thomas Ligotti --Time and again / Breece D'J Pancake--Replacements / Lisa Tuttle --Spirit seizures / Melissa Pritchard --Cat in glass / Nancy Etchemendy --The girl who loved animals / Bruce McAllister --Ursus Triad, later / Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg --(from Geek Love) The nuclear family: his talk, her teeth / Katherine Dunn --Subsoil / Nicholson Baker

    For almost seven years, Lispector showed Brazilian readers just how vast and passionate her interests were. This beautifully translated collection of selected columns, or crônicas, is just as immediately stimulating today and ably reinforces her reputation as one of Brazil's greatest writers. Indeed, these columns should establish her as being among the era's most brilliant essayists. She is masterful, even reminiscent of Montaigne, in her ability to spin the mundane events of life into moments of clarity that reveal greater truths."—Publishers Weekly

    

    Short Stories. Originally released by Knopf in 1996, Lutz's rigorously innovative debut barely made a ripple in the mainstream publishing world. Meanwhile, however, the book attained a cult status, and its influence has grown tremendously in the years since its appearance, disappearance, and reappearance. "Gary Lutz is a sentence writer from another planet, deploying language with unmatched invention. He is not just an original literary artist, but maybe the only one to so strenuously reject the training wheels limiting American narrative practice. What results are stories nearly too good to read: crushingly sad, odd, and awe-inspiring"--Ben Marcus.

    Jess Kirkman's grandmother is dying, and Jess remembers the tales she and his mother have passed down to him--a chorus of women's voices that sing and share and celebrate the common song of life.

    Now, everybody can.

    In stories filled with heart and humor, event and consequence, the customs and culture of Louisiana come to life in the hands of a writer who blends rare talent with an even more unusual humanity.

    Bleak and wildly funny, touching but stringently unsentimental, these stories give readers a most intimate view of the writer who has become synonymous with the recklessness, stoicism, and solitude of American manhood.

    Summer is a simple story of a nine-year-old girl who dies while on summer vacation. While her youthful killers try to hide her body, she tells us the story--from the point of view of her dead body--of the childrens' attempt to get away with murder. Black Fairy Tale is classic J-horror: a young girl loses an eye in an accident, but receives a transplant. Now she can see again, astonishingly what she sees out of her new left eye is the experiences and memories of its previous owner. Its previous deceased owner.

    The incomparable Lewis Nordan's first two collections of short fiction--WELCOME TO THE ARROW-CATCHER FAIR and THE ALL-GIRL FOOTBALL TEAM--originally published in 1983 and 1986, have long been out of print in all editions. Collectors' items, these two books are now almost impossible for Nordan fans to find anywhere.To rectify that, Algonquin is delighted to announce a selection of fifteen of the best stories from the two books, newly arranged and introduced by fellow Mississippian, bookseller Richard Howorth, and with a foreword by the author. Critics have called Lewis Nordan's fiction "extraordinary" and "marvelous" and "stunning" and "scorching" and "story-telling genius." The selected stories show that genius in the making. "Characters that people the South hobble and dance across the pages of his short stories."--United Press International; "Delightfully eccentric situations and colorful language add up to a work that is even stronger than WOLF WHISTLE."--Library Journal.

    We are each special and unique, yet we share a common connection.

    In crackling prose, she describes homes ruled by bullies, psychopaths, and delinquents; families whose conflict resolution techniques range from grand theft to homicide; kids who have nowhere to go and a lifetime to get there.

    Meet Tuck Budd, who is happy living in Manhattan with her two moms, Izzy and Anastasia, until she begins to wonder who her father is. Meet La, who faces the loss of her mother with an imaginary androgynous blue friend who lives in her closet. Zingingly bright and dreamily dark, full of wonder and gritty reality, these stories by acclaimed author Francesca Lia Block show the reader that in every girl there truly is a goddess.The cutting-edge author of Weetzie Bat once again breaks new ground with Girl Goddess #9, nine stories about girl goddesses of every age and shape and color and size, wearing combat boots and spiky hair or dressed all in white. One girl has two moms, another has no mother at all but a strange blue skinned creature that lives in her closet. One is a rock star groupie, another loves dancing and reading poetry and having picnics in the backyard when the moon is full. These are stories about girls discovering that the world is not a simple place and that there is more than one way to live'all in Ms. Block's rich, lyrical language that fans have come to adore and that Sassy magazine called ‘a dream.'

    This collection by the author of Airships and Bats Out of Hell explores lost moments in time with intensity, emotion, and an eye to the past. In "Uncle High Lonesome," a young man recalls his Uncle Peter, whose even temper was marred only by his drinking binges, which would unleash moments of rage hinting at his much deeper distress. Fishing is transformed into a life-altering, almost mystical event in "A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis," when a huge fish caught on a line threatens to pull a young boy, and his entire world with him, underwater and out to sea. And in "Snerd and Niggero," a deep friendship between two men is inspired by the loss of a woman they both loved, a woman who was mistress to one and wife to the other. Viewed through memory and time's distance, Hannah's characters are brightly illuminated figures from a lost time, whose occassionally bleak lives are still uncommonly true.

    "Maeve Brennan's book is full of small miracles," wrote the New York Times Book Review. "The magnificent title story is wide-ranging, savage, poignant, and should bring [Brennan] back to the table of modern fiction, where her place has been empty too long."

    McGahern's short stories equal his finest novels, reflecting both the richness of the ordinary, and the extraordinary, in the lives of a variety of individuals: the jilted lover waiting with would-be writers in a Dublin pub on a summer evening; the bitter climax between a father and son as a marriage begins; the fortunes and misfortunes of the Kirkwood family; and many more.For this revised edition, completed shortly before his death, John McGahern edited and deleted a number of stories from the Collected Stories that first appeared in 1992. This is the authorised edition of a modern classic.

    This is a collection of three works by Shirley Jackson: the novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the short story, "The Lottery".

    "He brings to life characters and situations as vivid and compelling as any in contemporary literature."--Michael Dorris, The Washington Post Book World.

    Now living happily in Berkeley, married and the mother of twins, Nora Jane is back in college, pregnant again, launching a new career, and facing circumstances that imperil her domestic bliss.The nine stories that follow explore the hazards of recapturing and reviving old affairs. Featuring both new and familiar Gilchrist characters, all of these stories shed brilliant new light on the oldest emotion.

    Credited with revitalizing the short story as a genre in Russian literature, he was posthumously honored with the Soviet Union's highest literary prize following his untimely death at the age of forty-five. Stories from a Siberian Village introduces Shukshin to English readers with twenty-five stories that reflect the Siberian origins of his artistic identity. These stories, most of which have never before appeared in English, are set in a remote Siberian village caught in transition between rural traditions and modern Soviet life. There Shukshin's peasants—survivors of revolution, collectivization, and war—seek their identity in a "brave new world." Eccentrics and oddballs, Shukshin's protagonists are restless freedom seekers whose dreams and foibles are as broad and inexplicable as their native Siberian landscape. As touchy as artists and as unpretentious as truck drivers, they struggle with questions of life and death, faith and reason, custom and progress. From their mutual misapprehensions and the gap between their dreams and reality arises Shukshin's biting humor.

    Also useful for its exploration of the crossover genre known as "dark fantasy." Noteworthy authors include Peter S. Beagle, Ursula Le Guin, Stephen King, Lucy Taylor, Steve Rasnic Tem, Tanith Lee, A. S. Byatt, David J. Schow, and Joyce Carol Oates.Contents: * Summation 1995: Fantasy by Terri Windling * Summation 1995: Horror by Ellen Datlow * Horror and Fantasy in the Media: 1995 by Edward Bryant * Obituaries by James Frenkel * Home for Christmas by Nina Kiriki Hoffman * Heartfires by Charles de Lint * Screens by Terry Lamsley * King of Crows by Midori Snyder * Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros by Peter S. Beagle * The Hunt of the Unicorn by Ellen Kushner * More Tomorrow by Michael Marshall Smith * Penguins for Lunch by Scott Bradfield * Either, OR by Ursula K. Le Guin * Paper Lantern by Stuart Dybek * Lunch at the Gotham Café by Stephen King * Queen of Knives (poem) by Neil Gaiman * Dragon-Rain by Eileen Kernaghan * Llantos de La Llorona: Warnings from the Wailer (poem) by Pat Mora * Too Short a Death by Peter Crowther * The James Dean Garage Band by Rick Moody * Because of Dust by Christopher Kenworthy * Loop by Douglas E. Winter * La Loma, La Luna by Sue Kepros Hartman * Women's Stories (poem) by Jane Yolen * Swan/Princess (poem) by Jane Yolen * Switch by Lucy Taylor * Scaring the Train by Terry Dowling * Blood Knot by Steve Resnic Tem * The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (poem) by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain * The Otter Woman (poem) by Mary O'Malley * Resolve and Resistance by S.N. Dyer * La Dame by Tanith Lee * Circe's Power (poem) by Louise Glück * Dragon's Fin Soup by S.P. Somtow * The Granddaughter by Vivian vande Velde * Daphne and Laura and So Forth (poem) by Margaret Atwood * A Lamia in the Cevennes by A.S. Byatt * The Guilty Party by Susan Moody * She's Not There by Pat Cadigan * The White Road (poem) by Neil Gaiman * Refrigerator Heaven by David J. Schow * After the Elephant Ballet by Gary A. Braunbeck * Henry V, Part 2 by Marcia Guthridge * Mrs. Greasy by Robert Reed * ############## by Joyce Carol Oates * The Printer's Daughter by Delia Sherman * Prayer (poem) by Nancy Willard * Jacob and the Angel (poem) by Jane Yolen * The Lion and the Lark by Patricia A. McKillip * Honorable Mentions: 1995Edited by Terry Windling and Ellen Datlow.

    There's "Let's Go," the story of a young couple's apathetic wanderings on a trip to discover the real Prague; "You Can Hear the Boats Go By," the story of ex-lovers who cope with their chance meeting in a supermarket in the most childish way; and "Barking," the mad rant of a drama student pissed off by Clown class. Not Her Real Name presents an essential guide to postmodern romance, to the vagaries of city life, and to a chronically self-absorbed generation whose love affairs are never as good as the last movies they've seen.

    Morlan, Robert Silverberg, Michael Swanwick, Jane Yolen, and many others. Supplementing the stories are the editors' invaluable overviews of the year in fantastic fiction, Edward Bryant's witty roundup of the year's fantasy films, and a long list of Honorable Mentions-all of which adds up to an invaluable reference source, and a font of fabulous reading.

    Filipina American debut author displays the contradictions of Asian American experience with irony & enthusiasm, anger & wit.

    A passing encounter, an almost unnoticed gesture, a brief pause--Berger observes and transcribes them, and in so doing uncovers the extraordinary heart of the ordinary. This collection of stories brings a richly imagined landscape of elusive and ephemeral moments into eloquent existence.

    A helpful list of honorable mentions and Gardner Dozois's insightful summation of the year in science fiction round out the volume, making it indispensable for anyone interested in science fiction today.Contents ix • Summation: 1995 • (1996) • essay by Gardner Dozois1 • A Woman's Liberation • [Yeowe and Werel • 4] • (1995) • novella by Ursula K. Le Guin51 • Starship Day • (1995) • novelette by Ian R. MacLeod68 • A Place with Shade • [The Remarkables] • (1995) • novelette by Robert Reed100 • Luminous • (1995) • novelette by Greg Egan129 • The Promise of God • (1995) • shortstory by Michael F. Flynn143 • Death in the Promised Land • (1995) • novelette by Pat Cadigan195 • For White Hill • (1995) • novella by Joe Haldeman231 • Some Like It Cold • (1995) • shortstory by John Kessel243 • The Death of Captain Future • [The Captain Future Duet] • (1995) • novella by Allen Steele281 • The Lincoln Train • (1995) • shortstory by Maureen F. McHugh293 • We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy • [North American future] • (1995) • novella by David Marusek341 • Radio Waves • (1995) • novelette by Michael Swanwick360 • Wang's Carpets • (1995) • novelette by Greg Egan389 • Casting at Pegasus • (1995) • novelette by Mary Rosenblum414 • Looking for Kelly Dahl • (1995) • novella by Dan Simmons452 • Think Like a Dinosaur • (1995) • novelette by James Patrick Kelly470 • Coming of Age in Karhide • [Hainish] • (1995) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin489 • Genesis • (1995) • novella by Poul Anderson575 • Feigenbaum Number • (1995) • shortstory by Nancy Kress589 • Home • (1995) • shortstory by Geoff Ryman595 • There Are No Dead • (1995) • shortstory by Terry Bisson602 • Recording Angel • (1995) • novelette by Paul J. McAuley627 • Elvis Bearpaw's Luck • (1995) • novelette by William Sanders645 • Mortimer Gray's "History of Death" • (1995) • novella by Brian Stableford698 • Honorable Mentions: 1995 • (1996) • essay by Gardner Dozois

    Set in various locations, from New York to the west coast of Ireland to the nameless realms of the imagination, his stories conjure a world where beautiful but deranged kids make lethal bombs, where talented sculptors spend their careers dismembering themselves in pursuit of their art, where wasters ris up with axes and turn into patricides. "Getting It in the Head" is a brilliant, bracing tour de force.

    Di Filippo coined "ribofunk" by fusing "ribosome" (as in cellular biology) with "funk" (as in rock and roll). In the world of Ribofunk, biology is a cutting-edge science, where the Protein Police patrol for renegade gene splicers and part-human sea creatures live in Lake Superior, dealing with toxic spills. Ribofunk depicts a sentient river; a sultry bodyguard who happens to be part wolverine; a reluctant thrill seeker who climbs a skyscraper-and finds himself stuck; and a chain-smoking Peter Rabbit who leads his fellows in a bloody rebellion against-whom else? - Mr. McGregor.This collection includes:One Night in Television CityLittle WorkerCockfightBig Eater The Boot Blankie The Bad Splice McGregorBrain WarsStreetlife Afterschool Special Up the Lazy River Distributed Mind

    

    From the land of fantastical castles, vast lakes and deep forests, the Brothers Grimm collected a treasury of entrancing folk and fairy stories full of giants and dwarfs, witches and princesses, magic beasts and cunning boys. From favourites such as The Frog-Prince and Hansel and Gretel to the delights of Ashputtel or Old Sultan, all are vivid with timeless mystery.

    He's a minster of the surprise ending and champion of the underdog. Includes such favorites as "The Ransom of Red Chief", "Gifts of the Magi", "The Furnished Room", "The Guilty Party", and more.

    Their victories over illness will inspire you to adopt a positive attitude, discover your faith and cherish every moment of your life.

    In "The Oysters," Pat Boone "not the Pat Boone" laments his love for his newly married professor, while delivering oysters to be irradiated. The oysters themselves are having a hard time deciding whether irradiation is a gain or a loss. Wendy Brenner triumphs in capturing all the normal oddities of life; and in the magic of a few words a bizarre but accurate images he creates our lives and how we live and breathe.

    WITH SWORD AND SHIELD, SPELL AND CURSE...Even at the risk of losing her one true love, a young mage must put aside all she holds dear to achieve a higher goal...A benevolent shape-changer is all that stands between her village and the bloody ravages of a werewolf...With a gift granted by the birds themselves, an unhappy young woman may find the means to escape her life of servitude...A young healer never realizes her true Gift until she must heal herself...Travel with Diana Paxson, Jo Clayton, Deborah Wheeler, and their fellow tale-weavers to lands where bold, heroic, women wizards and warriors are not afraid to take on challenges too often considered the sole province of men, in 22 original stories of shape-shifters, dream-questers and other women of power.

    Alice Walker Banned explores just what it is that various groups have found so threatening in Walker's work, bringing together the short stories "Roselily" and "Am I Blue?," an excerpt from the novel The Color Purple, as well as testimonies, letters, and essays about attempts to censor Walker's work by the California State Board of Education. The introduction by San Francisco Chronicle Book Review editor Patricia Holt offers insightful and ironic commentary on the efforts of the Traditional Values Coalition to pressure the State Board of Education into withdrawing Walker's stories from a statewide exam, while excerpts from a Board of Education hearing offer views from across the political spectrum on these efforts to censor Walker's work.…a fascinating, frightening book…—Mirabella…an invaluable contribution to the literature of censorship…—Booklist…this book will allow a cooler, more informed discussion of an important debate.—Library Journal

    This collection brings together ten stories; all of them set in and around the author’s hometown of Derbyshire. In Terry’s fiction, the world we know and the world of something else exist side by side with only the thinnest of lines between them. The characters that inhabit Terry’s work often inadvertently discover that this line is all too easily crossed. Originally published in a 500 copy edition by Ash-Tree Press, Terry Lamsley's Conference with the Dead has long remained almost unobtainable until now.A nominee for the World Fantasy Award, and winner of the International Horror Guild Award, this chilling collection of ghost stories set in England has remained out of print for far too long.

    Gothic Tales makes available for the first time a collection of stories by this highly influential writer, whose decadent romanticism led him to envision an idiosyncratic world--a fictive purgatory --precious and bizarre though always genuine despite its melodramatic formality.The four stories presented here are among Kyoka's best-known works. They are drawn from four stages of the author's development, from the conceptual novels of 1895 to the fragmented romanticism of his mature work. In the way of introduction, Inouye presents a clear analysis of Kyoka's problematic stature as a great gothic writer and emphasizes the importance of Kyoka's work to the present reevaluation of literary history in general and modern Japanese literature in particular. The extensive notes that follow the translation serve as an intelligent guide for the reader, supplying details about each of the stories and how they fit into the pattern of mythic development that allowed Kyoka to deal with his fears in a way that sustained his life and, as Mishima Yukio put it, pushed the Japanese language to its highest potential.

    Among the dozen selections is the Nebula Award-winning “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge.”Contents:Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge (1988)Daughter Earth (1991)Known but to God and Wilbur Hines (1991)Bible Stories for Adults, No. 20: The Tower (1994)Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks (1987)The Assemblage of Kristin (1984)Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant (1989)Abe Lincoln in McDonald's (1989)The Confessions of Ebenezer Scrooge (1989)Bible Stories for Adults No. 46: The Soap Opera (1994)Diary of a Mad Deity (1988)Arms and the Woman (1991)

    Sadly, the majority of his short stories have been unavailable for some time. Now this welcome volume, the first of three, brings together more than 40 stories written between 1895 and 1926, including "The Riddle and Other Stories, Ding Dong Bell, The Connoisseur and Other Stories, Kismet, " and 14 other previously uncollected pieces.<>Contents of Short Stories 1895-1926 : (1) The Riddle and Other Stories (1923): The Almond Tree; The Count's Courtship; The Looking-Glass; Miss Duveen; Selina's Parable; Seaton's Aunt; The Bird of Travel; The Bowl; The Three Friends; Lispet, Lispett and Vaine; The Tree; Out of the Deep; The Creatures; The Riddle; The Vats. (2) Ding Dong Bell (1924): Lichen; Benighted; Strangers and Pilgrims; Winter. (3) The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926): Mr Kempe; Missing; The Connoisseur; Disillusioned; The Nap; Pretty Poll; All Hallows; The Wharf; The Lost Track. (4) Uncollected stories: Kismet; The Hangman Luck; A Mote; The Village of Old Age; The Moon's Miracle; The Giant; De Mortuis; The Rejection of the Rector; The Match-Maker; The Budget; The Pear-Tree; Leap Year; Promise at Dusk; Two Days in Town.

    It's perfect for anyone who loves Sherlock Holmes -- or any mystery fan who's looking for the very best in short fiction.Contents include:The Watch Night Bell by Anne PerryThe Sleuth of Christmas Past by Barbara PaulA Scandal in Winter by Gillian LinscottThe Adventure in Border Country by Gwen MoffatThe Adventure of the Three Ghosts by Loren D. EstlemanThe Adventure of the Canine Ventriloquist by Jon L. BreenThe Adventure of the Man Who Never Laughed by J.N. WilliamsonThe Yuletide Affair by John StoesselThe Adventure of the Christmas Tree by William L. DeAndreaThe Adventure of the Christmas Ghosts by Bill CriderThe Thief of Twelfth Night by Carole Nelson DouglasThe Italian Sherlock Holmes by Reginald HillThe Christmas Client by Edward D. HochThe Adventure of the Angel's Trumpet by Carolyn Wheat

    Bypassing many of the conventions of 19th-century realism, she won praise for her realistic portraits of the inhabitants of bayou and urban areas.This collection of nine stories contains one of her most famous works, "Désirée's Baby" — a haunting and ironic tale of miscegenation. Additional stories include "Madame Célestin's Divorce," "A Gentleman of Bayou Téche" and "At the 'Cadian Ball," from Bayou Folk; "A Respectable Woman," "A Night in Acadie" and Azélie" from A Night in Acadie; "The Dream of an Hour" and the title story. Written with grace, delicate humor and a keen understanding of the human — especially the female — psyche, these stories are a superb introduction to an important American writer whose literary career was cut short by the harsh criticism directed at her novel The Awakening (1899).--back coverDésirée's baby --Madame Célestin's divorce --At the 'Cadian Ball --A gentleman of the Bayou Têche --A night in Acadie --Azélie --A respectable woman --The dream of an hour --A pair of silk stockings.

    The New York Times has called Diane Williams "a master spy, a double agent in the house of fiction." In this book she broadens the riotously disruptive program of her earlier collections. piecing together stories out of jagged shards of consciousness to give form to our most complicated longings.In the title novella, Williams offers her version of paradise: A woman runs off with a man on an enchanted journey across an enchanted landscape to an enchanted house, where their time is spent proving all the pleasures -- eating, drinking, bathing, slumbering, and coupling -- and where fantastic creatures, ravishing objects, and enthralling notions present themselves. But this sensual, blissful tale also becomes, in the female narrator's artful telling, a vehicle of discovery as she passes from state to state eluding our expectations of her.The novella, Williams's first longer work, is accompanied by forty-nine short pieces, all of them superbly wry and knowing instances of the "sudden fiction" for which she is renowned. The Stupefaction is a stunning illumination of the heart and mind from one of our most innovative and audacious writers.

    Winner of most of Japan’s top literary prizes for fiction, Kono Taeko writes with a disquieting and strange beauty, always foregrounding what Choice called "the great power of serious, indeed shocking events." In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls, but she compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. The impersonal gaze Kono Taeko turns on this behavior transfixes the reader with a fatal question: What are we hunting for? And why? Now available in paperback for the first time, Toddler-Hunting Other Stories should fascinate any reader interested in Japanese literature––or in the growing world of transgressive fiction.

    He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1978 The Stories of John Cheever won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death, in 1982, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.Benjamin Cheever is the author of The Plagiarist, The Parisian and Famous after Death.The Enormous Radio read by Meryl StreepThe Five-Forty-Eight read by Edward HerrmannO City of Broken Dreams read by Blythe DannerChristmas is a Sad Season for the Poor read by George PlimptonThe Season of Divorce read by Edward HerrmannThe Brigadier and the Golf Widow read by Peter GallagherThe Sorrows of Gin read by Meryl StreepO Youth and Beauty! read by Peter GallagherThe Chaste Clarissa read by Blythe DannerThe Jewels of the Cabots read by George PlimptonThe Death of Justina read by John CheeverThe Swimmer read by John Cheever

    and This won't hurt a bit! In this hilarious tale set in the rural North Carolina of 1951, the young hero learns three valuable lessons: avoiding pain just heightens it, a mother's wrath can hurt worse than a shot, and growing up sometimes involves choosing the lesser of two evils.

    A "regional" writer only by virtue of his gift for vividly evoking the spirit of the land and its people, Mr. Graves is also admired for the unerring craftsmanship of his prose. Now the University of Texas Press takes great pleasure in publishing A John Graves Reader to introduce his writing to a new generation of readers. This anthology contains selections from Goodbye to a River and his two other major books, Hard Scrabble (1974) and From a Limestone Ledge (1980). It also includes short stories and essays, some of which have never been published before and others that Mr. Graves has reworked especially for this book. All of the pieces in this anthology were chosen by Mr. Graves himself to be, in his words, "representative of my writing, for better or worse." They reflect various stages of his life and writing career—youth in Texas, World War II, sojourns in New York, Mexico, and Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, and his final return to Texas as home and as subject matter—as well as recurring themes in his writing, from the land and the people to fishing, traveling, and the enduring friendships that have enriched his life. For those who have never read John Graves, this anthology will be the perfect introduction to the range and excellence of his work. At the same time, those who have read him faithfully for many years will find new pieces to enjoy, as well as old favorites to savor once again.

    A beautiful book that lets parents make a binding commitment to their children by signing seven lifelong promises as they read together.

    

    His fiction is one of epiphany and celebration; it charts the personal discoveries, small and large, which shape the growth of character and the intimate relationships between people. It also explores how nature impinges on the human world. Indeed, in Norris' world objects are almost as important as people, they are richly described catalysts of human action and changed directions. Place and nature - hills, lakes, rivers, towns, animals - have the same weight as the characters who act out their lives against the background of a huge universe. These are stories set in a recognisable world which can slip into the visionary.

    Now, a quarter of a century later, Gloria Naylor has compiled an encore volume, Children of the Night, bringing this extraordinary series up to date. Gathering together the most gifted black writers of our time - from 1967 to the present - Naylor has assembled a rich and varied collection of stories. The portrait that emerges of the African-American experience in the post-Civil Rights era is stirring, compelling, sometimes disturbing, and certainly provocative. Naylor has arranged the stories thematically so the reader focuses on a particular subject - slavery, for example, or the family. In the hands of different writers, these themes provide a wealth and variety of human experience. The stories are more than testimonies of the long battle for survival. From a young woman's struggles with her barren faith in Alice Walker's lyrical "The Diary of an African Nun" to an innocent man's involvement in a horrifying act of violence in Ann Petry's "The Witness", they are, as Naylor states in her introduction, "examples of affirmation: of memory, of history, of family, of being". They are stories for all of us "at the beginning: of mankind as a species; of America as a nation; of the African-American as a full citizen".The tale of Gorgik / Samuel Delaney --Meditations on history / Sherley Anne Williams --Damballah / John Edgar Wideman --Louisiana: 1850 / Jewelle Gomez --Remember him a outlaw / Alexis DeVeaux --Mother / Andrea Lee --Long distances / Jewell Parker Rhodes --After dreaming of President Johnson / Howard Gordon --Neighbors / Diane Oliver --The witness / Ann Petry --Steady going up / Maya Angelou --The lesson / Toni Cade Bambara --Kiswana Browne / Gloria Naylor --Second-hand man / Rita Dove --Crusader Rabbit / Jess Mowry --Silences / Helen Elaine Lee --Proper library / Carolyn Ferrell --Diary of an African nun / Alice Walker --In a house of wooden monkeys / Shay Youngblood --Young Reverend Zelma Lee Moses / Joyce Carol Thomas --Tell me how long the train's been gone / James Baldwin --By the way of morning fire / Michael Weaver --China / Charles Johnson --Blackness / Jamaica Kincaid --Lost in the city / Edward P. Jones --Run, mourner, run / Randall Kenan --Blues for Little Prez / Sam Greenlee --Ma'Dear / Terry McMillan --Transaction / Kelvin Christopher James --A loaf of bread / James Alan McPherson --Backwacking, a plea to the senator / Ralph Ellison --The woman who would eat flowers / Colleen McElroy --And love them? / Thonmas Glave --An area in the cerebral hemisphere / Clarence Major --Oh she gotta head fulla hair / Ntozake Shange --That place / Carolivia Herron --New York day women / Edwidge Danticat

    D. Dolan, Ellen Douglas, Kathy Flann, Tim Gautreaux, David Gilbert, Marica Guthridge, Jill McCorkle, Robert Morgan, Tom Paine, Susan Perabo, Annette Sanford, and Lee Smith.

    Readers of all abilities will gain increased comprehension of the stories from the integrated support material on every page. Pupils' interest is maintained by the large format and simple layout. A more complete picture of the authors is provided through completion of a number of 'compare and contrast' exercises, reinforcement activities and ovwerview sections at the end of each story. The National Curriculum requirement to read stories from other cultures and traditions is also covered by books in the series.

    Performing Arts. RED DIAPER BABY includes three comic autobiographical monologues by performer Josh Kornbluth: The Mathematics of Change, Haiku Tunnel, and the title piece. Together, and with the author's introduction, the monologues compose a bildungsroman that is both comic and poignant. Kornbluth shows a deep affection for the wild, eccentric characters who people his universe. With a few deft strokes he paints unforgettable portraits, as true as they are funny. Together the monologues achieve real literary form and depth, as we witness a young man coming of age in a world that is anything but conventional. These monologues have a performer's personality even on the page. They read the way they play: with a delight in neurosis that turns it into intellectual slapstick--Pauline Kael.

    Lansdale is something of an icon, or a writer's writer, if you will. I began reading him in 1981, with novels like "Act of Love" and in publications like Mike Shayne and Twilight Zone. Here was a bold new purveyor of the macabre—cutting-edge and razor-sharp, with a creepy neo-Gothic style unlike anything I'd read previously—a writer daring to be different. Lansdale was just starting out back then, and his work was outstanding. I shuddered to think how good he'd be in, say, 15 years, and I'm still shuddering. Since those early days, he has written more than a dozen novels and hundreds of short stories, commentaries, and articles, and he has even done comic and television work. Let's call him...a "speculative" author, because speculative fiction, at least to me, has always been the stuff of real literature and true art—fiction that breathes more than whatever genre it might be placed in, work that resonates with something beyond the priority to entertain, work that tells us something about ourselves, our times, and our systems of belief. Lansdale isn't a horror writer, nor a suspense writer, nor a sci-fi/fantasy writer, and on the same hand, he's all of those things amalgamated, a writer whose creativity defies category. There's a certain voice to Lansdale that can't be duplicated or even effectively defined, and it's that voice that gives anything he does a thrilling and uncanny power that gets its claws right into your soul. Any given Lansdale book provides a grab bag full of surprises. You never quite know what you're going to get, but you do know youwon't be disappointed. This is a versatility most writers couldn't manage in three careers, and I suppose it's this same element that can help explain the fury his name now generates to collectors and specialty publishers, for Lansdale (in spite of a considerable profile in the mass market) has enjoyed about as positive a cult following as any author could ask. Hard-core fans simply can't get enough of this man's work (we're talking a lot of hard-core fans), and that incontestable fact clarifies this pair of classy, first-rate hardback collections. It's the rabid interest in the Lansdale muse and the man behind it. "In The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent," Lansdale nearly apologizes for some of the stories, citing that "some are, well, mediocre, and a few are just plain bad," and amusingly, he refers to "A Fist Full of Stories" as a "garage-sale collection." Not much of an endorsement from the author himself, but who cares? Lansdale needs no endorsement from anyone. It's true, a few of the stories aren't very good, but even these early clunkers reveal some delectable slivers of the Lansdale magic. Conversely, many of the pieces in both collections are not only great stories ("The Junkyard," "Master of Misery," "Night Drive," and "Drive-In Date" to name a few) but they serve to shed light on Lansdale as the young, evolving author or, more abstractly, the entity behind the superior fund of work that now trails behind him in 1997. What's particularly fascinating are the author's keenly biographical introductions (which you then catch glimpses of in the work) and the personal miniforewords to each piece. Of 'Fist Full', Lansdale writes: "This collection contains some odds and ends of my career that I don't mind seeing reprinted for followers of my work to examine." However modest that may sound, this is exactly the point of both collections—they're vehicles that enable the Lansdale reader to track the maturation and progress of the author's creative being. Not only do you get Lansdale's fiction, you get his attitude, his perceptions and opinions, his creative influences, and the things he loves and the things he hates (not to mention some utterly intriguing tales about his growing up). And there's more than just fiction in 'Fist Full:' "Drive-In Date" is written as a play, and his "Trash Theater" movie reviews (cowritten with David Webb) will have you laughing so hard, you'll be banging your head against the wall. Both volumes share impressive production standards (a must for collectors and Lansdale connoisseurs)—these are quality first editions, to be sure. For Lansdale zealots specifically, these aren't just great, they're essential books. But even to an incidental reader who's never heard of Joe R. Lansdale: Read these books and you'll be buying everything else you can put your hands on by the guy. All in all, both of these volumes present an assemblage of fine work from an author who keeps making waves and just keeps getting better.—Edward Lee

    

    Internet Archive wayback versions are available.

    Swick shows us the contemporary family in its true form, fractured and enduring, and her insights and observations are at once tender and jarringly accurate. The characters in these stories face real hardship-spouses and children lost to tragedy or failed understanding-yet their grief is mad bearable by the humor and generosity of Swick's vision.

    Twenty-five short tales written for a wide audience, they all share an eerie whimsy. It is as if Schmidt's beloved German Romantics were here with new stories for the modern reader.And then there is Country Matters, longer, more experimental stories written for the adventurous reader. Joyce and Freud are constant inspirations, but Schmidt's unique brand of intellectual ribaldry, shot through with the pain of our common humanity, enlivens all ten stories.Of the thirty-five stories in this volume, only two have previously appeared in English translation. Ranging from Schmidt at his most inviting and whimsical to Schmidt at his most cerebral and complex, the stories are a perfect introduction to his work.

    From three beloved Arabesque authors comes a festive collection of romantic stories that celebrate the three seasonal holidays--Gwynne Forster's Christopher's Gifts celebrates Christmas, Carmen Green's Whisper to Me celebrates Kwanzaa, and Lynn Emery's Happy New Year, Baby celebrates New Year's Eve.

    A collection of thirty-three short stories from around the world celebrates the diversity of women's experiences and includes selections from both famous and lesser-known female authors.

    Morticians and insurance men, salesmen and farmers; women hoping to make life more beautiful and less pressing with delicate, bewildering hobbies and necessary flirtations; boys who veer from shame to pride, from decency to irredeemable wrongs, in an afternoon; people who do not quite recover, during the time of our acquaintance, but do not give up gracefully.Lee Martin was born in Illinois. He earned his MFA from the University of Arkansas, and his Ph.D. From the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His stories have been widely published in journals including The Georgia Review, Story, Double-Take, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Glimmer Train Stories. He received a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction (1995) as well as Individual Arts Fellowships in Fiction from the Ohio Arts Council (1987) and the Tennessee Arts Commission (1989).

    The series has been called “the collection others should use as a model” (the Charlotte Observer), and for twenty years it has held to that standard. When Anne Tyler helped us celebrate the first ten years of the series in Best of the South, 1986–1995, the reviews were ecstatic. “A triumph of authentic voices and unforgettable characters,” said Southern Living. “An introduction to some of the best writers in the world today,” raved the Northwest Arkansas Times. Now that the anthology has reached its twentieth birthday, Anne Tyler has done it again. From the 186 stories found in the ten volumes from 1996 to 2005, she has picked her favorites and introduced them with warmth, insight, and her own brand of quiet literary authority. Once again, her choices reflect her love of the kind of generous fiction she has called “spendthrift.”Here are twenty stories—by both famous and first-time writers, from Lee Smith and Max Steele to Gregory Sanders and Stephanie Soileau—that hold nothing back.

    Drawing on well over a century of research into American women's short stories, Susan Koppelman uncovers a powerful literary legacy of women speaking truth to power to write about the brutal reality in the lives of women.While it resonates with the force of shared experience, Women in the Trees cuts across lines of race, ethnicity, class, region, and time. The Women's Review of Books writes, "One of the strongest aspects of this anthology is that while the collection as a whole reveals the similarities in the patterns of abuse, the stories singly do not read the same. Koppelman has selected well. These are not in any sense sociological tracts to prove a point. Focused, as fiction should be, on individual lives, they reveal the variations in the patterns as they are lived out by individual women, who come from different backgrounds, inhabit different communities, and respond to their situations in distinctly personal ways."Acclaimed on its first publication by critics, educators, and activists, this new edition of Women in the Trees includes several new selections, over thirty stories in all. Together, these stories form a unique and ultimately empowering collection notable for both its emotional impact and its literary wealth.

    I did not dream of journeying thus as a child . . . This is the unforgettable world of Isobelle Carmody, presented in 14 stories written over a period of 13 years. Within it readers will find roads of paradox on which an angel might be a torturer, or a princess might reject a prince to save a rooster. These are paths traveled by seekers of the difficult deepest truths never found on straight roads; here a boy searches for his true name, a group of pilgrims is led by a song on an ancient journey, and a beast discovers hope. Enter this world and you will never again be sure where reality ends and imagination begins, for sometimes the greatest truths can only be told through imagination. From one of Australia's finest writers of fantasy comes a stunning collection of stories full of provocative ideas and haunting images.

    All are fueled by a conviction that what moves people most are the secret and personal worlds--the interior designs--we all carry within, and that our most intense adventures are the ones we invent for ourselves.

    Our imagination of the Middle East and its peoples must alter, reading these completely moving texts by so many diverse writers of consummate authority. Ammiel Alcalay has done us all a great service." –Robert Creeley"We need this book! The soil is so deeply mixed, the stories and voices redolent with shared fragrances and new seedlings. Anyone who imagines Jews and Arabs to be strictly oppositional needs to explore the rich twining of roots offered here, and consider how this cross-pollination may hold the hope for the whole region. Ammiel Alcalay is a fine, wise gardener." – Naomi Shihab Nye"Having established himself as one of the most attentive readers of the Jewish-Arab Mediterranean past, Ammiel Alcalay sets out in this remarkable anthology to subversively redraw the boundaries and strata of modern Hebrew literature, introducing to the American reader key-notes that are almost inaudible within the Israeli literary establishment, and tracing the Oriental characters, long erased from the palimpsest of Hebrew literature." –Anton Shammas"A Jew writing in Arabic is not read in Israel...' So writes Samir Naqqash. Ammiel Alcalay's remarkable selection of texts is a plea on behalf of Israeli imaginations in spiritual exile. One is driven to meditate on the genius of truth in every re-visionary monument of home." –Wilson HarrisAmmiel Alcalay is poet, translator, critic, and scholar who teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of, among other books, After Jews and Arabs (1993); the cairo notebooks (1993); Memories of Our Future (1999); from the warring factions (2002); Scrapmetal (2007), and A Little History (2010). He was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and helped to organize the Olson Now project. He launched Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a publishing venture whose mission is to retrieve and make available key texts falling widely under the rubric of the New American Poetry.

    Kranes is a master of description, and his characters sometimes tend to lose themselves in the background of the territory and the mood. But in his best stories the unsettling background becomes a canvas against which the characters work out their peculiar destinies.

    And, of course, there's her strange encounter with an ostrich farmer.

    In this treasury of life-affirming passages, more than 40 celebrated writers, thinkers, and religious figures from various faiths speak eloquently on the nature of dying and provide words of comfort for those left behind.

    He is also a writer of dense, homoerotic short fiction, often packed with his eclectic learning. Davenport's lyrical prose, his imaginative translations of classical and modern poetry, and his vast store of knowledge are on display in this collection of ten stories that range from Kafka's visit to a nude spa to a tour of modern-day Paris. The mix of high classicism and unabashed homosexuality makes for a rich brew, certainly not for everyone. But Davenport is one of those writers who is incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence, much less a dull story.

    Cuentos, recuerdos, stories, memories—all are stirred into a simmering caldo by a writer whose love for her heritage shines through every page. Reminiscent of Like Water for Chocolate, the book is a rich mix of the simplest ingredients—food, family, tradition. We see Silviana striding to her chicken coop, triggering the "feathered pandemonium" of chickens who smell death in the air. We meet Elena, standing before the mirror in her wedding dress, and Teodoro Sánchez, who sleeps under the sky and smells of “chaparral and mesquite pollen and the stream bottom and the bone dust of generations. There’s the monsignor sitting on the edge of a sofa, sipping Nescafé from a china cup, and here is Sister Francisca "with her warm, minty breath" warning us away from impure thoughts. Be on your best behavior, too, in Tía Petra’s Edwardian parlor—la Doña Petrita, descended from conquistadores, might just deliver a tap on your head with her silver-handled walking stick. Then, with Mamacita, spend a summer afternoon bent over your embroidery with trembling hand and sweaty upper lip, and all the while wondering what in the world it feels like to be kissed. Intermingled with the author’s stories are collective memories of the barrio, tales halfway between heaven and earth that seem to connect barrio residents to each other and to their past. These cuentos are mystical and dreamy, peopled with ghosts and miracles and Aztec princesses dressed in feathers and gold. Come, sit down and have some salsa and a tortilla—fresh and homemade, it goes without saying; people who buy tortillas at the market "might as well move to Los Angeles, for they have already lost their souls." Then open the pages of this book. Help yourself to another feast of food and flowers, music and dancing, sunshine and moonlight—everything glorious and mundane, serious and humorous, earthly and spiritual, poignant and joyful, in la vida mexicoamericana.

    International in scope, this series of non-fiction trade paperbacks offers books that explore the lives, customs and thoughts of peoples and cultures around the world.

    Instead they took over the trappings, landscapes, and cultural assumptions of thetwentieth century for their ancient purposes. Thus Michael Cox introduces The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories, a unique collection of 33 of the best and most chilling ghost stories of our era. The first anthology to trace the evolution of the ghost story over the last one hundred years, this book demonstrates the variety and versatility of the genre and the different ways in which stories of the supernatural have adapted to twentieth-century venues and concerns. In these tales weencounter not only the returning dead, but also distinctly modern phantoms: a haunted typewriter, a ghost that travels by train, and an urban specter made of smoke and soot. There are child ghosts and haunted houses, playful spooks and deadly apparitions. The authors of these uncanny tales are asdiverse as the kinds of stories they tell; there are ghost stories by such specialists as M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood and many by authors not commonly associated with the genre: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Graham Greene, A.S. Byatt, and Angela Carter are only a few of the literarycelebrities included in this collection. At a time when our era seems to grow increasingly rational and predictable, The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories reminds us of the joys of uncertainty and wonder. Distinctive and gripping, these stories will linger longin the memory

    Her writing is rich with paradox—although obsessively Scottish in subject and style, she resented Scotland; although a trenchant champion of feminism, she voluntarily sacrificed her identity to that of the "poet's wife;" and although she was a committed reformer, she never aligned herself with any political or ideological movement. These passionate dichotomies are intertwined in her writing, giving a particular power to her fiction and non-fiction alike. This collection is the first publication to offer a sense of the diversity of Willa Muir's oeuvre. It makes possible the reevaluation of her work and assures her of a deserved place in the Scottish literary canon.

    The stories collected describe the conflicts of adolescence, romantic and domestic turmoil, life in small southern towns, academic life and wartime experiences, and they range in manner from the naturalistic to the near-farcical.

    1: The Early Years (1961). With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Freberg and his all-star company take on some of the greatest tales and incidents from the annals of U.S. history. The luminous cast boasts players from Freberg's hit novelty 45s and his short-lived, self-titled weekly radio series, such as Peter Leeds and June Foray, alongside the equally lauded voice-over talents of Jesse White and Paul Frees, and the musical director Billy May. The troupe reenact behind-the-scenes incidents beginning (appropriately enough) at the beginning with "Columbus Discovers America," which includes the song "It's a Round, Round World." With Frees as narrator, the story then moves forward to the "Pilgrim's Progress" where Mayor Pennypacker (Freberg) starts a goodwill campaign and invites everyone to "Take an Indian to Lunch." Other brilliant satires deal with the "Declaration of Independence" where listeners will find the melodious message "A Man Can't Be Too Careful What He Signs These Days" -- which still remains a bit of sensible advice, and keen-eared fans of Freberg will recognize that "Yankee Doodle Go Home" contains nods to his reworkings of "Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Banana Boat (Day-O)." Although the idea of a second volume had been kicked around, in typical Freberg fashion, he created and produced "The Middle Years" when he got around to. Of course the passage of time presented a few challenges in regards to continuity. But ever the ingenious entrepreneur, Freberg assembled another top-shelf company with original participants Leeds, Foray, White and May flanking the likes of Tyne Daly, John Goodman, David Ogden Stiers, Sherman Helmsley, Harry Shearer, Lorenzo Music and Freberg's children Donovan Freberg and Donna Freberg Ebsen. They pick up the story with the surreal concept of the founding fathers as an ad agency trying to 'sell' the idea of America, as heard on the three installments of "Madison, Jefferson, Franklin & Osbourne." Equally inspired is the elder Freberg's transformation into the role of "Star-Spangled Banner" author Francis Scott Key on "Rumplemyer's Shoes: The Francis Scott Key Story." Similarly exceptional is his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in "Abe Lincoln in Analysis" -- featuring the number "Show Folk" -- and the slice-of-life "Abe Lincoln at Home in the White House" with Daly, Helmsley and Foray. "The Middle Years" concludes in the wake of World War I with "Two Tin Pan Alley Songwriters" -- Freberg and Goodman -- coming up with the new patriotic selections "Hello, Peace, Hello" and a reprise of "There'll Never Be Another War," a tune introduced after the Civil War era "Appomattox Courthouse Bar & Grill" sketch.

    But in nearly all cases, they turn out to be not so "alien" after all. Contributors include Bill Pronzini, Rosalind Greenberg, Harry Harrison, Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, others.

    This "Penguin 60s" book contains two short stories, "The Victim" and "The Girl Who Loved Graveyards

    Con. III, the 1996 World Science Fiction Convention, Guest of Honor: James White.Contents:• Introduction by Mike Resnick• James White by Walt Willis• Custom Fitting • (1976)• Commuter • (1972)• House Sitter • (1996)• Sanctuary • (1988) • Christmas Treason • (1962) • The Secret History of Sector General • (1979) • Accident • [Sector General] • (1983) • Medic • (1960)• Countercharm • (1960) • Visitor at Large • (1959) • An Introduction to Real Virtuality • (1996) by Bruce Pelz• The Last Time I Saw Harris • (1996) • The Beacon • (1996) • The Not-So-Hot Gospeller • (1996) • The Long Afternoon of Harrogate • (1996) • The History of IF #3 • (1996) • The Qunize-y Report • (1996) • Fester on the Fringe • (1996) • The Exorcists of IF • (1976)• The Unreal George Affair • (1996) • Sector General Timeline • (1996) by Gary Louie• Notes on the Classification System • (1996) • The Classification System • (1996) by Gary Louie

    Teenaged best friends Patty and Joni harbor a closeness even death can not erase. And a lonely Seattle man finds his life transformed by a mysterious little messenger. In Anderson's moving narrative, we find many such glimpses of heaven--reminding us that God is always near, every step of our way.

    Maitland's interests are as varied as her characters in this stunning collection of short stories about women's lives. From classical mythology and folk stories to inexplicable accidents of history and tales of the supernatural, these narratives "are infused with a feminist awareness and . . . deserve to be read out loud" ("Ms".).

    Lawrence, Anais Nin, and many others.

    "Nightwork" is a masterful dreamwork, revealing with startling clarity the dark and unsettling sexuality that lies just beneath the surface of the mundane.

    But there's only one force that can save the City of Angels now--Godzilla. From Beverly Hills to the Hollywood Hills, here's one monster showdown sure to make the earth quake!

    In this collection of poems, Beown's prose moves from stark realism to the wavering surrealism of fairy tales or dreams as she tells of a woman who is transformed from being a creator of paintings to a creation of her paintings; the effect of a forgotten past on a pair of lovers; or the effort to repair the physical damage of a faded relationship.

    The heroes range from kings and sages to wise travelers and fantasizing laborers. This is one of those rare books that youngsters will curl up with again and again. Illustrated by Liat Benyamini Ariel.

    Donald Davis recalls a summer working under the lax supervision of Daff-Knee Garlic, owner and operator of the Sulpher Springs Big-Screen Drive-In Theater in rural North Carolina in the early 1960s. Davis recalls his duties at the concession stand, catching slip-ins, and patrolling the back rows. But the story culminates on Labor Day when the last movie, The Guns of Navarrone, is almost over. Davis ....

    Very endearing illustrations throughout.Very Good clean unmarked copy ISBN 0861638670 David and the Dragon Prince Fanshaw's Special Monster, Cecil and the Lazy Dragon, Noel the know it all gnome, The Wishing Fairy, The World's Greatest Leprechaun Hunt, Witch Wurzel, The Witches who Came to Stay, The Civilised Snowman, The Elf Bull.