Named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, nominated for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award, and given the Lambda Award.

    Beaumont's talents also helped bring to life such cinematic terrors as 'The Premature Burial' and 'The Masque of the Red Death'. As a writer of short stories, his contribution to the landscape of our nightmares is unequalled. The Howling Man is the definitive collection of Beaumont's most haunting work. Here are the classics - "The Hunger," "Miss Gentilbelle," "Free Dirt," along with five never-before-published stories. The Howling Man features introductions by Robert Bloch, Dennis Etchison, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Roger Corman, Richard Matheson and many other masters of horror and dark fantasy. They offer illuminating tributes to Beaumont - as a friend, a colleague, and a man whose dark magic left an indelible stamp on modern horror fiction, and on their own imaginations.

    An American cult figure, Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Jay McInerney.

    The tales are organized chronologically to give readers a sense of how the genre's range, vitality, and literary quality have evolved over time. Each tale offers a unique vision, an altered reality, a universe all its own. Readers can sample H.G. Well's 1903 story The Land Ironclads (which predicted the stalemate of trench warfare and the invention of the tank), Jack Williamson's The Metal Man, a rarely anthologized gem written in 1928, Clifford D. Simak's 1940s classic, Desertion, set on "the howling maelstrom that was Jupiter", Frederik Pohl's 1955 The Tunnel Under the World (with its gripping first line, "On the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream"), right up to the current crop of writers, such as cyberpunk's Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, whose 1982 story Burning Chrome foreshadows the idea of virtual reality, and David Brin's Piecework, written in 1990. In addition, Shippey provides an informative introduction, examining the history of the genre, its major themes, and its literary techniques.

    While he has garnered acclaim as a novelist, Bellow's shorter works prove equally strong. Primarily set in a sepia-toned Chicago, characters (mostly men) deal with family issues, desires, memories, and failings--often arriving at humorous if not comic situations. In the process, these quirky and wholly real characters examine human nature. The narrative is straightforward, with deftly handled shifts in time, and the prose is concise, sometimes pithy, with equal parts humor and grace. In "Looking for Mr. Green," Bellow describes a relief worker sized up by tenants: "They must have realized that he was not a college boy employed afternoons by a bill collector, trying foxily to pass for a relief clerk, recognized that he was an older man who knew himself what need was, who had more than an average seasoning in hardship. It was evident enough if you looked at the marks under his eyes and at the sides of his mouth." This collection should appeal both to those familiar with Bellow's work and to those seeking an introduction. --Michael Ferch

    This book by the Irish writer Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde includes five short stories: The Selfish Giant The Happy Prince The Nightingale and the Rose The Devoted Friend The Remarkable Rocket

    H . Lawrence, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle & Tolstoy, as well as fro m more modern masters of the genre such as Monica Dickens & Michael Morpurgo. '

    In the foreground, brought wholly alive, are relatives, neighbors, and family friends eccentric and otherwise.

    Certain Things Last is the first one-volume edition of Anderson's stories. But what makes this book truly remarkable is that five of Anderson's very best stories appear in print here for the first time. They are: "Certain Things Last," "Fred," "The Red Dog," "Mrs. Wife," and "The Masterpiece." The discovery of these new stories makes Certain Things Last an unprecedented publishing event. The short story, not the novel or autobiography, was the form in which Sherwood Anderson excelled. And the American short story probably owes more to Sherwood Anderson than to any other American writer. It was Anderson who wrested short fiction from the upbeat conventionality of the popular magazines of the 1920s and '30s and molded it to express the isolation of individual people. Certain Things Last contains 30 stories in all, chosen from previously unpublished manuscripts and from Anderson's three story volumes, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses and Men, and Death in the Woods. Numerous stories have been meticulously restored to Anderson's original version by Professor Modlin.

    Human aspiration and social improvement elevate these stories enlivened by an idiomatic sense of comedy; this edition also allows readers to discover the delightful narrative skills of little-known writers such as Korolenko, Kupin and Chirinov.