All the tales contain some science fiction or fantasy element, and all remain true to the spirit and personality of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous and enduring creation.Contents; * Introduction: The Detective Who Refused to Die (Sherlock Holmes in Orbit) • essay by Mike Resnick * The Musgrave Version (1995) / short story by George Alec Effinger * The Case of the Detective's Smile / short story by Mark Bourne * The Adventure of the Russian Grave / short story by William Barton and Michael Capobianco * The Adventure of the Field Theorems / novelette by Vonda N. McIntyre * The Adventure of the Missing Coffin / short story by Laura Resnick * The Adventure of the Second Scarf / short story by Mark Aronson * The Phantom of the Barbary Coast / novelette by Frank M. Robinson * Mouse and the Master / short story by Brian M. Thomsen * Two Roads, No Choices / short story by Dean Wesley Smith *The Richmond Enigma / short story by John DeChancie * A Study in Sussex / short story by Leah A. Zeldes * The Holmes Team Advantage / short story by Gary Alan Ruse * Alimentary, My Dear Watson / short story by Lawrence Schimel * The Future Engine / novelette by Byron Tetrick * Holmes Ex Machina (1995) / short story by Susan Casper * The Sherlock Solution / short story by Craig Shaw Gardner * T he Fan Who Molded Himself / short story by David Gerrold * Second Fiddle / short story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch * Moriarty by Modem (1995) / short story by Jack Nimersheim * The Greatest Detective of All Time / short story by Ralph Roberts * The Case of the Purloined L'Isitek / short story by Josepha Sherman * The Adventure of the Illegal Alien / short story by Anthony R. Lewis * Dogs, Masques, Love, Death: Flowers / short story by Barry N. Malzberg * You See But You Do Not Observe / short story by Robert J. Sawyer * Illusions / short story by Janni Lee Simner *The Adventure of the Pearly Gates / short story by Mike Resnick.

    In these selected stories is the chance to draw on her insight into the social and emotional realities of life. 2 cassettes.

    To quote the Los Angeles Times: "Impelled by a profound love of the land, the ten stories in In the Loyal Mountains are a reminder that American literature draws its unique strength from a powerful sense of place." In this luminous collection, Rick Bass firmly establishes himself as a master of the short story, with tales that embrace vibrant images of ordinary human life and exuberant descriptions of the natural world.

    The selection spans Thomas's writing lifetime, and it shows the full range of this tempestuous and meticulous artist who once cheerfully claimed that he had beast, angel and madman within him.

    The second section contains the grand master's ruminations on the SF genre itself. And the final section is comprised of Asimov's thoughts on the craft and writing of science fiction.

    They are marked by coincidence and surprise endings as well as the compassion and high humour that have made O Henry's stories popular for the last century.

    Often a desperate blond, a jealous husband, and, of course, a tough-but-tender P.I. the likes of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Raymond Chandler summed it up best in his description of Dashiell Hammett's style: "Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it....He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes."Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind, with over half of the stories never published before in book form. Included are thirty-six sublimely suspenseful stories that chronicle the evolutiuon of this quintessentially American art form, from its earliest beginnings during the Golden Age of the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask in the 1920s, to the arrival of the tough digest Manhunt in the 1950s, and finally leading up to present-day hard-boiled stories by such writers as James Ellroy. Here are eight decades worth of the best writing about betrayal, murder, and mayhem: from Hammett's 1925 tour de force "The Scorched Face," in which the disappearance of two sisters leads Hammett's never-named detective, the Continental Op, straight into a web of sexual blackmail amidst the West Coast elite, to Ed Gorman's 1992 "The Long Silence After," a gripping and powerful rendezvous involving a middle class insurance executive, a Chicago streetwalker, and a loaded .38. Other delectable contributions include "Brush Fire" by James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raymond Chandler's "I'll Be Waiting," where, for once, the femme fatale is not blond but a redhead, a Ross Macdonald mystery starring Macdonald's most famous creation, the cryptic Lew Archer, and "The Screen Test of Mike Hammer" by the one and only Micky Spillane. The hard-boiled cult has more in common with the legendary lawmen of the Wild West than with the gentleman and lady sleuths of traditional drawing room mysteries, and this direct line of descent is on brilliant display in two of the most subtle and tautly written stories in the collection, Elmore Leonard's "3:10 to Yuma" and John D. MacDonald's "Nor Iron Bars." Other contributors include Evan Hunter (better known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Helen Nielsen, Margaret Maron, Andrew Vachss, Faye Kellerman, and Lawrence Block.Compellingly and compulsively readable, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is a page-turner no mystery lover will want to be without. Containing many notable rarities, it celebrates a genre that has profoundly shaped not only American literature and film, but how we see our heroes and oursleves.

    Personal and poetic, these essays speak of matters close to the heart of a black writer. This evocative and insightful collection has been fully updated and includes four previously unpublished essays. She turns her clear, unflinching eye to issues of sex and sexism; male violence toward women; how Black women learn the erotic; the stereotypes of Black females in popular culture and the centrality of Whiteness in definitions of Canadian culture. And she examines her personal history.

    Illustrations and photos geared toward young readers

    A native of Madison County, North Carolina, she was introduced to the tale-telling tradition by her great-aunt 'Granny, ' well-known balladeer Dellie Chandler Norton. This collection of Adams's stories provides a rare portrait of a distinctive mountain community and charts the development of an artist's unique voice. The tales range from stories of heroic, sometimes fierce, mountain settlers to the comic adventures of local drifters and tricksters, from magical childhood encounters to adult rites of passage. We meet Bertha and the snake handlers, local preacher Manassey Fender (who 'looked like a pencil with a burr haircut, in a suit'), and Adams's beloved grandfather Breaddaddy, who taught her about life and death with an enchanting graveyard dance. But perhaps the most powerful character depicted here is 'Granny, ' whom Adams calls 'the most exciting person I have ever known and the best teacher I would ever have.' By weaving these remembrances into her stories, Adams both preserves and extends a rich artistic heritage.

    Ranging from hilarity to despair—innocent children bewildered by their elders’ behavior, a writer living on Xanax, and a socialite seeking a health cure only to find romance instead of rest—Gilchrist’s high-spirited characters always tend to find themselves in outrageous situations. The beloved and feisty Rhoda Manning returns, fighting the lure of the bottle while relentlessly going after her dream of becoming a famous writer. And while the restraint of family and society continues to haunt Gilchrist’s characters, they prove fearless and deliciously carve their own chaotic paths toward survival. Set in Fayetteville, Arkansas and New Orleans, Louisiana, the tales are artfully fashioned, providing tastes of marvelously trouble-prone people at every stage of life. Packed with humor, sexuality, and ever true to human weakness, this collection is romantic and full of passion—a treat in which readers will happily indulge.

    She was the most substantial and striking of the women writers of the fin de siecle who developed the modern short story, with its focus on the 'psychological moment', its exploration of the interior landscapes of human experience, and its only sporadic commitment to a realist aesthetic. This volume contains her two best collections of short stories, Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1895).An incipient modernism can clearly be identified in her stories: there is a recurrent focus on the inner consciousness of their female subjects, revealed through reverie or dream, or through intense moments of psychological and emotional connection. The stories are full of wanderers, and have the sense of dislocation characteristic of literary modernism; their compression and resistance to narrative closure confirm their alignment with the emergent aesthetic. Coupled with this aesthetic experimentation are explorations of female sexual desire, new gender identities and the pains and pleasures of maternity. Thirty years before Virginia Woolf's annunciation of modernism in the 1920s, when she presented this 'new' aesthetic movement as an abrupt break with a worn-out nineteenth-century realism. George Egerton had penetrated the emotional and psychological tragedies of apparently unexceptional women's lives and powerfully translated these tragedies into fiction. She forged a new way of expressing women's experience: her status as an important and compelling writer is indisputable.

    Senior’s gift for fine characterization, for recreating the music of everyday speech, pervades these tales, which explore notions of home and exile as well as the intricate realm of the human spirit – its fallible nature, its indomitable strength against the sometimes downward pull of fate.