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.

    He is one of just a handful of characters in sword-and-sworcery fiction who have had a seminal impact on the entire genre, and his compelling tale and tortured conscience have inspired countless rendering by artists both famed and unknown. Elric has even inspired songs from groups as diverse as Hakwind and Blue Oyster Cult to Cirith Ungol and the Tygers of Pan Tang.

    He is more than a mere detective, he is rather an enigmatic mix of folklore and science, with a knowledge and wisdom, which seems mysterious and even, at times, unearthly.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    In 1986, when he placed ads in Chinese newspapers calling for people's experiences, he received over 4000 responses. Those he has selected are disturbing, utterly compelling, seamlessly told and, together, constitute a many-layered and intimate picture. The interviews, which read like monologues, are prefaced by the person's age and occupation in 1966. One man, who was a 16-year-old student at the time, enjoyed destroying churches with the Red Guard, but when a classmate and an elderly man were beaten, he became a "non-participant." "I found that if you want to be a non-participant, the best thing to do is go fishing." A middle-aged housewife was not so lucky. When her husband was falsely charged with counterrevolutionary activity, they were both sentenced to No. 63, a prison camp where inmates were routinely tortured to death. She describes not just the cruelties she miraculously survived but the incidentals like the opera record, The Red Lantern, that the guards played to mask screams. Another woman, a gifted young dancer in 1966, was brainwashed into believing that her father was a "rightist." He died before she recognized the lie, and she now lives with terrible guilt. Feng includes four appendices: a chronology; key figures; an interview with the author; and several dozen short interviews to sample the widely varying attitudes towards the Cultural Revolution of those born after 1976. "What I fear most," says Feng, "is that later generations will adopt a sensationalist attitude towards the suffering of an earlier one." (From Publishers Weekly)

    He is one of the few writers of the era who actually fought in the war, who participated in its daily routines and experienced the senseless confusion, the terror, and the blood-letting of battle. As such, his crisply evocative first-hand accounts--both fictional and nonfictional--of life and death on the firing line set the standard for historical accuracy as well as dramatic power.William McCann has sifted through Ambrose Bierce's vast literary opus to present a collection of his most outstanding stories of the Civil War: seven selections from the author's memoirs and twenty works of fiction in all.From the minute-by-minute- heartbeat-by-heartbeat recreation of combat in "What I Saw of Shiloh" to the graphic realism and tragedy of such stories as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Biere's craftsmanship--the intensity of his vision, the precision of his prose--is evident throughout.Whether you're a history enthusiast, Civil War buff, or simply a lover of good, tough, evocative writing, Ambrose Bierce's Civil War is your opportunity to discover some of the grittiest and most vivid depictions of battle on record. --jacket flapContains:On a mountain --What I saw of Shiloh --A little of Chickamauga --The crime at Pickett's Mill --Four days in Dixie --What occurred at Franklin --A bivouac of the dead ; A horseman in the sky --An occurrence at Owl Creek bridge --Chickamauga --A son of the gods --One of the missing --Killed at Resaca --The affair at Coulter's Notch --The coup de grace --Parker Adderson, philosopher --An affair of outposts --The story of a conscience --One kind of officer --One officer, one man --George Thurston --The mocking-bird --Three and one are one --A baffled ambuscade --Two military executions --A resumed identity --Jupiter Doke, brigadier-general.

    The rest is the madness of art.” These words, spoken by a dying novelist in “The Middle Years,” sum up Henry James’s credo as a writer. In more than one hundred stories, ranging from brief anecdotes to richly developed novellas, James displayed the unwavering intensity of his aesthetic vision—and he did so with an astonishing variety of invention. The Library of America makes this body of writing available in its entirety in a new, authoritative edition of James’s world-famous stories, complete in five volumes.The thirty-one stories presented here are the culmination of James’s glorious final period. Among them are the extraordinary fantasies “The Great Good Place” and “The Jolly Corner,” in which supernatural motifs are used hauntingly to express undercurrents of yearning and dislocation; “Julia Bride,” a character portrait akin to “Daisy Miller,” in which a young American woman experiences the social pleasures and vicissitudes of the marriage market; “Crapy Cornelia,” a story whose sense of the compelling power of nostalgic memory owes much to James’s 1904 return visit to New York City; “The Birthplace,” a comic tale about the commercialization of genius that has lost none of its satiric edge; “The Tree of Knowledge,” a sly dissection of the family life of a pampered sculptor; “The Beast in the Jungle,” one of James’s masterpieces, the harrowing account of a man’s confrontation with his own lost opportunities that has been seen as foreshadowing many of the dominant themes of 20th-century literature; and “A Round of Visits,” James’s last story, about the need to confide and the limits of sympathy.

    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.

    This book is a collection of prose pieces, the line between fact and fancy, between actuality and invention is constantly blurred.