Here are thirteen memorable stories by renowned science fiction writers, telling what things might be like if... Elvis Presley weren't the "King" but the President of the United States ("Ike at the Mike" by Howard Waldrop)... The Black Death had killed the entire population of Europe in the fourteenth century ("Lion Time in Timbuctoo" by Robert Silverberg)... John F. Kennedy had survived the 1963 shooting in Dallas ("The Winterberry" by Nicholas A. DiChario). Included, too, is fascinating short fiction by Mike Resnick, Susan Shwartz, Larry Niven, Pamela Sargent, Fritz Leiber, Greg Bear, Barry N. Malzberg, Harry Turtledove, Gregory Benford and Kim Stanley Robinson. After reading these stories - some of the most compelling examples of alternate history anywhere - your mind will keep spinning the question "What If...?"

    The Beast God Forgot to Invent offers stories of culture and wildness, of men and beasts and where they overlap. A wealthy man retired to the Michigan woods narrates the tale of a younger man decivilized by brain damage. A Michigan Indian wanders Los Angeles, hobnobbing with starlets and screenwriters while he tracks an ersatz Native-American activist who stole his bearskin. An aging "alpha canine," the author of three dozen throwaway biographies, eats dinner with the ex-wife of his overheated youth, and must confront the man he used to be.

    Written in an incredibly compressed five-month period, the novel had an electrifying impact upon publication in 1939, unleashing a political storm with its vision of America’s dispossessed struggling for survival. It continues to exert a powerful influence on American culture, and has inspired artists as diverse as John Ford, Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen. Tracing the journey of the Joad family from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to the migrant camps of California, Steinbeck creates an American epic, spacious, impassioned, and pulsating with the rhythms of living speech. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and has since sold millions of copies worldwide.This text of The Grapes of Wrath has been newly edited based on Steinbeck’s manuscript, typescript, and proofs. Many errors have been corrected, and words omitted or misconstrued by his typist have been restored. In addition, The Harvest Gypsies, his 1936 investigative report on migrant workers, which laid the groundwork for the novel, is included as an appendix.The Long Valley (1938) displays Steinbeck’s brilliance as a writer of short stories, including such classics as “The Chrysanthemums,” “The White Quail,” “Flight,” and “The Red Pony.” Set in the Salinas Valley landscape that was Steinbeck’s enduring inspiration, the stories explore moments of fear, tenderness, isolation, and violence with poetic intensity.The Log from the Sea of Cortez, an account of the 1940 marine biological expedition in which Steinbeck participated with his close friend Ed Ricketts, is a unique blend of science, philosophy, and adventure, as well as one of Steinbeck’s most revealing expositions of his core beliefs. First published in 1941 as part of the collaborative volume Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck’s narrative was reissued separately a decade later, augmented by the moving tribute “About Ed Ricketts.”This volume contains a newly researched chronology, notes, and an essay on textual selection. It is the second of four volumes in The Library of America edition of John Steinbeck’s writings.

    In his book The Holocaust—born of the terrible revelation that the Jadwiga Concentration Camp was the site of his family’s extermination—Cady shook the consciousness of the human race. He also named eminent surgeon Sir Adam Kelno as one of Jadwiga’s most sadistic inmate/doctors. Kelno has denied this and brought furious charges. Now unfolds Leon Uris’s riveting courtroom drama—one of the great fictional trials of the century.

    The complete scripts to six Sam Shepard plays: The Unseen Hand, Forensic and the Navigators, The Holy Ghostly, Back Bog Beast Bait, Shaved Splits, 4-H Club.

    The eleven novels in The Library of America’s adventurous two-volume collection taps deep roots in the American literary imagination, exploring themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life.James M. Cain’s pioneering novel of murder and adultery along the California highway, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), shocked contemporaries with its laconic toughness and fierce sexuality.Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) uses truncated rhythms and a unique narrative structure to turn its account of a Hollywood dance marathon into an unforgettable evocation of social chaos and personal desperation.In Thieves Like Us (1937), Edward Anderson vividly brings to life the dusty roads and back-country hideouts where a fugitive band of Oklahoma outlaws plays out its destiny.The Big Clock (1946), an ingenious novel of pursuit and evasion by the poet Kenneth Fearing, is set by contrast in the dense and neurotic inner world of a giant publishing corporation under the thumb of a warped and ultimately murderous chief executive.William Lindsay Gresham’s controversial Nightmare Alley (1946), a ferocious psychological portrait of a charismatic carnival hustler, creates an unforgettable atmosphere of duplicity, corruption, and self-destruction.I Married a Dead Man (1948), a tale of switched identity set in the anxious suburbs, is perhaps the most striking novel of Cornell Woolrich, who found in the techniques of the gothic thriller the means to express an overpowering sense of personal doom.Disturbing, poetic, anarchic, punctuated by terrifying bursts of rage and paranoia and powerfully evocative of the lost and desperate sidestreets of American life, these are underground classics now made widely and permanently available.

    tight binding. No marks on pages.

    As a critic, she became the most provocative and influential voice of her time. More than a commentator on her era, she helped shape it. This volume brings together four essential works of the 1960s and 70s, books whose intelligence and brilliant style confirm her credo that “the highest duty of a writer is to write well—to leave the language in better rather than worse shape after one’s passage…Language is the body, and also the soul, of consciousness.”With the publication of her first collection of critical essays, Against Interpretation (1966), Sontag took her place at the forefront of a period of cultural and political transformation. “What is important now,” she wrote, “is to recover our senses…In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Against Interpretation’s treatment of an astonishing range of subjects—camp sensibility, the films of Robert Bresson and Alain Resnais, the aesthetics of science-fiction and “happenings,” the work of such modern thinkers as Simone Weil and Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss—reveals Sontag as a catalyzing figure who opened provocative perspectives on every subject she addressed.In Styles of Radical Will (1969), Sontag collected two of her longest and most ambitious essays, “The Aesthetics of Silence” and “The Pornographic Imagination,” along with penetrating studies of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran (one of many important modern writers Sontag introduced to American readers), and “Trip to Hanoi,” the record of a journey made at the height of the Vietnam War, reflecting both her deepening political involvement and the relentless analysis of her own motives that accompanied it.On Photography (1977) began as a review of an exhibit of Diane Arbus photographs and quickly evolved into an extended meditation on the premises and implications of photography as an art. Dazzlingly suggestive on every page, restlessly refusing to fall back on easy resolutions, it shows Sontag at the peak of her ability to connect disparate fields of thought and action, bringing aesthetics, history, politics, and philosophy into a common vision.Sontag’s own medical crisis led her to write Illness as Metaphor (1978), undoubtedly the most influential of her writings. Her precise delineation of the stereotypes and fantasies attached to illnesses—here, tuberculosis and cancer—played a major part in realizing her stated goal: “an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them.” The courage and clarity of her writing, her impatience with lazy assumptions and inherited biases, are evident on every page.This volume also includes six previously uncollected essays—studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon, and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement—along with a chronology of Sontag’s life and explanatory notes.

    Mistero Buffo, or The Comic Mysteries, is based on research into mediaeval mystery plays; The Accidental Death of an Anarchist concerns the "accidental" (or not) death of an anarchist railwork who "fell" (or was pushed) to his death from a police headquarters window in 1969; Trumpets and Raspberries is "A deeply subversive farce" (The Guardian) in which the boss of Italy's biggest car manufacturer FIAT, is mistaken for a left wing terrorist.

    Dick was a writer of incandescent originality and astonishing fertility, who made and unmade fictional world-systems with ferocious rapidity and unbridled speculative daring. “The floor joists of the universe,” he once wrote, “are visible in my novels.” The five novels collected in this volume—a successor to Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s—offer a breathtaking overview of the range of this science-fiction master. In these classics from the height of his career, the wild humor, freewheeling inventiveness, and darkly prophetic insights of Dick at his best are fully on display.Martian Time-Slip (1964) unfolds on a parched and thinly colonized Red Planet where the unscrupulous seek to profit from a troubled child’s time-fracturing visions. Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) chronicles the interwoven stories of a multiracial community of survivors, including the scientist who may have been responsible for World War III. Into this apocalyptic framework Dick weaves observations of daily life in the California of his own moment. Famous, among other reasons, for a therapy session involving a talking taxicab, Now Wait for Last Year (1966) explores the effects of JJ-180, a hallucinogen that alters not only perception, but reality.In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), a television star seeks to unravel a mystery that has left him stripped of his identity. A Scanner Darkly (1977), the basis for the 2006 film, envisions a drug-addled world in which a narcotics officer’s tenuous hold on sanity is strained by his new surveillance assignment: himself. Regarded by some as Dick’s most powerful novel, A Scanner Darkly mixes futuristic fantasy with an all-too-real evocation of the culture of addiction in 1970s America. Mixing metaphysics and madness, Dick’s work remains exhilarating and unsettling in equal measure.

    Winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry.

    Here are courtships and legacies; the worlds of literature, theatre, and the popular press; the paradoxes of temperament and the constraints of custom; the clash of conscience and desire. Stylistically, the stories allowed James to experiment with tones and devices quite different from his novels—dramatic plot twists and surprise endings, swift pacing and ebullient humor. The brilliance of his technical command allowed him to transform the tiniest of suggestions—a fleetingly observed gesture, an anecdote dropped at a dinner party—into fiction remarkable for its lambent surfaces and intricate psychological counterpoint.The twenty-one stories in this volume represent James at the peak of his storytelling powers. Among them are “The Turn of the Screw,” one of his most popular works, and a terrifying exercise in psychological horror centering on the corruption of childhood innocence; “The Real Thing,” a playful consideration of the illusion of art and the paradoxes of authenticity; “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Death of the Lion,” and “The Middle Years,” three very different expositions of the mysteries of authorship, embodying some of James’s most profound insights into the nature of his own art; “The Altar of the Dead,” a somber, ultimately wrenching meditation on the relation of the living to the dead; and “In the Cage,” an extended evocation of the inner life of a young woman trapped in a dehumanizing job at a postal-and-telegraph office.

    In The Bellarosa Connection, Harry Fonstein has escaped from Nazi brutality with the help of an underground organization masterminded by the legendary Broadway impresario Billy Rose, and his story continues in America . In the title story, seventeen-year-old Louie—whose mother is dying of cancer—strays far from home and finds not solace but humiliation and, ultimately, the blessing of his father's wrath.

    In the pages of pulp magazines that were still flourishing in the 1950s—Argosy, Dime Western Magazine, Zane Grey’s Western, and others—he perfected his trademark style, a blend of wiry tautness, sharp characterizations, and jolts of unexpected humor. Now, writer and film critic Terrence Rafferty has gathered the best of Leonard’s Westerns in a single volume, four classic novels and eight outstanding short stories, including the tales that inspired such powerful films as Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, and 3:10 to Yuma.In Last Stand at Saber River (1959), Leonard spins a tight narrative in which a homecoming Confederate veteran must fight to regain the ranch that has been stolen from him. Set, like most of Leonard’s Westerns, against a stark Arizona landscape, the novel is a masterpiece of unbroken tension, as the hero confronts a violent new war for all he holds dear.Chosen as one of the twenty-five greatest Western novels by the Western Writers of America, and the basis for a classic film starring Paul Newman, Hombre (1961) is a stagecoach drama whose hero, a man raised by Apaches, is treated with contempt by the white settlers who will ultimately depend on him for their survival.Valdez Is Coming (1970), Leonard’s favorite among his Westerns, pits Mexican American town constable Bob Valdez against the entrenched power of frontier oligarch Frank Tanner. When Valdez is maneuvered by Tanner into shooting an innocent man, he launches a one-man war for justice for the man’s widow that culminates with a surprising twist.With Forty Lashes Less One (1972) Leonard explores the comic tone that would mark his later books. Set within the harsh confines of Yuma Territorial Prison, the novel recounts the unlikely friendship of two prisoners—one part Apache, the other African American—planning a near-impossible escape.Like the novels, the eight stories included here, are tough, suspenseful, convincing, and beautifully spare in style. They range from Leonard’s first published pulp story, “Trail of the Apache” (1951), to one of his last, the fascinating character study “The Tonto Woman” (1982). Among the others are the twice-filmed “Three-Ten to Yuma” (1953) and “The Captives” (1955), the novella that inspired the acclaimed film The Tall T.

    In this, his final novel, he confronts the legacy of evil, and our unquenchable desire to wrest good from it. One week in late autumn of 1996, a group gathers at the site of a former death camp. They offer prayer at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform. They eat and sleep in the sparse quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews in this camp to their deaths. Clements Olin has joined them, in order to complete his research on the strange suicide of a survivor. As the days pass, tensions both political and personal surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to resolution or healing. Caught in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observer’s role and to bear witness, not only to his family’s ambiguous history but to his own. Profoundly thought-provoking, In Paradise is a fitting coda to the luminous career of a writer who was “for all readers. He was for the world” (National Geographic).