His work has been a huge favorite of lucky insiders like me for years, and now the secret is finally and definitely out." -Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm

    This landmark collection gathers four groundbreaking fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light.Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Knights.Contents:The Pastel City, 1971 (novel)A Storm of Wings, 1980 (novel)In Viriconium, 1982 (novel)The Lamia & Lord Cromis, 1971 (short story)Viriconium Knights, 1981 (short story)The Luck in the Head, 1984 (novelette)Strange Great Sins, 1983 (short story)The Lords of Misrule, 1984 (short story)The Dancer from the Dance, 1985 (short story)A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, 1985 (short story)

    The narrator, Steve Geddes, is a writer doing a book on collectors, especially those with "unlikely, bizarre, or exceptionally useless collections." His research leads him to the Havergals, a wealthy, eccentric couple. They "collect people"; that is, she does the "collecting" while he watches-"a bout of troilism," as Geddes calls it. By accident, Geddes learns that reclusive "cult author" Thornton McCain may have written a book that Geddes hasn't heard of. Geddes the observer becomes both obsessed collector and, for the randy Havergals, object to be collected. An insightful delight from start to finish; recommended for all fiction collections.

    Twenty astonishing stories from acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin that carry us to worlds of wonder and horror, desire and destiny, enchantment and doom.

    D'arque Angel, who deals her patients doses of death...Contents:· Introduction: Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Terrific Yourself · in · Croatoan · ss F&SF May ’75 · Working with the Little People · ss F&SF Jul ’77 · Killing Bernstein · ss Mystery Monthly Jun ’76 · Mom · nv Silver Foxes Aug ’76 · In Fear of K · ss Vertex Jun ’75 · Hitler Painted Roses · ss Penthouse Apr ’77 · The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat · ss Universe 6, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1976 · From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet · ss F&SF Oct ’76 · Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time · ss MidAmeriCon Program Book, Kansas City, MO., 1976 · Emissary from Hamelin · ss 2076: The American Tricentennial, ed. Edward Bryant, Pyramid, 1977 · The New York Review of Bird [original version] · nv * · Seeing · nv Andromeda 1, ed. Peter Weston, London: Futura, 1976 · The Boulevard of Broken Dreams · vi Los Angeles Review #1 ’75 · Strange Wine · ss Amazing Jun ’76 · The Diagnosis of Dr. D’arqueAngel [“Doctor D’arqueAngel”] · ss Viva Jan ’77

    

    In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.

    “I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed,” writes Roxane Gay in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2018, “but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world.” The artful, profound, and sometimes funny stories Gay chose for the collection transport readers from a fraught family reunion to an immigration detention center, from a psychiatric hospital to a coed class sleepover in a natural history museum. We meet a rebellious summer camper, a Twitter addict, and an Appalachian preacher—all characters and circumstances that show us what we “need to know about the lives of others.”

    Thompson on the 1970 Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Kentucky, first appearing in an issue of Scanlan's Monthly in June of that year. Though not known at the time, the article marked the first appearance of gonzo journalism, the style that Thompson came to epitomize through the 1970s.The article's focus is less on the actual race itself—indeed, Thompson and Steadman could not actually see the race from their standpoint—and more on the celebration and depravity that surrounds the event, as well as other events in Louisville (Thompson's home town) in the surrounding days.

    Collected here for the first time in paperback, the essays, articles, observations—and even some untypical country-music lyrics—offer a rare overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original. Whether rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Tom Robbins’s briefer writings exhibit the five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language. Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are brand-new short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an offbeat assessment of our divided nation. Wherever you open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, you’ll encounter the serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture.”

    Anne Tyler is both literary and popular, one of the few writers whose high sales match her critical acclaim. Now you can enjoy three of her more recent bestsellers in one low-priced, attractively packaged hardcover.

    These are some of the inhabitants of People From My Neighborhood. In their lives, details of the local and everyday—the lunch menu at a tiny drinking place called the Love, the color and shape of the roof of the tax office—slip into accounts of duels, prophetic dreams, revolutions, and visitations from ghosts and gods. In twenty-six “palm of the hand” stories—fictions small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand—Hiromi Kawakami creates a universe ruled by mystery and transformation.

    Rust Belt Chic tells stories about failure (mills closing), conflict (Pekar's constant grousing), growth (a thriving Iraqi immigrant community) and renewal (moving away only to, finally, return home). Put together, these stories create a new narrative about Cleveland that incorporates but deepens and widens the familiar tropes of manufacturing, stadiums and comebacks.

    This selection includes almost all of his short stories, including "The Canterville Ghost," "The Fisherman and his Soul," and "The Remarkable Rocket." Alongside THE MODEL MILLIONAIRE, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, and Stephen Crane to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in the "Summer of the Short Story." A story from Simon Van Booy's forthcoming collection, LOVE BEGINS IN WINTER, will be printed at the back of this volume.

    In a tour de force that could be described as Altmanesque, we are invited into the private lives of the residents of a quiet urban street in England over the course of a single day. In delicate, intricately observed closeup, we witness the hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs of a diverse community: the man with painfully scarred hands who tried in vain to save his wife from a burning house and who must now care for his young daughter alone; a group of young clubgoers just home from an all-night rave, sweetly high and mulling over vague dreams; the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird urban junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love. The tranquillity of the street is shattered at day's end when a terrible accident occurs. This tragedy and an utterly surprising twist provide the momentum for the book. But it is the author's exquisite rendering of the ordinary, the everyday, that gives this novel its freshness, its sense of beauty, wonder, and hope. Rarely does a writer appear with so much music and poetry -- so much vision -- that he can make the world seem new.