A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure.

    Fans and critics call their world cyberpunk. Here is the definitive "cyberpunk" short fiction collection.Contents:The Gernsback Continuum (1981) by William GibsonSnake-Eyes (1986) by Tom MaddoxRock On (1984) by Pat CadiganTales of Houdini (1981) by Rudy Rucker400 Boys (1983) by Marc LaidlawSolstice (1985) by James Patrick KellyPetra (1982) by Greg BearTill Human Voices Wake Us (1984) by Lewis ShinerFreezone (1985) by John ShirleyStone Lives (1985) by Paul Di FilippoRed Star, Winter Orbit (1983) by William Gibson and Bruce SterlingMozart in Mirrorshades (1984) by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner

    Daisy's valentine --A romantic weekend --something nice --An affair, edited --Connection --Trying to be --Secretary --Other factors --Heaven

    Henry originated the humorous, energetic tale that ends with an ironic, even shocking twist. In "After Twenty Years," for example, two boys agree to meet at a particular spot exactly twenty years later. Both are faithful, but in the intervening years one boy has turned into a criminal, the other into a policeman. Behind the rendezvous lurks a powerful dramatic situation with a fascinating moral dilemma--all in a few brief pages. This is just one of the many literary gems in Selected Stories of O. Henry, a collection of forty-five of O. Henry's most renowned and entertaining short stories. Each one offers insights into human nature and the ways it is affected by love, jealousy, poverty, gentility, and the all-pervading reality of people conning people--themes that ran through the author's own life. Born William Sidney Porter, O. Henry started writing while in prison for embezzlement. Later he moved to New York, and his tales romanticizing the commonplace, particularly the life of ordinary New Yorkers, became highly popular. The most widely read author of his time, O. Henry died penniless but left behind a wealth of short stories that endure as hallmarks of the genre.

    The birthplace and graveyard of American myths and dreams, the city harbours a group of people trapped between the beauty of their surroundings and their own moral impoverishment. This novel is a chronicle of their voices.

    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

    Lost, teetering on the edge of normalcy, Puchner's characters seek to define themselves in a frequently absurd and hostile world -- a world that threatens to make outcasts of us all. Caught up in loneliness or solitude, they can't quite hear the music of their own lives.In "Children of God," a young loner becomes the caretaker and companion for two mentally retarded men, seeking solace in their outsider status. "Essay #3: Leda and the Swan" is told in the forlorn, be-nighted, and tragically funny voice of a high school girl who longs more than anything to be loved. In "Mission," an idealistic ESL teacher is faced with the inscrutable wrath of one of his immigrant students. And in the unsettling "Child's Play," Puchner explores the price of nonconformity by following a pack of boys wreaking havoc on Halloween.Writing from an impressive range of perspectives -- men and women, children and adults, immigrants and tourists -- Puchner deftly exposes the dark, ten-der undersides of his characters with arresting beauty and precision. Here are people fumbling for identity in a depersonalized world, captured in moments that are hilarious, shocking, and transcendent -- sometimes all at once. Unfailingly true, surprisingly moving, and impossible to forget, these nine stories mark the arrival of a brilliant young writer and one of our most promising literary voices.

    --No particular night or morning --The city --The fire balloons --The last night of the world --The veldt --The long rain --The great fire --The wilderness --A sound of thunder --The murderer --The April witch --Invisible boy --The golden kite, the silver wind --The fog horn --The black black and white game --Embroidery --The golden apples of the sun --Powerhouse --Hail and farewell --The great wide world over there --The playground --Skeleton --The man upstairs --Touched with fire --The emissary --The jar --The small assasin --The next in line --Jack-in-the-box --The leave-taking --Exorcism --The happiness machine --Calling Mexico --The wonderful ice cream suit --Dark they were, and golden-eyed --The strawberry window --A scent of sarsaparilla --The Picasso summer --The day it rained forever --A medicine for melancholy --The shoreline at sunset --Fever dream --The town where no one got off --All summer in a day --Frost and fire --The anthem sprinters --And so died Riabouchinska --Boys! Raise giant mushrooms in your cellar! --The vacation --The illustrated woman --Some live like Lazarus --The best of all possible worlds --The one who waits --Tyrannosaurus Rex --The screaming woman --The terrible conflagration up at the place --Night call, collect --The tombling day --The haunting of the new --Tomorrow's child --I sing the body electric! --The women --The inspired chicken motel --Yes, we'll gather at the river --Have I got a chocolate bar for you! --A story of love --The parrot who met Papa --The October game --Punishment without crime --A piece of wood --The blue bottle --Long after midnight --The utterly perfect murder --The better part of wisdom --Interval in sunlight --The black ferris --Farewell summer --McGillahee's brat --The aqueduct --Gotcha! --The end of the beginning.

    They stay with you like a significant memory.”—Roger Rosenblatt“Van Booy is a remarkable young writer. Taste, touch, smell, sight and sound, in spite of their evanescence, are frozen for a moment in these stories and celebrated, along with their subtle interconnection, in all the aspects of love.”—Fred VolkmerThe Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion. Love, loss, frailty, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy’s themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.Born in London, Simon Van Booy grew up in Wales. A keen rugby player, he was recruited to play football for Campbellsville University in Kentucky. He eventually returned to England, where he graduated from Dartington College of Arts. Now a New Yorker, he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and in the Bard College Clemente Course. As a freelance journalist, he writes for several New York newspapers. He has won a first-place award for in-depth reporting from the New York Press Association.

    People who are perhaps ourselves, searching, often in the wrong places, for something meaningful, or real, or at least, for a moment, right. Here are couples like Vincent and Laurie, who after beginning an ill-timed relationship, escape for a weekend at the beach, where they confront their inevitable separation. There is also Olive, a recovering drug addict, sent on a mission to help her nephew, who finds herself in an illicit relationship with both him and his problems. And a young boy nicknamed Flipper, sequestered for a summer at a “fat” camp, who finds unexpected comfort in the company and forbidden gifts of a pregnant teenager. In these stories, Canty demonstrates both deep understanding and a powerful grasp of language and continues to set himself apart as a master of the short story.

    A child's collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder's inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers.

    Elegantly structured, these stories span the globe and beyond, from small-town America and sunny Caribbean islands to the Arctic Ocean and the very gates of Heaven itself. And though some of the stories are steeped in mythology, they remain grounded in universal experiences: loss of identity, leaving home, parenthood, joy, and longing.Crisscrossing the pages of Awayland are travelers and expats, shadows and ghosts. A girl watches as her homesick mother slowly dissolves into literal mist. The mayor of a small Midwestern town offers a strange prize, for stranger reasons, to the parents of any baby born on Lenin's birthday. A chef bound for Mars begins an even more treacherous journey much closer to home. And a lonely heart searches for love online--never mind that he's a Cyclops. With her signature tenderness, Ramona Ausubel applies a mapmaker's eye to landscapes both real and imagined, all the while providing a keen guide to the wild, uncharted terrain of the human heart.

    Each of the portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace. These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent.The half-skinned steer --The mud below --55 miles to the gas pump --The bunchgrass edge of the world --A lonely coast --Job history --Pair a spurs --People in Hell just want a drink of water --The governors of Wyoming --The blood bay --Brokeback Mountain

    Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in his works has continued to mount, and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for best novel of 1963 for "The Man in the High Castle, " and in the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?This volume includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1952-1955. These fascinating stories include "Beyond Lies the Wub, " "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford, " "The Variable Man, " and twenty-two others.

    Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little. "Immaculate of history, innocent of politics," she has come to Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.