Containing many "lost" pieces, it is a compendium of suspense from the pulp magazines of the '20s to his last efforts in the '70s. Fine.

    Here the reader is offered a glimpse of Mark Twain's sustained creative process, in what many critics consider the finest fiction of his later years. Begun in 1897 and revised first in 1902 and then 1908, the third version was the only manuscript titled The Mysterious Stranger. These texts offer a rare opportunity to observe Mark Twain's sustained literary struggle with a central theme.

    The Anarchists' Convention is his first short story collection, providing a prism of America through fifteen stories. These everyday people -- a kid on the road heading west, aging political activists, a lonely woman in Boston -- go about their business with humor and resilience, dealing more in possibility than fact. In the widely anthologized and O. Henry Award-winning "I-80 Nebraska," Sayles perfectly renders the image of a pill-popping trucker who has become a legend of the road.

    He almost made it. Instead, he finds himself free-falling through a world of hallucinatory absurdity, low comedy, and epic degradation. A Hollywood bottom-feeder who moonlights as a limo driver to pay the bills, both tormented and vicariously aroused by his contact with the industry's elite, Mr. Wiggins bears poignant, paranoid witness to the horror and hysteria that are by-products of "the Business." His phantasmagoric saga, by turns picaresque, pornographic, and poetic, Force Majeure is the first of a projected quartet called "Scriptures" that will chronicle the misadventures and transcendental fall and rise -- comic, tragic, and tragicosmic -- of Bud Wiggins, Quixote of Babylon.

    In the title novella, Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan Indian loved by Harrison's readers, is trying to parent his two step-children and take care of his family's health on meager resources - it helps a bit that his charms are irresistible to the new dentist in town. Republican Wives is a witty satire on the sexual neuroses of the Right, the mystery of why any person desires another, and the irrational power of love that, when thwarted, can turn so easily into an urge to murder. Tracking is a meditation on Harrison's fascination with place, telling his own familiar mythology through the places he has seen and the intellectual loves he has known in a vivid stream of consciousness that transfigures how we look at our own surroundings.

    Included here is Crown-Fire, Country Full of Swedes, The Windfall, Horse Thief, Yellow Girl and Kneel to the Rising Sun.

    This collection brings together twenty-one of Lardner’s best pieces, including the six Jack Keefe stories that comprise You Know Me, Al, as well as such familiar favorites as “Alibi Ike,” “Some Like Them Cold,” and “Guillible’s Travels.”

     La Brava, Cat Chaser, and Split Images received rave reviews and make it clear why this New York Times bestselling author has been hailed coast to coast as the hottest thriller writer of our time.

    Vollmann's growing reputation as the American writer whose books tower over the work of his contemporaries by virtue of their enormous range, huge ambition, stylistic daring, wide learning, audacious innovation, and sardonic wit (Washington Post Book World). All these qualities are in evidence in this collection in which the character of the writer and that of some of his intimates - both real and imaginary - surface and resurface in a series of extraordinary situations and encounters. Two astonishing stories frame this collection. The first, The Ghost of Magnetism, tells about a young man leaving San Francisco to become a sort of literary hobo living on his freeze-dried memories. The last, The Grave of Lost Stories, describes the death of Poe in a fungus-encrusted tomb somewhere deep in the earth. Here is the colorful and disreputable group of people familiar to us from Vollmann's earlier fiction - pimps, tramps, pornographers, witch doctors and massage-parlor girls. Within these stories, Vollmann gives us one of the most searching, bizarre, and subversive views of America today.

    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...?"

    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.

    In fact, the short story, as A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times Book Review, shows “McInerney in full command of his gifts . . . These stories, with their bold, clean characterizations, their emphatic ironies and their disciplined adherence to sound storytelling principles, reminded me of, well, Fitzgerald and also of Hemingway—of classic stories like ‘Babylon Revisited’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.’ They are models of the form.”Only seven of these stories have ever been collected in a book, but all twenty-six unveil and re-create the manic flux of our society. Whether set in New England, Los Angeles, New York or the South, they capture various stages of adulthood, from early to budding to entrenched to resentful: a young man confronting the class system at a summer resort; a young woman holed up in a remote cabin while her (married) boyfriend campaigns for the highest office of all; a couple whose experiments in sexuality cross every line imaginable; an actor visiting his wife in rehab; a doctor contending with both convicts and his own criminal past; a youthful socialite returning home to nurse her mother; an older one scheming for her next husband; a family celebrating the holidays while mired in loss year after year; even Russell and Corrine Calloway, whom we first met in McInerney's novel Brightness Falls.A manifold exploration of delusion, experience and transformation, these stories display a preeminent writer of our time at the very top of his form.

    The adventurous and sometimes shocking later works of playwright Tennessee Williams, from 1957 to 1980, are collected in this volume, which includes "Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer", and "The Night of the Iguana".

    They include "The Preliminary Notes", "The Apocalypse of Bob Paisner", and "Primary Sources". The title piece was awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Best Fiction published in the "Paris Review" during 1994.

    tight binding. No marks on pages.