It was released in 1960 and was the author's second book published by Arkham House. It was released in an edition of 2,060 copies. The stories originally appeared in several magazines between 1946 and 1958. The collection includes Bloch's 1959 Hugo Award winning story, "That Hell-Bound Train."

    A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray’s curio cabinet expands in Gutshot, where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. These singular stories live and breathe on their own, pulsating with energy and humanness and a glorious sense of humor. Hers are stories that you will read and reread—raw gems that burrow into your brain, reminders of just how strange and beautiful our world is. These collected stories come to us like a vivisected body, the whole that is all the more elegant and breathtaking for exploring its most grotesque and intimate lightless viscera.

    Most of the stories feature men who have been disappointed, somehow, by their inability to go on and fulfill the promise of their youth.Contents "Doctor Jack-o'-lantern" "The Best of Everything" "Jody Rolled The Bones" "No Pain Whatsoever" "A Glutton for Punishment" "A Wrestler with Sharks" "Fun with a Stranger" "The B.A.R. Man" "A Really Good Jazz Piano" "Out with the Old" "Builders"

    • Potential [Severn Valley] - (1973)• The End of a Summer's Day - (1973)• At First Sight - (1973)• The Franklyn Paragraphs [Severn Valley] - (1973)• The Interloper - (1973)• The Sentinels - (1973)• The Guy - (1973)• The Old Horns - (1973)• The Lost - (1973)• The Stocking - (1968)• The Second Staircase - (1973)• Concussion - (1973)• The Enchanted Fruit - (1973)• Made in Goatswood [Severn Valley] - (1973)

    Now, two years later, he reaffirms his mastery of shorter fiction with his first collection since the widely acclaimed Rock Springs, published a decade ago.The landscape of Women with Men ranges from the northern plains of Montana to the streets of Paris and the suburbs of Chicago, where Mr. Ford's various characters experience the consolations and complications that prevail in matters of passion, romance and love. A seventeen-year-old boy starting adulthood in the shadow of his parents' estrangement, a survivor of three marriages now struggling with cancer, an ostensibly devoted salesman in early middle age, an aspiring writer, a woman scandalously betrayed by her husband--they each of them contend with the vast distances that exist between those who are closest together. Whether alone, long married or newly met, they confront the obscure difference between privacy and intimacy, the fine distinction of pleasing another as opposed to oneself, and a need for reliance that is tempered by fearful vulnerability.In three long stories, Richard Ford captures men and women at this complex and essential moment of truth--in the course of everyday life, or during a bleak Thanksgiving journey, seismic arguments, Christmas abroad, the sudden disappearance of a child, even a barroom shooting. And with peerless emotional nuance and authority he once again demonstrates, as Elizabeth Hardwick has written, "a talent as strong and varied as American fiction has to offer."

    Whether he writes a gothic morality tale in which a male exotic dancer is haunted by his maiden aunt from beyond the grave, or about a self-help guru who tells his followers his mission is to discover who's been "crapping in your oatmeal," Saunders's stories are both indelibly strange and vividly real.

    One is seen as evil because he is a vampire, while the other is perceived as good because he is a man of God. But the vampire only does what he has to do to survive while the churchman, an Inquisitor, inflicts pain for the power it confers upon him. Which is the greater evil? And who will win the soul (and body) of a pretty witch.

    A series of strange murders, a group of odd, apparently possessed children terrorizing the adults of the town, all serve to make things interesting in the Chinese sense for toy store owner Dale, and her beau Vic, who find themselves drawn into a web of ancient intrigue, pitted against powers that were old when the New World was a big, empty garden. The second novel in the famous Oxrun Station series.

    Phrases like ‘Let me tell you a story,’ and ‘Now listen to this,’ and ‘My story is about,’ recur in his work.” This new book of sixteen stories is his fourth collection, following Gimpel the Fool, The Spinoza of Market Street and Short Friday. Many readers will rank it with Mr. Singer’s best work.The title story, an account of an old man who regularly visits an unconvincing medium on Central Park West, exemplifies what David Boroff calls Singer’s rare ability to “transmute metaphysical ideas into pure emotion.” “Getzel the Monkey” is the story of a moneylender who mimics the town’s richest man so successfully that he becomes like him to the point of tragedy. “Zeitl and Rickel,” the story of two women who wish to marry in the next world since they cannot do so in this one, contains the sentence, “Who can tell what goes on in another’s head?” The murderer who tells his story in “The Parrot” is driven to kill his mistress-wife because she takes out her unhappiness on their bird. “The Slaughterer” is a brilliant portrait of the progressive madness of a man persuaded against his nature to become a ritual slaughterer.“The Brooch” is the story of a thief who is able to work at his profession only as long as he can rely on his wife’s probity and uprightness. “The Warehouse” recounts the bureaucratic snarl-ups that plague souls in the after-life. In “The Plagiarist” a rabbi defrauded by a young disciple is asked to pray for his recovery and when the man dies he resigns to perform penance in exile. “The Lecture,” a story set in modern Montreal, reveals the reason behind an old lady’s interest in a visiting author. “The Needle” tells how a mother in search of a wife for her son devises an infallible test for prospective brides. “The Dead Fiddler” is the story of a dybbuk that talks, sings and curses in the body of a young girl. “Yanda” and “Henne Fire” are character studies of, respectively, a goodhearted Polish slavey who is fated to work for other people all her life, and a demon-like woman who causes trouble for people even after death. “The Letter Writer,” one of the major stories in the collection, relates the world of the unseen to the harsh realities of lonely old age and sickness in an alien modern city. This and the companion stories prove the truth of Miss Hughes’ assertion: “Singer is a master story-teller, one of the very few who can faithfully re-create a time forever past and render it meaningful to a troubled present.”

    Master storyteller Joe R. Lansdale has cooked up a passel of tales for you about the unlikeliest duo East Texas has to offer.Hap Collins looks like a good ol' boy, but from his misspent youth on, his best compatriot is Leonard Pine - black, gay, and the ultimate outsider. Inseparable friends, Hap and Leonard attend family gatherings, climb into the boxing ring, get in bar fights, and just go fishing - all while confronting racism, righting wrongs, and eating copious, delicious food.Chock full of Lansdale's unique blend of humor, ferocity, and insight, Of Mice and Minestrone delivers five never-before-seen (plus one perhaps familiar) Hap and Leonard stories, a selection of the boys' favorite recipes, and an introduction from New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Kent.So come discover the legends of Hap and Leonard, created by Joe R. Lansdale his own self, and featured in the by Hap and Leonard TV series starring Michael K. Williams (The Wire), James Purefoy (The Following), and Christina Hendricks (Mad Men).

    Although he is best known today for his scripts for television and film, including several classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, Beaumont is being rediscovered as a master of weird tales, and this, his first published collection, contains some of his best. Ranging in tone from the chilling Gothic horror of "Miss Gentilbelle," where an insane mother dresses her son up as a girl and slaughters his pets, to deliciously dark humor in tales like "Open House" and "The Infernal Bouillabaisse," where murderers' plans go disastrously awry, these seventeen stories demonstrate Beaumont's remarkable talent and versatility. This new edition of The Hunger and Other Stories, the first in more than fifty years, includes a new introduction by Dr. Bernice M. Murphy, who argues for reevaluation of Beaumont alongside the other greats of the genre, including Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, and Richard Matheson.Contents:Miss Gentilbelle • (1957) The Vanishing American • (1955)A Point of Honor • (1955) Fair Lady • (1957) Free Dirt • (1955) Open House • (1957)The Train • (1957) The Dark Music • (1956) The Customers • (1957)Last Night in the Rain • (1956)The Crooked Man • (1955) Nursery Rhyme • (1957) The Murderers • (1955) The Hunger • (1955) Tears of the Madonna • (1957) The Infernal Bouillabaisse • (1957)Black Country • (1954)

    The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggling New York Jewish painter, Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic.The Magic Barrel is a book about New York and about the immigrant experience, and it is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.

    Contents:1 · Bright Segment · nv * 28 · Microcosmic God · nv Astounding Apr ’41 59 · Ghost of a Chance [“The Green-Eyed Monster”] · ss Unknown Jun ’43 77 · Prodigy · ss Astounding Apr ’49 89 · Medusa · nv Astounding Feb ’42 112 · Blabbermouth · nv Amazing Feb ’47 138 · Shadow, Shadow, on the Wall · ss Imagination Feb ’51 149 · Twink · ss Galaxy Aug ’55

    This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman's children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

    Hempel, fiercely admired by writers and reviewers, has a sterling reputation that is based on four very short collections of stories, roughly fifteen thousand stunning sentences, written over a period of nearly three decades. These are stories about people who make choices that seem inevitable, whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. With compassion, wit, and the acutest eye, Hempel observes the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America. When "Reasons to Live, " Hempel's first collection, was published in 1985, readers encountered a pitch-perfect voice in fiction and an unsettling assessment of the culture. That collection includes "San Francisco," which Alan Cheuse in "The Chicago Tribune" called "arguably the finest short story composed by any living writer." In "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, " her second collection, frequently compared to the work of Raymond Carver, Hempel refined and developed her unique grace and style and her unerring instinct for the moment that defines a character. Also included here, in their entirety, are the collections "Tumble Home" and "The Dog of the Marriage." As Rick Moody says of the title novella in Tumble Home, "the leap in mastery, in seriousness, and sheer literary purpose was inspiring to behold.... And yet," he continues, ""The Dog of the Marriage, " the fourth collection, is even better than the other three...a triumph, in fact." "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel" is the perfect opportunity for readers of contemporary American fiction to catch up to one of its masters. Moody's passionate and illuminating introduction celebrates both the appeal and the importance of Hempel's work.