They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and stories of the Jews displaced from that world to the New World, from the East Side of New York to California and Miami.

    Today, as the new worlds, alternate universes, and synthetic pleasures Sheckley foretold become our reality, his vision begins to look less absurdist and more prophetic. This retrospective selection, chosen by Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich, brings together the best of Sheckley’s deadpan farces, proving once again that he belongs beside such mordant critics of contemporary mores as Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern, and Thomas Pynchon.

    From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami’s characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be closest of all.

    Since the 1950s Peter Matthiessen has written fiction and nonfiction of elemental power and moral vision, including the acclaimed novels At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga and works of naturalism and exploration like the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard.This stunning collection of short stories, available for the first time in paperback, spans more than three decades of writing by one of the most acclaimed literary voices of our time.

    Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life."

    For the first time in one volume: every word Bruce Sterling has ever written on the Shapers-Mechanists Universe.In the last decade, Sterling has emerged a pioneer of crucial, cutting-edge science fiction. Now Ace Books is proud to offer Sterling's stunning world of the Schismatrix--where Shaper revolutionaries struggle against aristocratic Mechanists for ultimate control of man's destiny. This volume includes the classic full-length novel, Schismatrix, plus thousands of words of mind-bending short fiction.

    Le Guin has, in each story and novel, created a provocative, ever-evolving universe filled with diverse worlds and rich characters reminiscent of our earthly selves. Now, in The Birthday of the World, this gifted artist returns to these worlds in eight brilliant short works, including a never-before-published novella, each of which probes the essence of humanity.

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

    Collected in a mini-book format, here--for the first time in print--are six of her quirky, wry, engaging best:In -The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model, - aliens reveal the terrible truth about how humans were created--and why we'll never discover aliens.-As Good as New- is a brilliant twist on the tale of three wishes, set after the end of the world. -Intestate- is about a family reunion in which some attendees aren't quite human anymore--but they're still family.-The Cartography of Sudden Death- demonstrates that when you try to solve a problem with time travel, you now have two problems.-Six Months, Three Days- is the story of the love affair between a man who can see the one true foreordained future, and a woman who can see all the possible futures. They're both right, and the story won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.And -Clover, - exclusively written for this collection, is a coda to All the Birds in the Sky, answering the burning question of what happened to Patricia's cat.

    It remains as fresh as when it was first published.

    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.

    The comic persona he invented, a modern citydweller whose zaniest flights of free association are tinged with anxiety, is as hilarious now as when he first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker—and his troubled side is even more striking. Here, The Library of America presents the best and most extensive Thurber collection ever assembled.Only a book of this scope can do justice to Thurber’s extraordinary career and to the many unexpected turns of his comic genius. Here are the acknowledged masterpieces: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “The Catbird Seat,” the anti-war parable The Last Flower, the brilliantly satirical Fables for Our Time, the children’s classic The 13 Clocks, and My Life and Hard Times, which Russell Baker calls “possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written.” Here too are the best pieces from The Owl in the Attic, Let Your Mind Alone!, My World—And Welcome To It, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals. From his other famous collections are included such favorites as “The Pet Department,” “The Black Magic of Barney Haller,” "Nine Needles,’ “the Macbeth Murder Mystery,” and “File and Forget,” revealing an astonishingly diverse mix of literary parodies, eccentric portraits, stories of domestic warfare and inner terror, reminiscences both tender and farcical, extravagant feats of wordplay, freewheeling burlesques of popular culture (from detective novels to self-help fads), and exasperated protests against the mechanized impersonality of the modern world.Thurber’s wonderful drawings—spontaneous creations of which he once said, “I don’t think any drawing ever took me more than three minutes”—are here in profusion, with their population of husbands, wives, dogs, seals, and various species of Thurber’s own invention. His first great cartoon collection, The Seal in the Bedroom, is presented complete, along with such celebrated sequences like “The Masculine Approach” and “The War Between Men and Women,” and his devastatingly straightforward illustrated versions of once-canonical poems such as “Barbara Frietchie” and “Excelsior.”Rounding out this volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, his memoir of New Yorker publisher Harold Ross, and a number of pieces, previously uncollected by Thurber, including some early work never before reprinted.

    In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness—and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”

    The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age; from an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure" to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.The Complete Stories is a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius-abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.

    The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man's dominance over the natural world. The mountain paradise of 'Monte Verità' promises immortality, but at a terrible price; a neglected wife haunts her husband in the form of an apple tree; a professional photographer steps out from behind the camera and into his subject's life; a date with a cinema usherette leads to a walk in the cemetery; and a jealous father finds a remedy when three's a crowd . . .