Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonnegut’s audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.Alternative cover edition here

    Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in the title story, confronting the murderous Misfit; a neglected four-year-old boy looking for the Kingdom of Christ in the fast-flowing waters of the river; General Sash, about to meet the final enemy. Stories include:"A Good Man Is Hard to Find""The River""The Life You Save May Be Your Own""A Stroke of Good Fortune""A Temple of the Holy Ghost""The Artificial Nigger""A Circle in the Fire""A Late Encounter with the Enemy""Good Country People""The Displaced Person"©1955 Flannery O'Connor; 1954, 1953, 1948 by Flannery O'Connor; renewed 1983, 1981 by Regina O'Connor; renewed 1976 by Mrs. Edward F. O'Connor; (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

    Scott Fitzgerald's "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," plus stories by Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, and others. Perfect for classroom use, this outstanding collection of tales will also prove popular with fiction readers everywhere.--back cover

    Included are "The Dark Chateau," "The Witch," "The Ghost," and more.

    Volume One, presenting the first five writers to receive the award, features the fiction of: Robert A. HeinleinJack WilliamsonClifford D. SimakL. Sprague de CampFritz Leiber

    But if, by chance, an insider led you to the White Hart on a Wednesday night, you would have found yourself in the midst of a select gathering or writers, editors, scientists and interested laymen—drinking, swapping odd bits of information, and, like as not, listening to Harry Purvis' memorable stories. A scientist by profession, Harry Purvis has had or heard about some of the most astonishing experiences—like the story of the carnivorous orchid that was used in a murder plot, or the one about the military computer that was converted to pacifism. There's SILENCE PLEASE, involving a spurned lover and a device that was supposed to destroy sound; and BIG GAME HUNT, in which an ambitious researcher becomes so wrapped up in his latest projest—controlling animal behavior with electrical impulses— that he overlooks one tiny important detail. Such stories may challenge your powers of logic and strain your imagination. Yet even if you doubt their veracity, they're guaranteed to provide you with hours of SF reading. Baron Munchausen, step aside.Contains: Silence Please; Big Game Hunt; Patent Pending; Armaments Race; Critical Mass; The Ultimate Melody; The Pacifist; The Next Tenants; Moving Spirit; The Man Who Ploughed the Sea; The Reluctant Orchid; Cold War; What Goes Up; Sleeping Beauty & The Defenestration of Ermintrude

    From trickster tales of the Native American tradition to bestsellers of early women writers.

    Here are thirty-eight brief, brilliant flashes of fiction, both classic and contemporary. Each work is superb, intense, and speaks to the human condition in a profound, often provocative way–a truly outstanding collection by some of the worlds greatest authors.

    The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South — a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg are reunited in Vietnam and petty nostalgia and the constant pain of disappointed love prevail. Airships is a striking demonstration of Barry Hannah's mature and original talent.

    S. Pritchett, one of our greatest short story writers, has chosen forty-one stories from nine countries written in the English language for this volume, producing a collection that successfully displays the wealth and variety of an art that spans some 200 years.The United States, Great Britain, and Ireland have fine traditions of short story writing that have developed from the time of Sir Walter Scott and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the twentieth century the art was perfected by Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, John Updike, and V. S. Pritchett himself. Other contributions in the book come from such masters as James Joyce, Mark Twain, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Frank O'Connor, H. E. Bates, William Trevor, and Liam O'Flaherty. Now, the collection of short story masters extends to Canadian, Indian, New Zealander, and Australian writers, who show in the works included here the full range of invention and ability in a genre that continues to flourish.

    P. Lovecraft, who counted him second only to Edgar Allan Poe as an influence on his work. Lovecraft readers will be interested to know that two ideas Lovecraft got from Dunsany were (1) an artificial pantheon of gods and other entities (Dunsany's Pegāna Mythos predates Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos) and (2) a cosmic vision of man as living on a tiny island of order amid a vast and chaotic universe. Perhaps, as S. T. Joshi writes in the introduction to this collection, "It is now time to appreciate Dunsany in his own right as a master fantasist whose prodigal imagination was equaled by few, whose prose style was a model of affecting simplicity, and whose bold philosophical vision remains challenging to the present day." This edition includes the complete stories from The Gods of Pegāna (1905) and Time and the Gods (1906), plus three other stories belonging to the Pegāna cycle. --Fiona WebsterContents:The Gods of Pegāna (1905)Of Skarl the Drummer (1905)Of the Making of the Worlds (1905)Of the Game of the Gods (1905)The Chaunt of the Gods (1905)The Sayings of Kib (1905)Concerning Sish (1905)The Sayings of Slid (1905)The Deeds of Mung (1905)The Chaunt of the Priests (1905)The Sayings of Limpang-Tung (1905)Of Yoharneth-Lahai (1905)Of Roon, the God of Going (1905)The Revolt of the Home Gods (1905)Of Dorozhand (1905)The Eye in the Waste (1905)Of the Thing That Is neither God nor Beast (1905)Yonath the Prophet (1905)Yug the Prophet (1905)Alhireth-Hotep the Prophet (1905)Kabok the Prophet (1905)Of the Calamity That Befel Yun-Ilara by the Sea (1905)Of How the Gods Whelmed Sidith (1905)Of How Imbaun Became High Prophet in Aradec (1905)Of How Imbaun Met Zodrak (1905)Pegāna (1905)The Sayings of Imbaun (1905)Of How Imbaun Spake of Death to the King (1905)Of Ood (1905)The River (1905)The Bird of Doom and the End (1905)Time and the Gods (1906)The Coming of the Sea (1906)A Legend of the Dawn (1906)The Vengeance of Men (1906)When the Gods Slept (1906)The King That Was Not (1906)The Cave of Kai (1906)The Sorrow of Search (1906)The Men of Yarnith (1906)For the Honour of the Gods (1906)Night and Morning (1906)Usury (1906)Mlideen (1906)The Secret of the Gods (1906)The South Wind (1906)In the Land of Time (1906)The Relenting of Sarnidac (1906)The Jest of the Gods (1906)The Dreams of a Prophet (1906)The Journey of the King (1906)Beyond the Fields We Know (1919) essayIdle Days on the Yann (1910)A Shop in Go-by Street (1912)The Avenger of Perdóndaris (1912)

    A Boston schoolmaster abandons his dreams of owning a farmhouse in rural Illinois only to be taken on a voyage across the seas and into self-discovery, faith, and love; an artist's rapturous enthusiasm inspires an aging university professor to approach life's chaotic moments as opportunities for creation. Each of these stories is wonderful in its own right, and provides valuable insight into the author's literary beliefs.Written just prior to his critical masterwork, On Moral Fiction, The King's Indian is a must-read for those interested in learning more about Gardner's highly controversial artistic philosophies.

    Sometimes it feels like we are all on a different planet earth. Sometimes we are!

    His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence.His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin’s own experience, of a preacher’s son coming of age in 1930’s Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as “an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us.”Giovanni’s Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America’s racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin’s most ambitious novel.Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin’s short fiction, including the masterful “Sonny’s Blues,” the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

    The decadent 1920s and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. In the bitingly witty poems and stories collected here, along with her articles and reviews, she brilliantly captures the spirit of the decadent Jazz Age in New York, exposing both the dazzle and the darkness. But beneath the sharp perceptions and acidic humour, much of her work poignantly expresses the deep vulnerability of a troubled, self-destructive woman who, in the words of philosopher Irwin Edman, was 'a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack'.Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was born in West End, New Jersey, and grew up in New York. In 1916 she sold some of her poetry to the editor of Vogue, and was subsequently given an editorial position on the magazine. She then became drama critic of Vanity Fair and the central figure of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, whose members included George S. Kaufman and Harpo Marx. Her collections of poems included Enough Rope (1926) and Not So Deep as a Well (1936), and her collections of stories included Here Lies (1939); in addition, she collaborated on and wrote screenplays including the Oscar-winning A Star is Born (1937), and Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942).If you enjoyed The Collected Dorothy Parker, you might like Truman Capote's The Complete Stories, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'She managed to express her real feelings in stanzas which snap and glitter like a Chanel handbag'Peter Ackroyd, The Times