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.

    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.

    Deprived of love and respect from his family, Eddie is renamed 'Dirk Diggler' and conquers the world of porn, but manages to retain his essential innocence. As the turbulent seventies shade into the hedonistic eighties, Dirk's career goes into a tailspin; but he is rescued by the safety net of the extended family fostered by hard-core movie director Jack Horner.Paul Thomas Anderson's screenplay is exemplary in its ability to interweave the stories of its large cast of characters. In accord with the wisdom of the Roman dramatist Terence (who claimed, 'Nothing human is alien to me'), Anderson has engaged with a side of life widely considered to be irredeemably sleazy, and has mined humour, sadness and compassion out of his unlikely subject matter.

    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.

    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.

    tight binding. No marks on pages.

    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".

    With its pulse-pounding action, electric dialogue, and hardcore thrills, Death Proof recharges the exploitation film genre and drives it straight into the 21st century. Jungle Julia is the hottest DJ in Austin. Ready for a night out, Jungle Julia and her girls turn heads all over Austin until they settle at Huck's, the coolest dive in town. There they meet Stuntman Mike, an aging rebel with a badass muscle car, a silver jacket, and a long scar on his face. The girls drink and dance the night away as Mike sits at the bar and watches. But Stuntman Mike is no innocent drifter. He has a secret weapon--and it's parked outside.

    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...?"

    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.

    Love in the shape of Lu Anne. Following her to Mexico where she is filming a movie he's scripted, it doesn't matter to Gordon that Lu Anne is fighting for survival too, and that Gordon may push her over the edge.

    The complete scripts to six Sam Shepard plays: The Unseen Hand, Forensic and the Navigators, The Holy Ghostly, Back Bog Beast Bait, Shaved Splits, 4-H Club.

    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.

    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.

    Of the scripts included here, Barton Fink--an intense look at the psychological ruin of a New York playwright trying to make it in 1940s Hollywood--is a masterful culmination of these themes.