Los Angeles.  In no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field.  And no writer has mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy.  With this fever-hot collection of reportage and short fiction, he returns to his native habitat and portrays it as a smog-shrouded netherworld where"every third person is a peeper, prowler, pederast, or pimp."From the scandal sheets of the 1950s to this morning's police blotter, Ellroy reopens true crimes and restores human dimensions to their victims.  Sublimely, he resurrects the rag Hush-Hush magazine.  And in a baroquely plotted novella of slaughter and corruption he enlists the forgotten luminaries of a lost Hollywood.  Shocking, mesmerizing, and written in prose as wounding as an ice pick, Crime Wave is Ellroy at his best.

    Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers an intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.The Wood-SpriteRussian Spoken HereSoundsWingstrokeGodsA Matter of ChanceThe SeaportRevengeBeneficenceDetails of A SunsetThe ThunderstormLa VenezianaBachmannThe DragonChristmasA Letter That Never Reached RussiaThe FightThe Return of ChorbA Guide to BerlinA Nursery TaleTerrorRazorThe PassengerThe DoorbellAn Affair of HonorThe Christmas StoryThe Potato ElfThe AurelianA Dashing FellowA Bad DayThe Visit to the MuseumA Busy ManTerra IncognitaThe ReunionLips to LipsOracheMusicPerfectionThe Admiralty SpireThe LeonardoIn Memory of L.I. ShigaevThe CircleA Russian BeautyBreaking the NewsTorpid SmokeRecruitingA Slice of LifeSpring in FialtaCloud, Castle, LakeTyrants DestroyedLikMademoiselle OVasiliy ShishkovUltima ThuleSolus RexThe Assistant ProducerThat in Aleppo OnceA Forgotten PoetTime and EbbConversation Piece, 1945Signs and SymbolsFirst LoveScenes From the Life of A Double MonsterThe Vane SistersLance

    This text uses place names to describe some of these meanings.