Originally available only in limited-edition hardcover, these tales run the gamut from devilish fantasy to twisted courtroom drama to vampire-robot western. Each story has an introduction in which the author relates the background of and inspiration for the story, whether it was drawn from history, literature, or pure imagination. The title story, about a serial killer in Texas in the 1930s, won the 1999 Bram Stoker Horror Award for long fiction.

    Then her little brother suddenly starts asking for his new friend, "Susie." Is someone else playing with him? Someone only he can see? Soon Charlotte realizes that her all-too-normal house is haunted-by the ghost of a girl who doesn't realize that she's dead. . . . "Has several strong appeals: new best friends solving a mystery together, a just-scary-enough ghost girl, and a deathless bond between sisters that provides the book with its resoundingly satisfying conclusion." (The Horn Book)

    For nearly forty years, the films of George A. Romero have presented viewers with hellish visions of our world overrun by flesh-eating ghouls. This study proves that Romero's films, like apocalyptic literature or Dante's Commedia, go beyond the surface experience of repulsion to probe deeper questions of human nature and purpose, often giving a chilling and darkly humorous critique of modern, secular America.

    It chronicles these events in a connected narrative, from the onset of the illness to reflections in the years after the death. The book is, most of all, a series of acts of understanding. The poems are impelled by a passion to know, and a freedom to follow wherever the truth may lead. The book goes into area of feeling and experience rarely entered in poetry.The ebullient language, the startling, far-reaching images, the sense of extraordinary connectedness seize us immediately. Sharon Olds transforms a harsh reality with truthfulness, with beauty, with humor--and without bitterness.The deep pain in The Father arises from a death, and from understanding a life. But there is joy as well. In the end, we discover we have been reading not a grim accounting but an inspiriting tragedy, transcending the personal. The radiance and daring that have always distinguished Sharon Old's work find here their most powerful expression.

    An entire island bureaucracy casually confounds the attempts of Tillman, a hotel owner, in his attempt to get his dead mother out of the freezer and into a real grave; stymied, he resorts to a highly unusual form of burial. Two poor islanders stumble into a high-class dance party one night and find themselves caught up in a violent encounter that just might escalate into revolution. And a young woman sails off into the romantic tropics with the man of her dreams, only to learn the hard way - as Eve did - that paradise is just another place to leave behind.Winner of the National Book Award for first fiction, Easy in the Islands is a “stunning” (Washington Post) collection of stories by one of America’s foremost contemporary fiction writers. Infused with the rhythms and the beat of the Caribbean, these vivid tales of paradise sought and paradise lost are as lush, steamy, and invigorating as the islands themselves.From fishing fleets in remote atolls too small to appear on any map and reggae bars on islands narrow enough to walk across in an hour, to the sprawling barrios and yacht filled marinas of Miami, Bob Shacochis charts a course across a Caribbean that no one who has ever been there on vacation will recognize.

    When he's asked to act for a young policeman accused of bribery, because he knows something about police corruption in New York City, he isn't too keen. He just can't see the profit - until he meets the man's fiancee. And then Kirk's motives become uncomfortably confused, and he finds himself descending swiftly into a grey world of bookmakers, gangsters, grafters and corrupt politicians, a world where setting up an honest cop is all in a day's work...

    But you don't want to read them.So if you're looking to laugh, gasp, gag, or do all three at the same time, making sort of a weird sound that hurts your lungs and elicits odd glances from nearby pedestrians, don't miss Gleefully Macabre Tales!

    A natural-born tracker, she and seven other hunters have gathered in the remote and treacherous snow-covered tundra of northern British Columbia in pursuit of white-tail deer. And while the group may be isolated, they are not alone. Deep in the woods, a vicious force watches, waits, and stalks its targets. When the hunters become the hunted, Diana will learn—for the first time in her life—what it’s like to be prey. In the blinding white wilderness of the Canadian winter, one by one, the members of her crew are stalked by a ruthlessly efficient hunter. Diana soon realizes that her only options are to kill or be killed—and she’ll have to draw from all the knowledge and skill in her arsenal to survive the predator lurking in the trees... Finalist for the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Novel "Outstanding. A real old-fashioned thriller.”—Los Angeles Times “Superbly written. A remarkable book.”—London Literary Review

    In a series of personal essays they often reveal as much about themselves and their work as they do about the books that they love.

    Lawrence's inner life and his historically significant actions. Extensive research provides the basis for Mack's sensitive investigation of the psychological dimensions of Lawrence's personality and with the history, sociology, and politics of his time. 27 photos.

    This is the classic introduction for the educated lay reader to the richly diverse world of mathematics: its history, philosophy, principles, and personalities.

    A few decades later, Europeans fell in love with "the Turk," a celebrated chess-playing machine built in 1769. Thomas Edison was obsessed for years with making a talking mechanical doll, one of his few failures as an inventor. In our own time, scientists at MIT are trying to build a robot with emotions of its own.What lies behind our age-old pursuit to create mechanical life? What does this pursuit tell us about human nature? In Edison's Eve Gaby Wood traces the history of robotics, from its most brilliant inventions to its most ingenious hoaxes. Joining lively anecdote with literary, cultural, and philosophical insights, Wood offers a captivating and learned work of science and history.

    Depopulated after the extermination of its original native population, today it’s home to nineteen million. The site of vicious racial violence, including massacres, slavery, and the roll-back of Reconstruction, Florida is now one of our most diverse states, a dynamic multicultural place with an essential role in 21st-century America.In Finding Florida, journalist T.D. Allman reclaims the remarkable history of Florida from the state’s mythologizers, apologists, and boosters. Allman traces the discovery, exploration, and settlement of Florida, its transformation from a swamp to “paradise.” Palm Beach, Key West, Miami, Tampa, and Orlando boomed, fortunes were won and lost, land was stolen and flipped, and millions arrived. The product of a decade of research and writing, Finding Florida is a highly original, stylish, and masterful work, the first modern comprehensive history of this fascinating place.

    In doing so, he evokes the bitter conflicts between black and white, north and south in America.

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