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.

    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.

    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...?"

    In fact, the short story, as A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times Book Review, shows “McInerney in full command of his gifts . . . These stories, with their bold, clean characterizations, their emphatic ironies and their disciplined adherence to sound storytelling principles, reminded me of, well, Fitzgerald and also of Hemingway—of classic stories like ‘Babylon Revisited’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.’ They are models of the form.”Only seven of these stories have ever been collected in a book, but all twenty-six unveil and re-create the manic flux of our society. Whether set in New England, Los Angeles, New York or the South, they capture various stages of adulthood, from early to budding to entrenched to resentful: a young man confronting the class system at a summer resort; a young woman holed up in a remote cabin while her (married) boyfriend campaigns for the highest office of all; a couple whose experiments in sexuality cross every line imaginable; an actor visiting his wife in rehab; a doctor contending with both convicts and his own criminal past; a youthful socialite returning home to nurse her mother; an older one scheming for her next husband; a family celebrating the holidays while mired in loss year after year; even Russell and Corrine Calloway, whom we first met in McInerney's novel Brightness Falls.A manifold exploration of delusion, experience and transformation, these stories display a preeminent writer of our time at the very top of his form.

    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.

    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.

    Included here is Crown-Fire, Country Full of Swedes, The Windfall, Horse Thief, Yellow Girl and Kneel to the Rising Sun.

    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.

    Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in his works has continued to mount, and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for best novel of 1963 for "The Man in the High Castle, " and in the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?This volume includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1952-1955. These fascinating stories include "Beyond Lies the Wub, " "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford, " "The Variable Man, " and twenty-two others.

    Among them are some of Stanley Elkin's finest, including the fabulistic "On a Field, Rampant," the farcical "Perlmutter at the East Pole," and the stylized "A Poetics for Bullies." Despite the diversity of their form and matter, each of these stories shares Elkin's nimble, comic, antic imagination, a dedication to the value of form and language, and a concern with a single theme: the tragic inadequacy of a simplistic response to life.

    This collection brings together twenty-one of Lardner’s best pieces, including the six Jack Keefe stories that comprise You Know Me, Al, as well as such familiar favorites as “Alibi Ike,” “Some Like Them Cold,” and “Guillible’s Travels.”

    Skipp and Spector'slatest chiller, their most intimate, potent and gripping work yet.

    . . Will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability.” —The New York Times Book Review, cover).These eight masterly stories reveal Lorrie Moore at her most mature and in a perfect configuration of craft, mind, and bewitched spirit, as she explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal her own exquisite, singular wisdom.In “Debarking,” a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the United States prepares to invade Iraq, and against this ominous moment, we see—in all its irresistible wit and darkness—the perils of divorce and what can follow in its wake . . .In “Foes,” a political argument goes grotesquely awry as the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest themselves at a fund-raising dinner in Georgetown . . . In “The Juniper Tree,” a teacher visited by the ghost of her recently deceased friend is forced to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a kind of nightmare reunion . . . And in “Wings,” we watch the inevitable unraveling of two once-hopeful musicians, neither of whom held fast to their dreams nor struck out along other paths, as Moore deftly depicts the intricacies of dead-ends-ville and the workings of regret . . .Here are people beset, burdened, buoyed; protected by raising teenage children; dating after divorce; facing the serious illness of a longtime friend; setting forth on a romantic assignation abroad, having it interrupted mid-trip, and coming to understand the larger ramifications and the impossibility of the connection . . . stories that show people coping with large dislocation in their lives, with risking a new path to answer the desire to be in relation—to someone . . .Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of American life, dramatic irony, and enduring half-cracked love wend their way through each of these narratives in a heartrending mash-up of the tragic and the laugh-out-loud—the hallmark of life in Lorrie-Moore-land.--jacket

    Selected by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, these novel excerpts, stories, and memoirs illuminate wonderful writing by authors often overlooked in the West. Chronologically arranged to reveal the development of Indian literature in English, this volume includes works by Jawaharlal Nehru, Nayantara Sahgal, Saadat Hasan Manto, G.V. Desani, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Kamala Markandaya, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Ved Mehta, Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Satyajit Ray, Salman Rushdie, Padma Perera, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Rohinton Mistry, Bapsi Sidhwa, I. Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor, Sara Suleri, Firdaus Kanga, Anjana Appachana, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Githa Hariharan, Gita Mehta, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Ardashir Vakil, Mukul Kesavan, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai.

    Kennedy's dark ambitions for his children--even the last & least of them. His book focuses in particular on the extraordinary 60s, a decade that began in glory for the family with Jack's ascension to the presidency, & ended--after the murders of Jack & Bobby, the tragedy at Chappaquidick & their father's death--with Teddy, the last brother, standing alone in the rubble of Camelot. While The Last Brother is both shocking & newsworthy, Teddy Kennedy emerges as a curiously tragic figure, the victim of his own family, forever "the fat, awkward little boy" who was ignored by his siblings, his father & his mother, then propelled, unwilling & unprepared, into the public limelight. Searing, yet strangely moving & even sympathetic, The Last Brother presents a detailed, tragic portrait of a man at war with himself, doomed to live in the giant shadow of his brothers, trapped in the glorious but hollow Kennedy myth, longing--but unable--to escape.