Collects twelve humorous stories featuring the teeny weenies.

A fiercely honest exploration of the risks and rewards of contemporary relationships--and hookups-- Sex with Strangers embraces the dizzying power of attraction across the spectrum of passion and infatuation. In this fearless collection, lust and loneliness drive a diverse cast of queer and straight characters into sometimes precarious entanglements. Recognizing that any partner is unknowable on some level, Michael Lowenthal writes about how intimacy can make strangers of us all. A newly ordained priest struggles with guilt and longing when he runs into his ex-girlfriend. A woman weighs the cost of protecting her daughter from a man they both adore. A teenage busboy has a jolting brush with a famous musician. A young man tries to salvage a long-distance relationship while caring for his mentor, an erotic writer dying of AIDS. In edgy, disquieting stories, Lowenthal traces the paths that attraction and erotic encounters take, baffling and rueful as often as electrifying. This fraught and funny volume forces us to grapple with our own subconscious desires and question how well we can ever really know ourselves.

Five short stories in which young people gain a sense of self.

Short stories by Ian McEwan, Max Schott, Paul Bowles, Peter Marsh, James Kaplan, Joy Williams, Mark Helprin, Peter Taylor, Tim McCarthy, Stanley Elkin, Harold Brodkey, Leslie Epstein, Natalie Petesch, Robert Sorrells, Jonathan Baumbach, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Cullinan, Gilbert Sorrentino, Lhluchan Sintetos, Theodore Solotaroff, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, John Gardner, Mary Ann Malinchak Rishel, and more.

Product Description Through the Drowsy Dark collects ten stories and nine poems by Nebula- and Hugo-nominee Rachel Swirsky, “a terrific writer who’s been making a name for herself with a string of intelligent, perceptive stories,” as critic Jonathan Strahan characterizes her. In Through the Drowsy Dark, Swirsky's characters struggle with too much and too little emotional control, with heartbreak, with grief that has gone deep underground; they search for nothingness, for difference, for oneness. One commits a terrible crime because she believes it's the moral thing to do, while another digs up a dead dog because the very thought of kissing it on the lips makes her clitoris throb. Swirsky's explorations of the heart and mind are fearless—and dangerous fictions indeed. About the Author Rachel Swirsky is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and has an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. She lives in Bakersfield, California.

Following her acclaimed, Los Angeles Times Book Prize–nominated novel, The God of War , Marisa Silver’s extraordinary book, Alone With You , is a starkly elegant and superbly rendered collection of short stories. Marisa Silver dazzled and inspired readers with her critically acclaimed The God of War (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist), praised by Richard Russo as “a novel of great metaphorical depth and beauty.” In this elegant, finely wrought new collection, Alone With You, Silver has created eight indelible stories that mine the complexities of modern relationships and the unexpected ways love manifests itself. Her brilliantly etched characters confront life’s abrupt and unsettling changes with fear, courage, humor, and overwhelming grace. In the O. Henry Prize–winning story “The Visitor,” a VA hospital nurse’s aide contends with a family ghost and discovers the ways in which her own past haunts her. The reticent father in “Pond” is confronted with a Solomonic choice that pits his love for his daughter against his feelings for her young son. In “Night Train to Frankfurt,” first published in The New Yorker, a daughter travels to an alternative-medicine clinic in Germany in a gambit to save her mother’s life. And in the title story, a woman vacations in Morocco with her family while contemplating a decision that will both ruin and liberate them all. From “Temporary,” where a young woman confronts the ephemeral nature of companionship, to “Three Girls,” in which sisters trapped in a snowstorm recognize the boundaries of childhood, the nuanced voices of Alone With You bear the hallmarks of an instant classic from a writer with unerring talent and imaginative resource. Silver has the extraordinary ability to render her fictional inhabitants instantly relatable, in all their imperfections. Her stories have the singular quality of looking in a mirror. We see at once what is familiar and what is strange. In these stirring narratives, we meet ourselves anew.

A profoundly unsettling collection of tales of Americans caught up in the ethnic, religious, social, economic, and political conflicts of modern day Israel, by an astonishing new voice. In a land where sudden death is an everyday fact of life, a boy dodges bullets and searches through rubble for news of his soldier father. An aging rabbi?s faith is tested by a crippling, seemingly supernatural affliction. A middle-aged man comforts his Holocaust-survivor mother as she faces senility, convinced that Nazis are conspiring against her. And the mysterious biblical red heifer makes a startling appearance in the midst of a decidedly contemporary struggle. In these unsettling tales, the remarkable Jon Papernick transports us to modern-day Israel, a country torn by war, strife, and controversy throughout the history of its statehood. Giving voice to striking characters--Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans; Arabs, Christians, and Jews--caught in the ethnic, religious, social, and political conflicts of a dangerous region, Papernick brings the images we glimpse from afar, in newspapers and on television, chillingly to life. By turns starkly realistic and allegorically fantastic, these tales chronicle the conflict from the inside and illuminate the suffering and anger experienced by those on all sides. In?An Unwelcome Guest,? a young Jewish settler from New York plays a deadly game of backgammon with a ghostly old Arab while his pregnant wife sleeps unaware. In?The King of the King of Falafel,? a restaurant rivalry ends in apocalyptic violence. In "Lucky Eighteen," two young Americans living in Jerusalem as the Oslo accords collapse juggle political activism and a devastating love triangle--under the dark specter of suicide bombings. And in the brilliant, horrifying title story, a lonely shepherd wanders a broken no-man's-land, carrying with him the burden of an unspeakable act. In these haunting and strangely beautiful stories, the tragic carnage of the Middle East is rendered in unforgettable form. Suffused with rage, violence, humor, magic, and religion, this gripping collection leaves a profound impact. Evenhanded yet passionate, shocking yet hopeful, The Ascent of Eli Israelheralds the arrival of a masterful storyteller. Please visit.

This anthology assembles seventeen never-before-collected pulp stories from the 1950s. Includes-for the first time since its original publication in the April 1957 issue of SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION-"Invulnerable," which STEPHEN KING described as "...one of my favorite stories..." when it nearly appeared in Ellison's 1982 collection, STALKING THE NIGHTMARE. It's taken 30 years, but "Invulnerable" is finally available again. Every story has been revised by the author specifically for this collection. Stories include: "Invulnerable" (1957), "Like Father, Like Son" (1957), "Walk the Ceiling" (1957), "The Kissing Dead" (1956, written with Henry Slesar), "Across the Silent Days" (1958), "Star Route" (1955), "Backlash " (1956), "Machine Silent, Machine Yearning" (1957), "Way of an Assassin" (1958), "Fool's Mate" (1958), "The Untouchable Adolescents" (1956), "The Little Boy Who Loves Cats" (1954), "Parasite" (1955), "Up the Down Escalator" (1955), "Glug" (1958), "Hit-Skip" (1957), and "Why Did Wallace Crack?" (1956).

A son is set the task of concealing his father's death; a drowned child is callously handled by rescuers; a lonely schoolteacher is shot by a hunter; a boy witnesses his mother's act of infidelity; a car explosion kills a foreign schoolgirl; and the middle-aged author of these tales depicts his own consciousness. In a perceptive work about a writer of stories, acclaimed author E.L. Doctorow opens to the reader the creative imagination of a writer.

Advance Reader Copy

Connoisseurs of fictional murder and intrigue will rejoice in Shooting Script and Other Mysteries by William Link and Richard Levinson. Spanning the years 1954 to 1966, this collection shows the young writers exploring terrain that would later make them world famous as co-creators of a certain raincoat-clad LAPD detective and a mystery novelist from Cabot Cove, Maine. These compelling stories range from a small town in Colorado to a military base in Germany; from the hot, flat roads of Nevada to the steel-and-glass canyons of New York City. Never before collected in one volume, they share a common denominator: suspense of the most delicious variety. Shooting Script is edited by Edgar Award-winning playwright Joseph Goodrich and features a foreword by Tom Straw, author of the New York Times best-selling Richard Castle novels.

Nebula and Locus award finalist Lemberg returns us to the Birdverse with this powerful collection of poems and stories. "In the Birdverse, a magic loosely based in geometry is a source of craftsmanship, art, protection and healing. Multiple cultures and countries engage in trade relationships and political alliances. Cultures make use of magic according to their own traditions and rules, and worship the deity Bird, in whichever feathered from Bird takes. And within these countries and cultures, individuals hurt and are hurt, heal and are healed." - Bookslut

You will not find "'Repent, Harlequin ' Said the Ticktockman" in this book. Nor will you find "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," "A Boy and His Dog," or "The Deathbird," or any of Harlan Ellison's myriad masterpieces. What will you find herein? The front cover might give you a nasty clue: stories of crime and amorality, of sex and violence. What the cover might not have conveyed was that the award-winning tales enumerated above were forged in an imagination stoked for the preceding decade by the need to trade tales to the pulps and slick men's magazine to make the rent ($7 a week). You hold in your hands the work of a writer painfully crawling forward, tale by tale, honing his craft in an industry where every word counted...of course, you knew all that; you got it from the title. AGAIN, HONORABLE WHOREDOM AT A PENNY A WORD kicks off with "Typewriters & Pipe Lighters," a collection of anecdotes from Ellison recalling the writing of these stories, which span his first full year as a professional writer (1956) to 1968, when he still dashed off the occasional thriller while making his name with the iconic fantasies listed above. A further essay-"Naked Deranged Psycho Thrill-Demon Or, Bitch-Slut Gun-Crazy Homicidal Rat" (1996)-discusses pulp editor W.W. Scott's propensity for re-titling Ellison's works for publication in such publications as Guilty and Trapped. Most of the stories are straight-forward thrillers never-before collected in an Ellison anthology: "Her Name Was Death" (1957), "Thirty Miles to Death Junction" (1957), "The Teaser with a Knife" (1967), "Don't Mind the Maid" (1957), "The Girl in the Red Room" (1964), "Hunchback" (1957), "Goodbye, Eadie" (1956), "The Clean Break" (1956), "Boss of the Big House"(1957), "Drive a Girl to Kill" (1957), "Hell's Holocaust" (1957), "Willie Just Won't Kick Off" (1968), "Mad Dog " (written with Henry Slesar, 1957), "The Women in the House" (1957), "Taxi Dancer"(1967). "The Music of Our Affair"(1963) features the author experimenting with style, to cacophonous effect. "Find One Cuckaboo" (1960) is a never-before reprinted novelette originally included in the paperback anthology THE SAINT MYSTERY LIBRARY, No. 11. "Clobber Me, Moogoo " (1956) and "McManus's Mental Mistress" (1968) exhibit a fantasy-tinged approach to stories of sex. "Only Death Can Stop It" (1960) compelled Harlan to add a disclaimer to the table of the contents. "The Final Push" (1957) is one of the author's three Westerns. While "Saddle Tramp" (collected in HONORABLE WHOREDOM AT A PENNY A WORD) was more tramp than saddle, this story has more in common with "The End of the Time of Leinard" in its evocation of a genre Ellison adores. "Night on the Mug Beat" is a never-before published cop story, appearing herein for the first time. The main body of the collection closes with "The Steep Road to the Gutter" (1965), an overlooked masterpiece of early Ellisonia that the editor is overjoyed to expose to a wider audience. But wait, there's more In preparing AGAIN, HONORABLE WHOREDOM AT A PENNY A WORD for publication, the editor stumbled across a file headed A WOMAN NAMED MIDNIGHT. After confirming that "A Girl Named Poison" (found in the author's 2013 collection PULLING A TRAIN) hadn't changed her name upon reaching maturity, the editor brought the forty-page typescript for an unfinished novel-credited to "Ellis Daye" on the first page, and written while Ellison lived in the treehouse on Bushrod Lane-to its author. Harlan read the story but had no recollection of writing it, nor why it had never been completed and published, but nevertheless gave his blessing for it to make its debut herein.

Widely acknowledged as one of the most influential editors of our era, Gordon Lish has quite simply changed the face of American literature. The stunning list of writers with whom he has worked closely includes Harold Brodkey, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Anne Carson, Cynthia Ozick, Raymond Carver, Will Eno, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel and many more. But it is in his own writing that his genius is made manifest. There, his quick wit and black humor are on full display, as well as a merciless intellect that skewers no one so thoroughly as, and more often than, a narrator most often known as "Gordon." In the stories in Goings, Lish wrestles with memory; self-knowledge (the lack and the impossibility thereof); friendship; mothers, sons and lovers. More than that, the language here is a collective paradigm of Lishian prose: a great writer's attempt to leap off the page.

Warren Adler is the acclaimed author of 25 novels, published in 30 languages. Two of his books, "The War of the Roses" and "Random Hearts" were made into major motion pictures. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and New York City. Ken and Sheila Kramer have a comfortable life and loving marriage. But when Ken is introduced to Carol, the wife of his wife's major client, we discover that she is Ken's old flame, the love of his life and the object of his sexual obsession as a young man. Carol has totally reinvented herself and married a rich husband who has no knowledge of her early life. While unbeknownst to Ken, his wife is carrying on a steamy affair with her client, Carol's husband. When love and sexual obsession again bursts into flames between Ken and Carol, the plot of this masterful black comedy thickens as both couples embark on an African Safari with startling and tragic results. The author of The War of the Roses surpasses himself with this powerful novel of love and betrayal, sexual passion and emotional obsession. It is storytelling at its dramatic best and once again shows Warren Adler's indisputable mastery of contemporary marital relationships. "A masterpiece of gallows humor." .New York Daily News "Warren Adler does for infidelity and betrayal what his The War of the Roses did for incompatibility and greed. He has with delicious tension, carved out the state of matrimony as his exclusive theater of war." .Fred Mustard Stewart, author of The Glitter and the Gold "Adler at his steamy, schemey best if you enjoyed the nice nastiness of The War of the Roses, this is right up your dastardly alley. .Palm Springs Desert Sun

Five years in the making, the Edgeworks Abbey Archive represents Harlan Ellison's last word on his written legacy. Researched and edited by Ellison's long-time associate, Jason Davis, under the supervision of Harlan and Susan Ellison, this collection assembles the preferred texts of each story and essay along with previously uncollected and unpublished material to create the definitive edition.HONORABLE WHOREDOM AT A PENNY A WORD collects the hard-boiled fiction Ellison wrote for the mystery/suspense digests of the 1950s, along with a few later contributions to the genre from the men's magazines of the 1960s. In these pages, you will find Ellison's only recurring character, insurance investigator-turned-fixer Jerry Killian, as well as the diminutive private dick Big John Novak, a character intended to continue, but only appearing in one suspenseful outing. His aborted second appearance, "In Small Packages," makes its debut herein, alongside a pair of first drafts that showcase the rapid development of Ellison's craft across his first years as a professional writer-a time when pros were paid a penny a word.

The author of the widely syndicated "Uncivil Liberties" column ruminates on everything from Fidel Castro to the calorie count of his favorite food. "Trillin is a curmudgeon's curmudgeon".--People.

"The collected short stories of Jonathan Carroll"--Jacket.

Working from the 1960s on, the French writer, artist and illustrator Roland Topor (1938-97) was an all-round maverick known for his paintings and drawings as much as for his novels (such as The Tenant , filmed by Roman Polanski), plays and short stories, all dominated by a sense of irrational, everyday menace. He was also a filmmaker, actor (appearing as Renfield in Herzog's Nosferatu ) and the cofounder, with Arrabal and Jodorowsky, of the Panic performance art movement. The tone of Topor's fiction and art could be interpreted as humorous, but it's a humor pushed deep into discomfort, almost to the point of total horror. From the collision of these factors, rooted in the author's experiences and his irrepressible personality, come works increasingly seen as unique in European art and writing of the late 20th century. Head-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne tells of an isolated, misanthropic narrator and his encounter with the beautiful Suzanne, an old flame from his past. It is at once a fable, a love story of enormous tenderness and a tale of increasingly unpleasant events that culminate in horror and atrocity. With its distinct blend of sympathetic cynicism and grotesquerie, Head-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne --Topor's first work to be translated into English in half a century--offers an ideal introduction to the work and worldview of an artist currently undergoing a major reassessment and rediscovery in his home country and beyond.