A companion volume to "The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, " these new translations bring together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. This volume contains his most famous story. "The Transformation, " more popularly known as "Metamorphosis." Other works include "Meditation, " a collection of his earlier studies; "The Judgement, " written in a single night of frenzied creativity; "The Stoker, " the first chapter of a novel set in America; and "A Fasting Artist, " a collection of stories written towards the end of Kafka's life. There is also a fascinating occasional piece, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia, " Kafka's eye-witness account of an air display in 1909. Taken together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

"Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird, he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. He won major literary awards, befriended actor Peter Sellers (who appeared in the screen adaptation of his novel Being There), and was a guest on talk shows and at the Oscars. But soon the facade began to crack, and behind the public persona emerged a ruthless social climber, sexual libertine, and pathological liar who may have plagiarized his greatest works. Jerome Charyn lends his unmistakable style to this most American story of personal disintegration, told through the voices of multiple narrators--a homicidal actor, a dominatrix, and Joseph Stalin's daughter--who each provide insights into the shifting facets of Kosinski's personality. The story unfolds like a Russian nesting doll, eventually revealing the lost child beneath layers of trauma, while touching on the nature of authenticity, the atrocities of WWII, the allure of sadomasochism, and the fickleness of celebrity."-- Page [4] of cover.

"From the author of Blame, a new novel about the unexpected damage inflicted by romantic entanglements. It's the early 1980s: Reagan is in the White House and his trickle-down theory is gaining traction in the national psyche. Cressida Hartley, twenty-eight, a PhD candidate in economics, has moved to her parents' shabby A-frame in the Sierras, hoping to finish her dissertation about art in the marketplace. Though she came seeking solitude, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the life of the small mountain community, and she's seduced by a local lodge owner, Jakey Yates, a big, burly, immensely attractive man in his late forties. Rick Garsh, the local contractor, gives Cress a part time job. Through Rick she meets the Morrow brothers, two talented fine-finish carpenters. They are handsome, amusing, intriguing, and married. As Cress tells her best friend back home in Pasadena, being a single woman on the mountain amounts to a form of public service. Increasingly uninspired by her dissertation, Cress allows love, adultery, and obsession to commandeer her life, and soon she becomes the victim of her own perilous reasoning. Michelle Huneven is one of our most searching, elegant novelists--Richard Russo has called her "a writer of extraordinary and thrilling talent." In Off Course, she tells the cautionary tale of an intelligent young woman seeking her place in life only to discover that love is the great distraction, and impossible love the greatest distraction of all"--

"Master stylist Begley continues the story of Jack Dana, the former Marine Corps officer turned novelist whose quest to avenge his murdered uncle takes a new, more dangerous turn. The man who brutally murdered Uncle Harry is dead. In an effort to recover from the confrontation and collect himself, Jack takes refuge on Torcello, a small island in the Venetian lagoon, to return to his writing career. Even more urgently, he wants to win back Kerry, the beautiful lawyer who rejected him after the bloody episode with Harry's assassin. But events beyond Jack's control intervene: Kerry loses her life in circumstances that contradict everything Jack thinks he knew about her. Soon death begins to stalk Jack himself. It is impossible not to recognize in its drumbeat the machinations of Abner Brown, the man who orchestrated Harry's demise. Jack fights back, driven by cold rage and determination to complete his revenge. At his side is Kerry's best friend, the glamorous and enigmatic Heidi Krohn. Their quest will force Jack to plumb the abyss of depravity into which Kerry had sunk and face one of his fellow Marines who has embarked on a violent feud of his own. Reprising memorable characters from Killer, Come Hither and introducing dangerous new ones, Begley concludes Jack's harrowing vendetta with one last shocking twist"--

"Lola Bensky is a nineteen-year-old rock journalist who irons her hair straight and asks a lot of questions. A high-school dropout, she's not sure how she got the job - but she's been sent by her Australian newspaper right to the heart of the London music scene at the most exciting time in music history: 1967. Lola spends her days planning diets and interviewing rock stars. In London, Mick Jagger makes her a cup of tea, Jimi Hendrix (possibly) propositions her and Cher borrows her false eyelashes. At the Monterey International Pop Festival, Lola props up Brian Jones and talks to Janis Joplin about sex. In Los Angeles, she discusses being overweight with Mama Cass and tries to pluck up the courage to ask Cher to return those false eyelashes. Lola has an irrepressible curiosity, but she begins to wonder whether the questions she asks these extraordinary young musicians are really a substitute for questions about her parents' calamitous past that can't be asked or answered. As Lola moves on through marriage, motherhood, psychoanalysis and a close relationship with an unexpected pair of detectives, she discovers the question of what it means to be human is the hardest one for anyone-including herself-to answer. "--

"In an effort to forestall the frailty and isolation of old age, psychiatrist Millard Salter intends to kill himself at the end of the day-but not before he ties up his life's loose ends. These include a with his ne'er-do-well youngest son, Lysander, who at 43 has yet to hold down a paying job; an unscheduled rendezvous with his first wife, Carol, whom he hasn't seen in 27 years; and a brief visit to the grave of his second wife, Isabelle, with whom he fathered an illegitimate child. Yet on what he intends to be the final day of his life, Millard has also assumed a far greater responsibility: to assist a theater director suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease in ending her own life with a helium hood. Complicating this plan is that, during the months since Compassionate Endings has paired Millard with Delilah, the widower has fallen in love with her. As Millard sets about wrapping up his life, he confronts a lifetime of challenges during a single day: a narcissistic colleague intent on having his job, an obsessive administrator browbeating him for a report that will doom his colleagues, and an escaped lynx that is roaming the hospital in search of prey. Meanwhile, as Millard prepares for his impending suicide, his family is planning a surprise for him of its own"--

Fictional Novel, Literary Fiction

The interviews in this collection cover Walter Mosley's career and reveal an overarching theme: a belief in the transformative power of reading and writing. Since the 1990 publication of his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress , Mosley (b. 1952) has published over thirty books in a tremendous range of genres and modes: crime and detective fiction, science fiction, literary novels of ideas, character studies, political and social nonfiction, erotica, and memoir. Best known for his Easy Rawlins detective series and Socrates Fortlow series of crime novels, Mosley has created a body of work that as a whole chronicles and examines twentieth-century African American experience. Conversations with Walter Mosley covers the breadth of Mosley's career and reveals a craftsman and wryly witty conversationalist. Conscious of his forebears as well as literary techniques, he discusses favorites and influences including Camus, Shakespeare, and Dickens as well as writers in popular genres--especially speculative fiction and the hard-boiled noir detective tradition. He also discusses how his work modifies the crime tradition to engage it with black experience.

The first in a series of superb science fiction. Alpha is, aside from the first letter of the Greek alphabet, a term that denotes excellence and primacy in a variety of disciplines: in nuclear physics, for example, it is the name of a particle of unusually large mass and charge. It seemed a useful label to attach to this volume, the first of an intended series of collections of science fiction stories. The Alpha series of anthologies will center on no particular theme except that of literary quality. The presence in any one volume of a cluster of stories bearing other thematic resemblance-as in this volume, where there are four or five time-travel stories-will be purely coincidental. I propose to cull the files of the science fiction magazines for stories that an educated and sophisticated reader will find stimulating, and to assemble them in books of roughly equal size that will appear once a year over the next few years. Some of the stories will be fifteen or twenty years old and richly in need of restoration to print. Others will be quite recent: the literary level of the science fiction short story has undergone an extraordinary transformation in the past few years, a fact that demands recognition here. Appropriately enough, this first volume of the ALPHA series covers a roster of writers from A to Z. Specifically, Aldiss to Zelazny-although this coincidence in alphabet is merely incidental to the fact that both these gentlemen, and the several others represented in this anthology, all write superb science fiction. Two criteria were used in the selecting of these stories-literary merit and importance to the genre. The result is that the variety of subjects is matched only by the richness and diversity of their handling-brilliant, frightening, clever, bizarre, powerful, witty, funny-and several steps in-between. So much for policy. The nine volumes of this series provide an exciting cumulative view of a field in which some of the most vigorous and inventive fiction of our times has been produced. Simply put, here is the best science fiction from the best science fiction writers.

The eighth in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality and importance to the science fiction genre. Here is another set of the best stories, stories which were ahead of their epoch when they were new, which display a freshness and vigor that make them almost indistinguishable from the best of today's s-f, and which set the standard by which modern writers have guided their careers. A DUSK OF IDOLS: Not only are the gods cruel, but they can make you like it. THE HUMAN OPERATORS: The great ships possess unlimited cruising range--and unbounded ferocity. WARM: It's just a simple guessing game: to be? or not to be? KLYSTERMAN'S SILENT VIOLIN: Powerful weapons are a fine thing--but you wouldn't want your lover to marry one. THE NEW REALITY: It's amazing how much destruction you can wreak with a few simple tools--if you put your mind to it. These and six other tales of the highest quality--the most amazing conviction

The seventh in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality and importance to the science fiction genre. Since its inception in 1970, the Alpha series has been dedicated to the proposition that science fiction can be a literature not only of stimulating and unfamiliar ideas but also of skilful and vigorous writing. Thus far Alpha has offered sixty-odd stories that exemplify the best of science fiction: challenging, provocative views of the universe, presented in crisp, sparkling prose. The volumes in the series offer some of the liveliest work produced in the short-story form anywhere in the world, and not just of the science-fiction category. Alpha serves a secondary purpose: to rescue from oblivion stories that might otherwise be undeservedly forgotten. Herewith, the seventh feast of outstanding fiction.

It was Christmas Eve 1927 and Prohibition was at its height when Diana and Lionel Trilling, that distinguished literary pair, were introduced to each other. They met at a Manhattan speakeasy. Both were 22. Lionel was a graduate student at Columbia, taking his first tentative steps to a literary career. Diana hoped to be a singer. Soon after their marriage in 1929, the stock market crashed. Their families were in financial ruin. Not until the forties did Lionel attain literary recognition and Diana launch her career as fiction critic of the Nation. A long arduous decade had been lost to illness, financial hardship, grueling family responsibility. Also to the lure, and rejection, of Communism. The Beginning of the Journey takes its title from Lionel Trilling's famous novel, The Middle of the Journey. An uncommonly personal account of the upbringing, education, and marriage of two remarkable individuals, it is also a probing portrait of life among the group now so widely referred to as "the New York intellectuals." Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, William Phillips, Phillip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, James Agee, Sidney Hook, Randall Jarrell, Allen Ginsberg: these are but a few of the well-known figures whom we come to see through the eyes of someone who lived at the center of America's Bloomsbury. Although Mrs. Trilling chiefly deals with the intellectual culture of our century, the range of her memoir is not limited to this single section of society. The Beginning of the Journey speaks to questions of a kind which transcend social lines but which have been largely ignored by our literary biographers. What was it like, what was it really like, to be a woman in this predominantly male universe? What did it feel like to be as respected a critic as Diana Trilling but married to a man so much more celebrated than herself? What did a woman of her generation sacrifice for marriage and motherhood?

In Viña Delmar's breakthrough novel, "Bad Girl," the author takes readers on a gripping journey through the tenements and working-class married life of 1920s America. Published in 1928, this cautionary tale delves into the controversial themes of premarital sex, pregnancy, and childbirth. The unexpected and immediate sensation of the novel led to its notoriety, even facing a ban in Boston initially. Despite the challenges, "Bad Girl" soared to new heights, becoming the Literary Guild's April 1928 selection and climbing the Publishers Weekly fiction bestseller list to peak at No. 4. Step into the world of societal taboos and forbidden love in this compelling narrative that captivated readers and secured its place as a bestseller in 1928.

"For many serious readers," Robert Alter writes in his preface, "the novel still matters, and I have tried here to suggest some reasons why that should be so." In his wide-ranging discussion, Alter examines the imitation of reality in fiction to find out why mimesis has become problematic yet continues to engage us deeply as readers. Alter explores very different sorts of novels, from the self-conscious artifices of Sterne and Nabokov to what seem to be more realistic texts, such as those of Dickens, Flaubert, John Fowles, and the early Norman Mailer. Attention is also given to such individual critics as Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin and to current critical schools. In Alter's essays, a particular book or movement or juxtaposition of writers provides the occasion for the exploration of a general intellectual issue. The scrutiny of well-chosen passages, the joining of images or themes or ideas, the associative and intuitive processes that lead to the right phrase and the right loop of syntax for the matter at hand-all these come together unexpectedly to illuminate both the text in question and the general issue. Recent discussions of mimesis in fiction generally proceed from a single thesis. By contrast, Motives for Fiction offers an empirical approach, attempting to define mimesis in its various guises by careful critical readings of a heterogeneous sampling of literary texts. Intelligent and good-humored, the book is also old-fashioned enough to wonder whether mimesis might not be a task or responsibility to which much contemporary fiction has not proved entirely adequate.

Homicide has many social and psychological implications that vary from culture to culture and which change as people accept new ideas concerning guilt, responsibility, and the causes of crime . A study of attitudes toward homicide is therefore a method of examining social values in a specific setting. Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860 is the first book to contrast psychological assumptions of imaginative writers with certain social and intellectual currents in an attempt to integrate social attitudes toward such diverse subjects as human evil, moral responsibility, criminal insanity, social causes of crime, dueling, lynching, the "unwritten law" of a husband's revenge, and capital punishment. In addition to works of literary distinction by Cooper, Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe, among others, Davis considers a large body of cheap popular fiction generally ignored in previous studies of the literature of this period. This is an engrossing study of fiction as a reflection of and a commentary on social problems and as an influence shaping general beliefs and opinions.

"In a collection that includes new essays written explicitly for this volume, one of our sharpest and most influential critics confronts the past, present, and future of literary culture. If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared -- if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity -- could the novel survive? In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades, Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-twentieth century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka, to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups: Fanatics, Monsters, Figures, and others. Uncompromising and brimming with insight, these essays are essential reading for anyone facing the future of literature in the digital age"--

This collection of Ayn Rand's early fiction - including her short story 'The Night King' - ranges from beginner's exercises to excerpts from early versions of 'We the Living and The Fountainhead'. Arranged chronologically, from 1926 through 1940, these works allows readers to follow the trajectory of Rand's literary and intellectual growth, from a twenty-one-year-old Russian immigrant struggling to master English to the brilliant prose stylist she was to become in her mature work.

The fourth in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality. Two criteria were used in the selecting of these stories-literary merit and importance to the genre. The result is that the variety of subjects is matched only by the richness and diversity of their handling-brilliant, frightening, clever, bizarre, powerful, witty, funny-and several steps in-between. Simply put, here is the best science fiction from the best science fiction writers. While a small number of science fiction writers are immensely well known, the Alpha series is intended, in part, to draw attention to some of the lesser known writers, whose work is equal in vision and artistry of those who have become household names.

The third in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality. Two criteria were used in the selecting of these stories-literary merit and importance to the genre. The result is that the variety of subjects is matched only by the richness and diversity of their handling-brilliant, frightening, clever, bizarre, powerful, witty, funny-and several steps in-between. Simply put, here is the best science fiction from the best science fiction writers. The main intent of the Alpha series is to assemble groups of stories that give pleasure by demonstrating the richness and variety of the science-fiction form. Quality of storytelling is the touchstone; I make no effort to gather the stories in any one volume according to any thematic pattern. Yet thematic patterns seem to creep into the books like insidious invaders from far galaxies. The first Alpha contained a cluster of tales dealing with travel through time-relativity gone topsy-turvy all over the book. The second volume, through no prior intent of the editor, seemed to deal almost entirely with the tensions arising out of man's confrontation with technology. And in this third one, I find, a prevailing theme in nearly every story is the conflict between ourselves and strangers. Again and again, through some odd accident of balance, you will find tales of tense encounters, showing protagonists facing the unknown quantities of time and space. Freud tells us that nothing ever happens by accident. Perhaps so. These anthologies are not assembled in a random process, and no doubt the editor's mind serves as a thematic filter in ways that are not clear to the editor himself except in hindsight. And one can reasonably object that virtually every good science-fiction story deals in meetings with the unknown, so that the supposed theme detected here is no true theme at all, but only a universal characteristic of the genre. In any event, here are ten outstanding stories. I think they achieve what is for me the basic science-fiction accomplishment: they show the reader visions he has not previously had, and send him away transformed and enlarged. Go thou and read. Go and be changed.

The second in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality. Two criteria were used in the selecting of these stories—literary merit and importance to the genre. The result is that the variety of subjects is matched only by the richness and diversity of their handling—brilliant, frightening, clever, bizarre, powerful, witty, funny—and several steps in-between. Whatever else these stories may be doing, they all explore the interplay between human beings and the technological society man has created for himself. Good science fiction simultaneously peers into remote realms of space and time and holds a mirror to the contemporary moment; and if the reflection in that mirror is somewhat distorted, so be it. Blame not the messenger for bearing bad tidings. Herewith ten stories which demonstrate the unsettling kinds of insights that science fiction alone can offer. More are on the way. The nine volumes of this series provide an exciting cumulative view of a field in which some of the most vigorous and inventive fiction of our times has been produced. Simply put, here is the best science fiction from the best science fiction writers.