In these pages you'll meet Jacob, who as a junior counselor at summer camp wakes up his young charges at midnight to tell them that their parents have been executed by the Nazis, and Alexander Kahn, a failed novelist turned journalist who breaks the law within sight of the prison warden, so taken is he with the camaraderie he's discovered in the joint when compared with the thin gruel of companionship he's experienced outside. You'll meet Harry, the once famous screenwriter, and a moral man who "lacks a moral follow through." And in the title novella, the tragic and great Beau DeVyne.

At the end of the 19th century, Jewish writers began writing in Yiddish and creating for the first time popular literature that brought alive the small dramas, struggles, and joys of ordinary life. Sholem Aleichem was one of the very few modern writers who spoke for an entire people. This collection of stories includes the title piece and seven other tales.

Somehow, for all my outward pretence of cold-eyed professionalism, all my insistence that writing is simply a job like any other, I've discovered to my surprise and chagrin that there's more than that going on around here, that I write as much out of karmic necessity and some inescapable inner need to rededicate my own skills constantly to my-what? My craft? My art? My profession? I wrote these stories because the only way of earning a living I have ever had has been by writing, but mainly, I have to admit, I wrote these stories because I couldn't not write them. Well, so be it. They involved me in a lot of hard work, but for me, at least, the results justify the toil. I'm glad I wrote them. Writing them, it turns out, was important for me, and even pleasurable, in a curiously complex after-the-fact kind of way. May they give you pleasure now too. -Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

A genre-spanning collection of short stories dealing with naked unicorns, digital watches with minds of their own, and dreadful events on the planet Venus

In 1950 for a series of short stories for London's Evening Standard newspaper, Julian Symons invented Private Detective Francis Quarles. After engaging in mysterious activities during the Second World War, Quarles opened an office in Trafalgar Square from where he investigates puzzles ranging from robbery to murder. Contains 42 previously uncollected stories.

The characters in this extraordinary debut collection fi nd themselves caught between commitment and responsibility. In one story, a wife struggles to care for her adulterous husband after a car accident. In another, a husband finds himself drawn to his wife's former lover. In language that is eloquent and precise, these stories speak to the mysteries of friendship and marriage. This startling and powerful collection is illuminated by keen insight and hope.

First half of The Astounding-Analog Reader, Volume One, an anthology series of two volumes edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, collecting some of the best short stories from John W. Campbell's legendary science fiction magazine Astounding (later renamed Analog). Stories in this book date from 1937 to 1941. 1. Forgetfulness (1937) novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Don A. Stuart] 2. Seeds of the Dusk [When Earth Is Old] (1938) novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun 3. Farewell to the Master (1940) novelette by Harry Bates 4. Trouble on Tantalus (1941) novelette by P. Schuyler Miller 5. Time Wants a Skeleton (1941) novella by Ross Rocklynne 6. Nightfall (1941) novelette by Isaac Asimov 7. By His Bootstraps (1941) novella by Robert A. Heinlein [as by Anson MacDonald]

Grand Avenue, a street in the center of the northern California town of Santa Rosa where "everybody's connected to everybody, " is home not only to Pomo Indians making a life outside of the reservation but also to Mexicans, blacks, and some Portuguese, all trying to find their way among the many obstacles in their turbulent world. Bound together by a lone ancestor, the lives of the Native Americans from the core of these stories - tales full of cures, poison, family healing rituals, and a kind of humor that allows the inhabitants of Grand Avenue to see their own foibles with a saving grace. A teenage girl falls in love with a crippled horse marked for slaughter . . . an aging healer summons his strength for one final song . . . a father seeks a bond with his illegitimate son . . . a mother searches for the power to care for her cancer-stricken daughter's spirit. Here is a tapestry of lives rendered with the color, wisdom, and quest for meaning of the traditional tale-telling in which they are rooted. Vibrant with the emotions and realities of a changing world, these stories are all equally stunning and from the heart.

"How easy Mr. Kersh makes it all seem! How admirably he sets the scene, the atmosphere . . . very neatly done." - The Observer "Three short, rough novels, hard-hitting, battering the emotions without compunction . . . Kersh tells a story, as such, rather better than anybody else." - Pamela Hansford Johnson, Daily Telegraph Best known for his gritty novels of London life and his weird and often horrific short fiction, in Clock Without Hands (1949) Gerald Kersh delivers three novellas, each very different but all showcasing the virtuosity of his storytelling. Clock Without Hands relates the unexpected and macabre impact of a sordid murder on the mild-mannered neighbour who witnesses the crime. In Flight to the World's End , a desperate boy flees his cruel life at an orphanage, only to discover a harsh truth about the world outside. And in Fairy Gold , a clerk plays a malicious practical joke on his impoverished co-worker, with unpredictable and startling consequences. Gerald Kersh (1911-1968) published more than thirty books, including the noir classic Night and the City (1938) and Fowlers End (1957), which Anthony Burgess called "one of the great comic novels of the century," as well as hundreds of short stories which were once ubiquitous in British and American magazines. But though he has been championed by Angela Carter, Harlan Ellison, Ian Fleming, Michael Moorcock and others, Kersh has undeservedly fallen into neglect since his death. This edition of one of his lesser-known books is the first-ever reprint and includes a new introduction by Thomas Pluck.

For twenty years now, Frederick Busch has been a relentless chronicler of the human heart. Except for an occasional foray abroad, he has tended to set his fiction in a physical territory--the Northeast, upstate New York especially--which he has given literary shape. With the capaciousness of a Dickens and the control of a Hemingway, Busch's novels have come in steady counterpoint, raising and answering by turns insistent questions that worry even the plainest of domestic lives. In this his fifth book of stories, the Absent Friends of the title are the lost characters the author has so compassionately detailed, who long to recover their absent selves. But they are also, as Richard Bausch comments in The Philadelphia Inquirer, "friends we have failed, or who have failed us; it is the emotional cost of that estrangement that interests Frederick Busch."

All new stories exploring those women who embody the brass bras and chainlink bikinis in the world of science fiction and fantasy writing. Authors include Elizabeth Moon, Esther Friesner, Jody Lyn Nye, Harry Turtledove, Margaret Ball and more.

Characters make discoveries about themselves and their relationships, in seven stories that comment on topics ranging from surburbia to Central American politics

He lived beside a river that emptied into a great ocean. The narrow strip of land that lay between him and the estuary was covered at high tide by a shining film of water at low tide with the cast-up offerings of sea and shore. (Excerpt)

Everybody has their secrets. Who, for instance, is the hooded figure hiding in the bushes outside a young man’s house? Why does the same stranger keep appearing in the background of a family’s holiday photographs? What makes a woman stand mesmerized by two children in a school playground, children she’s never met but whose names she knows well? All will be revealed . . . but at a cost. As Sophie Hannah uncovers the dark obsessions and strange longings behind the most ordinary relationships, life will never seem quite the same again.

Book by Lopate, Phillip

"Michael Ayrton, was an English artist and writer, known as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and designer, and also as a critic, broadcaster and novelist. He was a stage and costume designer, working with John Minton on the 1942 John Gielgud production of Macbeth from age 19; and a book designer and illustrator, for Wyndham Lewis's The Human Age trilogy and William Golding. He also collaborated with Constant Lambert. His work is in several important collections including the Tate Gallery, London, National Portrait Gallery, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fry Art Gallery, Essex."--

"[His] way with the familiar essay--that flexible, forgiving genre in which anything goes except charmlessness and anonymity--has much in common with that of Messrs, Beerbohm, Liebling, and Mencken. Each piece is exquisitely sustained, moving from point to point with the relaxed economy of a pro." --Wall Street Journal