This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

In That's Life, William Herrick's view of humanity is unsparing yet compassionate. He sees life as commitment--to ideals, friends, family--but no one, least of all Herrick, said it was going to be easy. His portraits of the members of a distinctly American family--a novella, five short stories, and a group of five letters--comprise not quite a novel but more than a collection of stories. "I think of it as a co-operative structure," the author says, "in which each character owns and occupies his or her own place, yet it is the entire family which operates the building. To simplify matters, I call the book a fiction." And so we learn the past and present of each of the Millers: Max and Rebecca, Rebecca's mother Ruth (in an old folks' home), and the three Miller children--Eli, an obsessive artist, Peter, an amateur student of life as he bums rides across the country, and teen-ager Nina, a not-so-innocent working-class child away at prep school on a scholarship. But we learn about them in counterpoint and mosaic as Herrick turns our attention, and our allegiance, first to one member of the family and then another. There are few books where human weaknesses are so fully displayed and yet where human endurance and capacity for joy are so palpably present.

Set in the San Francisco environs of the 1930s, this series of five short stories covers the intrigues of brilliant, stylish, and very polite amateur sleuths Claire Delacroix and her millionaire boss, Akhenaton Beelzebub Chase. They are a perfect pair to solve impossible crimes set forth by police captain Cleland Baxter, who once served with Chase in the Great War. Mystery abounds, beginning with the intriguing puzzle of a Hungarian actor found dead in his locked dressing room with vampire-like puncture wounds in his neck. A deep water explorer disappears from his diving suit, as does a fighter plane[alpha]s passenger after traveling through a cloud. Both Chase and Delacroix have a penchant for re-enacting the scene of the crime, their many talents in evidence as they do. Delacroix is a medical doctor, pilot, and multi-instrument musician with a weakness for movie magazines and a San Francisco Call reporter (who gets his own bonus story set in 1923), while her partner Chase is a professor, inventor, and autodidact polymath whose parents went down with both the Titanic and the Lusitania, with his wartime gassed lungs as a weakness. The crimes solved range from a very deadly massacre of even the house servants, to a missing person caught in the act of attending a bar mitzvah. Through it all there are colorful gadgets and gizmos galore, food both delicious and deadly, and a setting that sparkles as brightly as the characters of the well-matched sleuths. Great fun!

A new collection of short stories from the author of Bop contains twenty tales permeated with such themes and motifs as characters searching for signs of acceptance and the truths revealed in a shared look, or an offhand remark.

Karen Finley is, without a doubt, the most famous and important performance artist of today, and yet in recent years her trademark persona -- that of populist provocateur -- has grown ever more complex. Always a versatile artist (she has exhibited paintings, recorded music, written plays), Finley now seems intent on moving beyond the agitprop of her best-known work in order to examine her more introverted inclinations. This stunning book, which features recent watercolors, drawings, short stories, and poems, offers ample evidence of Finley's multi-dimensional talents.

Short stories summon up the tones and twists of contemporary marriages, careers, pleasures, and social quirks

In these short stories, Dorfman writes of love and betrayal, of families broken apart by hope and fear, of personal lives invaded by political authority, and of men and women who long for privacy.

Yiddish short fiction from Russia by a writer who embraced Communism, only to become disillusioned, which led to his imprisonment and death in a gulag. There are three stories, Remnants, on a woman seeking happiness, Impoverished, on a father and his daughters, and Departing, which looks at the effect of a suicide on the friends and family of the victim.

This is a classic science fiction novella by Stanley G. Weinbaum that was originally published in Astounding Stories in 1935. This is the only of Weinbaum's stories to be set on the planet Pluto, written only five years after the planet's discovery. The tale starts with a spaceship called Aardkin that gets boarded by the notorious pirate ship the Red Peri. One year on Frank Keene and astrophysicist Solomon Nestor crash land on Pluto and find themselves captives of the Red Peri herself, the nineteen year-old daughter of the man who built the Red Peri. During their ordeal the secret of the reason behind her forays into piracy are revealed. This work is part of our Vintage Sci-Fi Classics Series, a series in which we are republishing some of the best stories in the genre by some of its most acclaimed authors, such as Isaac Asimov, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Robert Sheckley. Each publication is complete with a short introduction to the history of science fiction.

"Lupoff writes with intelligence, humor, wisdom, and a zest for life. He had a lot of fun writing this book, and it shows; because of it, we have a lot of fun reading it."Joe Gores, author of Hammett Where Memory Hides is a guided tour through the life and career of mystery and science fiction's most versatile practitioner. Richard A. Lupoff has been a professional author for six decades, and a life-time fan of everything from pulp magazines to comic books, science fiction and mystery, and more. As the extensive bibliography (included in this book) demonstrates, Lupoff's credits run the gamut of fiction, nonfiction, mainstream publishing, and fan journals. In the 1960s, he penned All In Color For a Dime , a foundation-laying work for modern comic book fandom, and Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure , a study of Tarzan's creator. The Comic Book Killer and Marblehead are among his best-known novels. His short story 12:01 PM , filmed twice in the 1990s, added a new sub-genre to science fiction and spawned a legion of imitators. In Where Memory Hides , Lupoff regales readers with triumphs and tribulations from his six-decade plus career. He also offers insights on writing, haggling with agents, and literary criticism of authors such as Dashiell Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and many others. This autobiography is available in two editions -- a standard trade paperback edition, and a paperback collector's edition with color graphics throughout. "... (Lupoff's) books and stories, I can testify, having read a great many of them and published some myself, almost unfailingly display not only his intelligence and perceptivity, but also the grace and charm of his wit, the skill of his narrative technique, and the exemplary individuality of his ideas. That is to say, he's a damned good writer."Robert Silverberg, author of The Book of Skulls "... Although in his 80s, Lupoff still writes with the enthusiasm of a young fan ..." Publisher's Weekly

The #1 national bestseller now revised and updated with a new Epilogue. Now aged 75, Peter C. Newman at last tells the story of his stranger-than-fiction life. Try to keep up as we follow his many lives: as a pampered child in a Czech chateau; a Jewish kid in short pants being machine-gunned by Nazi fighter planes on the beach at Biarritz, en route to the last ship to escape from France in 1940; as a refugee on an Ontario farm; as an outsider on a scholarship at Upper Canada College; as a Financial Post journalist, then an author whose Renegade in Power made Canadian politics dramatic and disrespectfully exciting for the first time; as the man who revealed the secrets of the rulers of the Canadian business world in The Canadian Establishment , and other huge business success stories, including The Establishment Man , on Conrad Black; or the millionaire who turned his back on business books and tackled Canadian history ( Company of Adventurers and other triumphs), in a career where his work has dominated the bestseller lists in politics, business, history, and current affairs. In the midst of all this were his years at the Toronto Star and Maclean’s where, as editor, he took the magazine weekly – a huge accomplishment. He is still a legend there, where his columns continue to run. He knew and wrote about every prime minister from Louis St. Laurent to Paul Martin and every prominent Canadian – hero or villain – in between. Yet his most interesting character is – Peter C. Newman. Incredibly, this central figure known to millions of Canadians sees himself as a perennial outsider. In personal terms, the rich little Czech boy whose nannies never stayed talks frankly about his marriages and the women he has known before his ultimate marriage to his beloved Alvy. His enthusiasms – from jazz to the Canadian Navy, not to mention his adventures on his beloved sailboat – make for a rich portrait of an astonishingcharacter, one who never stops being controversial.

For more than five decades, with relentless candor, biting wit, and striking imagery, Bruce Benderson's fiction has celebrated the warped beauty of our megalopolises, including their clashes between the classes and their subcultures of sex and drugs. Oppressed but flamboyant, the voices of his subterranean worlds have become just too intense to be ignored. Now, for the first time, all his short texts, including 21 never before published, appear together in the same volume. Included is one of the first post-Stonewall coming out stories, written in 1970, decades before such narratives developed into a full genre. This, then, is the complete and definitive Bruce Benderson reader. Benderson's most well-known book, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, was awarded the prestigious Prix de Flore in its French edition. Other publications include the essay collection Sex and Isolation, the short story collection Pretending to Say No, and the novels Pacific Agony and User.

An entertaining anthology of short fiction by some of speculative fiction's biggest names--including Arthur C. Clarke, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Swanwick, Alastair Reynolds, Howard Waldrop, Jonathan Lethem, Ian McDonald, and Robert Reed--journeys into the offbeat world of sports competition.

A collection of short stories recording the misadventures of a variety of "shlemiels."

Matt Cohen's stories have been widely anthologized and have appeared in distinguished periodicals and journals in Canada, Britain and the United States. "Lives of the Mind Slaves" features 7 short stories -- one of which (Trotsky's First Confessions') was written especially for this book -- and a brilliant novella. Cohen's novella, Golden Whore of the Heartland, explores the conflict between the spontaneity of passion -- a chance affair -- and the comfort of commitment and belonging. The Sins of Tomas Benares' explores the theme of love over generations. 'Caf? Le Dog' is a celebration of all that remains inexplicable in the attractions between men and women. Racial Memories' is vintage Cohen -- a story about a not-so-classic Jewish family. "Lives of the Mind Slaves" contains the best of Cohen's two previous short story collections, "Caf? Le Dog" and "Living on Water."

Tells the stories of a young child growing up in Prague during World War II, a visit from a dead man, a killer, ghosts, war and exile

The new collection from Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of Transcendent 2 offers plenty of thrills for readers of LGBTQ-focused speculative literature. The stories range from magical space opera to cheerful body horror and historical fantasy, always with a sense of hope amid adversity.

Most readers north of the Rio Grande are not aware that waves of immigrants have created an ethnically diverse culture in Latin America, a mosaic of particular visions and voices that includes a cohesive Jewish community with roots in Eastern Europe and as far back as pre-Columbian Spain. In this unique anthology, Ilan Stavans - who is at home both in Jewish and Latino cultures - introduces us to engaging writers, the histories of the different communities in which they emerged, their literary tradition and cultural predicament.

Ira Mittelman, the middle-aged hero of "A Box of Ashes," one of two novellas in Little Men, is wrestling with a dilemma: should he fulfill his late father's dying wish by taking the old man's ashes back to Missouri, to scatter them on the grounds of Camp HaHaTonka, the Boy Scout camp where Ira spent several summers as a boy? It's a long way to go just to dump some ashes, and if Ira makes this pilgrimage, his absence might jeopardize the fragile relationship he's managed to maintain with his ex-wife (they're still having sex every Friday night). In "Spivak in Babylon," Little Men 's other novella, it's 1982, and Leo Spivak, an ambitious 30-year-old copywriter at a large Chicago advertising agency, is about to get his big break: a chance to go to Hollywood to participate for the first time in the filming of a television commercial. A week in Hollywood, on the company's expense account! A room at the fabled Chateau Marmont (Garbo's old suite, in fact)! The only problem is the subject of the commercial itself: a new feminine hygiene spray to be marketed to pre-adolescent girls. Hovering over all the proceedings in "Spivak in Babylon" is the genial, befuddled presence of President Ronald Reagan, the Leader of the Free World, who haunts Leo's dreams.