This volume presents between the covers of a single book the range and scope of one of the most distinguished writers in America. It contains the complete text of The Assistant; ten stories from The Magic Barrel and Idiots First; three journeys from The Natural, A New Life, and The Fixer; and two long selections from A New Life and The Fixer.

"In lyric essays, a story, poems, and photographs, Smith illuminates the whirl of chance and choice that stokes a writer's imagination, recounting her fascination on the eve of a trip to Paris with Simone Weil and an evocative, accidentally discovered film about Stalin's mass deportation of Estonians. In France, a gravestone, a televised figure-skating competition, a meal, and a garden all converge in what becomes Devotion, [a] ... fairy tale about a young, displaced Estonian skater and a solitary dealer in rare objects and arms. This ... fable about creativity and obsession, possession and freedom is followed by a meditation on how a work of art is, for other artists, a call to action"--Booklist, 08/01/2017.

"Malcolm Pasley's translations, together with those in a forthcoming companion volume, The Transformation ('Metamorphosis') and Other Stories, are distinctive in that they illuminate Kafka's life as well as his art by presenting the works in the sequence in which they were written. Unlike other editions popularly available, this one has been prepared directly from the author's manuscripts. In its fidelity to the text it vastly alters our received versions of many of Kafka's greatest works, besides correcting numerous errors of detail. This volume contains the major short works left by Kafka, including Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, The Great Wall of China and Investigations of a Dog, together with The Collected Aphorisms and He: Aphorisms from the 1920 Diary."--Publisher.

"This is the first anthology of translated multilingual Jewish fiction in 25 years: a collection of 18 splendid stories, each translated into English from a different language: Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Yiddish. These compelling, humorous, and moving stories, written by eminent authors that include Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Isaac Babel, and Lili Berger, reflect both the diversities and the commonalities within Jewish culture, and will make you laugh, cry, and think. This beautiful book is easily accessible and enjoyable not only for Jewish readers, but for story-lovers of all backgrounds"--

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.

In ten seductive new stories, Tod goldberg encounters the ruthless, vulnerable people who inhabit resort cities, along with their misdemeanors and felonies.

Best Russian Short Stories, compiled and edited by Thomas Seltzer is a collection of short stories by famous Russian authors. The collection includes: THE QUEEN OF SPADES A.S. Pushkin THE CLOAK N.V. Gogol THE DISTRICT DOCTOR I.S. Turgenev THE CHRISTMAS TREE AND THE WEDDING F.M. Dostoyevsky GOD SEES THE TRUTH, BUT WAITS L.N. Tolstoy HOW A MUZHIK FED TWO OFFICIALS M.Y. Saltykov THE SHADES, A PHANTASY V.G. Korolenko THE SIGNAL V.N. Garshin THE DARLING A.P. Chekhov THE BET A.P. Chekhov VANKA A.P. Chekhov HIDE AND SEEK F.K. Sologub DETHRONED I.N. Potapenko THE SERVANT S.T. Semyonov ONE AUTUMN NIGHT M. Gorky HER LOVER M. Gorky LAZARUS L.N. Andreyev THE REVOLUTIONIST M.P. Artzybashev THE OUTRAGE A.I. Kuprin Odin's Library Classics is dedicated to bringing the world the best of humankind's literature from throughout the ages. Carefully selected, each work is unabridged from classic works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama.

"Animal Truth and Other Stories is a collection of eco-fabulist tales in which adventures with fantastic animals and real science lead to metamorphoses of the heart. Familiar legends, from Faust and Oedipus to werewolves and time travel, appear in radically new ways: An artist obsessed with species extinction unwittingly summons a demonic double when he creates a "banquet" featuring a baked mermaid. A brilliant woman studying a rare fish makes a soul-shattering discovery about motherhood. A time-travelling billionaire escapes his modern life only to have his heart broken by a lovely creature in Earth's remote past. Each tale in this collection turns into gold the prickling straw of anxieties about our continued life on the planet. By turns playful, terrifying, haunting, and sensuous, these stories inspire wonder at the interwoven lives of human and nonhuman beings"--

Seventeen classic short works include pieces written between 1949 and 1986 and feature such protagonists as a captured partisan fighter, a middle-aged chemist, and a lustful older man --

Written between 1934 and 1942, moving from the drawing rooms of pre-war Paris to the lives of men and women in wartime France,these ten stories show : a keen eye for the details of social class; the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives; the manners and mannerisms of the French bourgeoisie; questions of religion and personal identity.

While explaining to her sons why their fish is dead, the author relates stories of memorable animals in her life.

"This capstone novel in Library of America's Bernard Malamud edition brings together his three final novels: The Tenants, about the growing tension between two male writers--one Jewish, the other Black--who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house; Dubin's Lives, a revealing study in the perils and promise of love in middle age thought to be Malamud's most autobiographical work; and God's Grace, a postapocalyptic tale of upended evolution in which redemption depends on the lone human survivor's ability to find common ground with a talking chimp. Edited by Malamud's definitive biographer, the volume is rounded out with thirteen masterful short stories and the memoir 'Long Work, Short Life' as well as a fascinating autobiographic sketch, 'A Lost Bar-Mitzvah,' published here for the first time."--Dust jacket.

Good, solid, mass mrkt pb. Remainder mark to top edge. Unmarked text; page corners sharp, not dog-eared; age yellowing to pgs. Cover: watermark along edges, surface scratches, edge wear. Quick shipping from smoke-free environment.

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.

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.

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.

"26 new short stories representing the state of the art in international science fiction, selected by Lavie Tidhar. The Best of World SF draws together stories from across the spectrum of science fiction - expect robots, spaceships and time travel, as well as some really weird stuff - representing twenty-one countries and five continents."--Provided by publisher.

Ellison's suspense anthology: 15 stories and one wild, 32-page introduction, none collected previously except for "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," first published in book form mere weeks earlier in Deathbird Stories. Some, such as "Toe the Line" and "Ormond Always Pays His Bills," are simple pulp crime yarns; others are masterful examples of psychological terror and, in the case of "Whipped Dogs," mystical fantasy. Excellent.