A NOVEL OF AN IGNOMINIOUS FALL, THE RISE TO INFAMY, AND LIFE AFTER BOTH. • It is the summer of 1998, and Stephen Glass is a young magazine journalist whose work is gaining more and more acclaim -- until a rival magazine tells Glass's editor that it suspects one of his stories is fabricated. As his editor sorts out the truth, Glass is busy inventing it -- spinning rich and complex blends of fact and fiction, and exploiting the gray world in between. But Glass is caught. His fabulism is uncovered and his career instantly unravels. Worse, his editor learns that it's not the first time. Soon, a long history of invention, passed off as journalism, emerges. Glass suddenly becomes a household name -- an emblem of hubris and a flashpoint for Americans' distrust and dislike of the press. The media is consumed with the story: Once the young man who had been known for mastering the "takedown" article, Glass now becomes the one every journalist wants to take even further down. Once the hunter, Glass becomes the hunted -- the story of the year. Glass responds to this agonizing public scrutiny with a self-imposed exile, first near Chicago with his family and then in the anonymous suburbs of Washington, D.C. There, he begins a long personal struggle with his misdeeds, working out his own answers to the questions of why he fabricated, how he can learn to stop lying, and whether, at age twenty-five, he has destroyed his life irrevocably. Glass encounters a world far stranger than his own fabrications -- one populated by eccentric coworkers, ailing animals, angry masseuses, sexy librarians, competitive bingo players, synchronized swimmers, a soulful stripper, and a mysterious guardian angel who dresses only in purple. Meanwhile, Glass is chased by marauding journalists whose desperation and ruthlessness manage to match even his own. As he dodges his pursuers, Glass grasps at straws only to find that, wondrously, they sometimes hold. Despite himself, he rediscovers the Judaism he'd left far behind in Hebrew school, and falls helplessly in love with a young woman who turns out to have her own shameful past. In the end, The Fabulist is as much about family, friendship, religion, and love -- about getting through somehow, even when it seems impossible -- as it is about reality and fantasy. At once hilarious and harrowing, The Fabulist is one of the year's most provocative novels.

Remember Charles Bronson stalking the streets of New York blowing holes in muggers in Death Wish ? Remember Glenn Ford standing off the vicious juvenile delinquents in Blackboard Jungle ? Well, it is more than fifty years and two different worlds from 1955 to now. And something the author of these stories knows that you are scared to admit is that reality and fantasy have flip-flopped. They have switched places. The stories that scare you today are the ones about rapists and thugs, psychos who will carve you for a dollar and hypes who will bust your head to get fixed. Glenn Ford's world was yesterday, and Bronson's is today. And in the stalking midnight of this book, one of America's top writers, Harlan Ellison, invades the shadows of both!

Meyer Levin was a Chicago-born Jewish author. His best-known book is "Compulsion", which is a novelization of the notorious Loeb and Leopold murder case of 1924. Levin was in a special position to tell the story, because he was personally acquainted with the perpetrators. Levin is also famous for bringing Anne Frank's diary to light. But "The Old Bunch" may be his greatest work. "The Old Bunch" was written in the mid-1930's, and it tells the tales of the kids of a Chicago Jewish ghetto coming of age and stepping out into the world. It's presumably something of a fantasy autobiography, echoing Levin's own adventures -- Levin was born in 1905, and the events in this book take place beginning in the year 1921 (when the "bunch" is graduating from school), and running through to 1934. The book is compelling for its individual stories and for its living window into times past. Because it was written prior to the horrors of WWII, it's a very pure view of the pre-war era. (Anything written later will necessarily be done with hindsight, and will likely de-emphasize "unimportant" details in favor of those that connect to major war events.) But the history is merely a fascinating byproduct of the vivid human stories that fill the pages. "The Old Bunch" is surprisingly unknown today, which is a shame. This really is one of the great novels, in a class with Tolstoy and Steinbeck. It conveys the entirety of the era: The people, the culture, the economics, Chicago politics (very dirty!), with a global perspective as well (some characters travel to Europe and Palestine). It covers the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the New Deal. To read the book is to live and breathe in these bygone days. Most importantly, Meyer Levin depicts events without agenda or judgment. Characters may be Democrats or Republicans or workers or bosses or religionists or atheists or many other things, but all are portrayed with depth, and none are simple heroes or villains or symbols. These are, in the end, tales about the very personal and individual transitions to adulthood, and the elusive quest for wisdom. It is the same challenge that every generation must face. "The Old Bunch" was critically acclaimed and went through numerous print editions, but it eventually passed into the public domain and was temporarily forgotten. A Wall Street Journal article in 2012 ("Destiny's Children", by Joseph Epstein) sparked a revival of interest, and Rancho Lazarus Publications is proud to present a new edition, accurately rendered and true to the original text, and with the addition of occasional footnotes to clarify details of historical accuracy that the modern reader may not have on tap. With almost 700 pages of text (the original hardback book ran to almost 1000 pages), this is an epic novel. But far from being overlong, it's the sort of reading that leaves you wishing there was more. "Written in good hard-driving colloquial prose, full of sharp characterizations. . . A very fine novel." -- New Republic "A landmark -- vivid and exciting reading. It brilliantly succeeds in taking the reader on a memorable tour of the world in which the old bunch lived." -- The New York Times