Five of Saul Bellow’s most moving, richly textured, and exquisitely plotted short stories make up this volume, each providing a history of personality and self-awakening. The title story, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” follows a musicologist narrator who for years has scattered wounding witticisms “from the depths of my nature, that hoard of strange formulations.” As the story unfolds he tries to discover what led him into a “deep legal-financial hole,” while he awaits extradition from a refuge in British Columbia. “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” follows a divorced suburban woman and her lovers—would-be and actual—through a frantic day in their lives. Their needs and passions, as well as their comic conflicts, are matters of life and death. In “Zetland: By a Character Witness” and in “A Silver Dish,” Bellow returns, with his unequaled command of eloquent recollected detail, to a bygone Chicago, “Zetland” is a brilliant portrait of an artist as a young boy and a man, precocious and eccentric; “A Silver Dish” is a memorable story of a raffish, willful father and his affectionate son. “Cousins,” the final story in the volume, explores the mysteries of family feeling—mysteries that defy both logic and the worthiness of their objects, as Ijah Brodsky, successful in the larger world, is drawn into an encounter with criminal and naively idealistic forces. This collection represents a turning point in the bountiful career of Saul Bellow, a felicitous rendering of the human condition in all its absurd complexity.

Each story in Love Among the Haystacks appears in a new, authoritative text.

Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in—and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas. With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg’s life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay “The Herd of Independent Minds.” An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken portrays with vivid accounts from Rosenberg’s life. Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg’s brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.

This highbrow artwork is an amassment of sensibilities. In this meeting of the postmodern minds, the writers necessary emotional range is fully developed and set in motion.

The complete short stories of the bestselling author of Mallawindy and the Woody Creek series "Pure brilliance. This is a book to keep and treasure - you'll want to read it again and again." Sun-Herald At the beginning of her writing journey, Joy Dettman's charming, irascible, melancholy, wisecracking characters appeared in over twenty unique tales, many of which have won awards, many of which have never been published. Now, for the first time, Diamonds in the Mud and Other Stories is the complete collection of Joy Dettman's exquisite short stories. We meet an old coot in a rusty ute who picks up a hitchhiker, a neighbour reaches across the language divide to lend a helping hand, a grave digger might just have saved a young man's life, an exhausted farmer's wife lusts after a china cup, Granny Jordan is losing her marbles and an author is troubled by rats under the floorboards. Since Joy's first novel, Mallawindy, was published in 1998 she has attracted a growing number of readers who are entertained and shocked by her array of unforgettable characters populating the Australian landscape. "Dettman writes compulsively readable stories" The Age Fans of Rosalie Ham's The Dressmaker will love Joy Dettman.

A police detective burdened by the trauma from the recent World War, Thomas Kollane can't even sleep right, but his partner will need his full focus if they intend to solve the recent string of arsons plaguing Umonison, Illinois. Richard Gibson is set in his ways as a veteran cop, but he will need his war-torn partner's fresh viewpoint if he intends to keep his career moving forward. With few leads and even fewer suspects, this case may require more than the two have to solve. An ancient mental asylum at the city's center may hold the key to the riddle.

Philip K. Dick ponders the very nature of humanity in this anthology of five gripping short stories and novellas. Includes "The Defenders," "Foster, You're Dead," "Piper in the Woods," "Second Variety," and "The Variable Man."

Now in paperback, this blockbuster story collection further cements Tananarive Due’s status as a leading innovator in Black horror and Afrofuturism; featuring two new stories —Includes “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge,” winner of the World Fantasy Award —Selected for the Locus Magazine 2023 Recommended Reading List —“Rumpus Room” selected as finalist for a 2023 Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction "[A] master class in horror fiction and sci-fi written by one of the very best in the genre." —Joe Hill, NPR's Weekend Edition "The Wishing Pool . . . is a major treat, full of major scares. Due excels at twist endings but also brilliantly creates an atmosphere of creeping dread in which you know something terrible is coming . . . Due shows just how much territory she can cover in one short book and just how versatile terrifying tales can be." —Washington Post "Holy hell: These fourteen stories from author and film historian Due might scare even the most dauntless horror fans to death . . . A patchwork of stories that somehow manages to be both graceful and alarming, putting fresh eyes to the unspeakable." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review AMERICAN BOOK AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR TANANARIVE DUE's second collection of stories includes offerings of horror, science fiction, and suspense—all genres she wields masterfully. From the mysterious, magical town of Gracetown to the aftermath of a pandemic to the reaches of the far future, Due's stories all share a sense of dread and fear balanced with heart and hope. In some of these stories, the monster is racism itself; others address the monster within, each set against the supernatural or surreal. All are written with Due's trademark attention to detail and deeply drawn characters. The story "Incident at Bear Creek Lodge" is a World Fantasy Award finalist, and this paperback reissue includes two new stories.

'The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge, and Other Stories' is a collection of fictional stories by author Mary Noailles Murfree, writing under the pen name Charles Egbert Craddock. The stories are set mostly in the early 19th century American countryside. The characters are quirky and set to give the readers quite a few laughs.