One of “the best writers of our time” (Ann Patchett) offers this hilarious yet haunting cycle of stories—all previously uncollected. Since the explosive publication of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus has dazzled readers as “the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation” (John Cheever). He has been praised as "one of America’s preeminent novelists, our prime conductor of electric sentences" (William Giraldi). Above all, Allan Gurganus is a seriously funny writer, an expert at evoking humor, especially in our troubled times. Now he offers nine classic tales—never before between covers. They attest to his mastery of the short story and the growing depth of his genius. Offering characters antic and tragic, Gurganus charts the human condition—masked and unmasked—as we live it now. “Once upon a time” collides with the everyday. We meet a mortician whose dedication to his departed clients exceeds all legal limits. We encounter a seaside couple fighting to save their family dog from Maine’s fierce undertow. A virginal seventy-eight-year-old grammar school librarian has her sole erotic experience with a polyamorous snake farmer. A vicious tornado sends twin boys aloft, leaving only one of them alive. And, in an eerily prescient story, cholera strikes a rural village in 1849 and citizens come to blame their doomed young doctor who saved hundreds. These meticulously crafted parables recall William Faulkner’s scope and Flannery O’Connor’s corrosive wit. Imbuing each story with charged drama, Gurganus, a sublime ventriloquist, again proves himself among our funniest writers and our wisest.

This is the first new collection of John Cheever stories in more than fifteen years, and the first time these stories have ever been collected. Originally published in the 1930s and 1940s in magazines which run the gamut from obscure leftist literary periodicals, through The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly, to mass circulation glossies like Colliers and Cosmopolitan, these stories deal with themes and use techniques which are not generally considered to be "Cheeveresque". They will undoubtedly surprise those readers familiar only with Cheever's post-1947 work. Each of these early stories bears the unmistakable stamp of the master storyteller. "Bayonne" is an evocative character study of a waitress whose work serving blue-collar regulars in a diner provides her with more emotional than financial support. "In Passing", which ends with the radical organizer Girsdansky haranguing a small unmoved crowd on the Boston Common at twilight, reveals perhaps more about states of mind during the Depression than standard histories of that era. "Fall River" is an elegy on economic catastrophe in a backwater New England town: Cheever calls up a picture of a wasteland with abandoned factories where "the looms blocked off the floor like discarded machinery in an old opera house". "The Autobiography of a Drummer" is a remarkable portrait of a man who has outlived his time. It anticipates Arthur Miller's Willy Loman by more than a decade. In this intriguing collection, Cheever plunges us into a stark world; the scenes are reminiscent of Edward Hopper. It is a world of foreclosures, down-and-outs, burlesque shows, desperate gamblers, and deferred hopes. It adds a new dimension to the assessment ofJohn Cheever's considerable reputation.

There are a multitude of interesting updates in the revised edition of the classic book about King's hidden work. Included in the new information is a series of newly discovered unpublished works, with King's exclusive and definitive statements about how they originated and why they never saw the light of day.

Much cyberpunk SF is grimly noir in depicting future-shocked people trapped by their limitations, but in this collection of 19 laid-back yarns, Rucker finds human dilemmas much too important to take seriously. "Jenna and Me," for example, co-written with his son Rudy Rucker Jr., shows President Bush's daughter brain-wiped by agents of the "conspiracy elite," but eventually becoming the unwitting focus for an alien invasion that may remake humanity for the better.

Here is a collection of twenty-six unreal, unbelievable and quirky tales that are wildly funny, outrageously strange, and shockingly scary by Australia's most popular author for children.