Michael Chabon is back with a brand-new collection that reinvigorates the stay-up-all-night, edge-of-the seat, fingernail-biting, page-turning tradition of literary short stories, featuring Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, Peter Straub, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Heidi Julavits, Roddy Doyle, and more! Margaret Atwood- Lusus Naturae David Mitchell- What You Do Not Know You Want Jonathan Lethem- Vivian Relf Ayelet Waldman - Minnow Steve Erickson- Zeroville Stephen King- Lisey and the Madman Jason Roberts - 7C Heidi Julavits- The Miniaturist Roddy Doyle - The Child Daniel Handler - Delmonico Charles D’Ambrosio - The Scheme of Things Poppy Z. Brite - The Devil of Delery Street China Mieville- Reports of Certain Events in London Joyce Carol Oates - The Fabled Light-house at Vi–a del Mar Peter Straub - Mr. Aickman’s Air Rifle
Mr Eggers is delighted to bring eager readers another packed issue of McSweeney's, his instructive and highly entertaining corrective to the ills of modern life. McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, guest edited by the inimitable Michael Chabon, will take you to places you never knew existed, send delicious shivers down your spine, and have your heart pounding healthily in your chest. The ghost story, the horror story, the detective story; stories of suspense, terror, fantasy and the plain macabre - all can be found gracing the pages within. Such celebrated writers as Gaiman, Moody, Hornby, King, Elmore Leonard, Harlan Ellison and Glen David Gold amongst others, have all put pen to paper in celebration of the art of genre.
By the New York Times–bestselling author of Moonglow: “When you read these stories, it may strike you how seldom you come across really beautiful writing” (USA Today). Cherished by readers and critics alike for such extraordinary novels as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon is at the height of his considerable powers in this striking and bittersweet collection of short stories. An anxious young misfit does nothing to protect his best friend from the scorn of their teachers and classmates. A kleptomaniac real estate agent leads an unhappy couple on a disastrous house tour. A heartbroken grifter finds his ex-girlfriend’s grandmother to be an easy mark—and an unexpected source of redemption. Throughout these stories, Chabon’s characters, suffused with yearning but crippled by broken love, often find themselves at a crossroads—and faced with sudden insight. Michael Chabon is “Updike without the condescension,” wrote James Hynes in the Washington Post Book World, “Cheever without the self-pity, a young American Nabokov who writes with a rueful joie de vivre.” In this darkly funny, achingly delicate collection, he renders the compromises of adulthood and the vivid fantasies of childhood with clarity and warmth. This ebook features a biography of the author.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics, now with special bonus material by the author “It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal—smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read.”—The Washington Post Book World One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Decade • Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age. Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award
The Final Solution clarifies the key questions surrounding the attempt by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. Drawing on important new research, these authoritative essays focus on the preconditions and antecedents for the 'Final Solution' and examine the immediate origins of the genocidal decision. Contributors also examine the responses of peoples and governments in Germany, occupied Europe, the USA and among Jews worldwide. The controversial conversions of this study challenge many of our accepted ideas about the period.
The Best of McSweeney's Volume 2 the second instalment of Dave Eggers's crash course in what McSweeney's is all about brings together more stories from the first ten issues of the magazine. Jonathan Ames, Judy Budnitz, Glen David Gold, Jonathan Lethem and A.M. Homes are amongst the writers spreading their wings in this fine collection and showing once more why McSweeney's is now a byword for brilliance, innovation and the unexpected.
The stories are legendary, the characters unforgettable, the world horrible and disturbing. Howard Phillips Lovecraft may have been a writer for only a short time, but the creations he left behind after his death in 1937 have shaped modern horror more than any other author in the last two centuries: the shambling god Cthulhu, and the other deities of the Elder Things, the Outer Gods, and the Great Old Ones, and Herbert West, Reanimator, a doctor who unlocked the secrets of life and death at a terrible cost. In Lovecraft Unbound, more than twenty of today's most prominent writers of literature and dark fantasy tell stories set in or inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft.
Provocative, revealing, and often hilarious poems by the Oscar-winning screenwriter of No Country for Old Men In his screenplays and short stories, Ethan Coen surprises and delights us with a rich brew of ideas, observations, and perceptions. In his first collection of poems he does much the same. The range of his poems is remarkable–funny, ribald, provocative, sometimes raw, and often touching and profound. In these poems, Coen writes of his childhood, his hopes and dreams, his disappointments, his career in Hollywood, his physically demanding love affair with Mamie Eisenhower, and his decade-long battle with amphetamines that produced some of the lengthier poems in the collection. You will chuckle, nodding with recognition as you turn the pages, perhaps even stopping occasionally to read.
He was known simply as the Blind Traveler -- a solitary, sightless adventurer who, astonishingly, fought the slave trade in Af-rica, survived a frozen captivity in Siberia, hunted rogue elephants in Ceylon, and helped chart the Australian outback. James Holman (1786-1857) became "one of the greatest wonders of the world he so sagaciously explored," triumphing not only over blindness but crippling pain, poverty, and the interference of well-meaning authorities (his greatest feat, a circumnavigation of the globe, had to be launched in secret). Once a celebrity, a bestselling author, and an inspiration to Charles Darwin and Sir Richard Francis Burton, the charismatic, witty Holman outlived his fame, dying in an obscurity that has endured -- until now. A Sense of the World is a spellbinding and moving rediscovery of one of history's most epic lives. Drawing on meticulous research, Jason Roberts ushers us into the Blind Traveler's uniquely vivid sensory realm, then sweeps us away on an extraordinary journey across the known world during the Age of Exploration. Rich with suspense, humor, international intrigue, and unforgettable characters, this is a story to awaken our own senses of awe and wonder.
