Like Malamud and Jackson, Avram Davidson brought a unique level of charm, wit, and intrigue to the short story form. Collected here for the first time are his remarkable mystery tales, including the 1815 investigations of New York's Chief Constable; a sinister lesson in New England thrift; New Amsterdam river pirates versus the KGB; treachery in nursing home; and expatriates who will kill for a little peace and quiet. "Aficionados of short mystery fiction will be hard-pressed to find any more ingenious and entertaining stories than those in this volume." --Bill Pronzini, author of Boobytrap
* Where did Sinbad Sail? * Who Fired the Phoenix? * The Boy Who Cried Werewolf * The Great Rough Beast * Postscript on Prester John * The Secret of Hyperborea * What Gave All Those Mammoths Cold Feet? And many more--fictional? authoritative? fantastic? deadpan?--investigations into the real, the true...and the things that should be true PREFACE BY PETER S. BEAGLE ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE BARR "Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, nobody knows what a wombat looks like and everyone knows what a dragon looks like." Not a novel, not a book of short stories, Adventures in Unhistory is a book of the fantastic--a compendium of magisterial examinations of Mermaids, Mandrakes, and Mammoths; Dragons, Werewolves, and Unicorns; the Phoenix and the Roc; about places such as Sicily, Siberia, and the Moon; about heroic, sinister, and legendary persons such as Sindbad, and Aleister Crowley, and Prester John; and--revealed at last--the Secret of Hyperborea. The facts are here, the foundations behind rumors, legends, and the imaginations of generations of tale-spinners. But far from being dry recitals, these meditations, or lectures, or deadpan prose performances are as lively, as crazily inventive, as witty as the best fiction of the author, a writer praised by Gardner Dozois as "one of the great short story writers of our times." Who, on the subject of Dragons, could write coldly, dispassionately, guided only by logic? Certainly not Avram Davidson. Certain facts, these facts, deserve more than recitation; they deserve flourish, verve, gusto, style--the late, great Avram Davidson's unique voice. That prose which, in the words of Peter S. Beagle's Preface to this volume, "cries out to be read aloud."
A New Collection of Long Out-of-Print Stories From One of the Greatest Fantasists of the Twentieth Century Avram Davidson, who died in 1993, was widely regarded as one of the most outstanding authors of short fantasy fiction in our time. This collection comprises his distinctive historical fantasies-tales of strange Mitteleuropas, of magic in Victorian England and on the American frontier. Here are "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire," "Traveller from an Antique Land," and "What Strange Stars and Skies"; here are dragons, cameras, and "The Singular Incident of the Dog on the Beach." Witty, whimsical, dark, and strange, these tales of times and places that almost were will leave even the most jaded readers amazed. No one has ever written like Avram Davidson, before or since.
Avram Davidson's six Jack Limekiller stories create a rich and colorful world where the magical and inexplicable coexist with the outboard motor and the escalation of the American war in Vietnam. British Hidalgo is "a place that you can put your arms around" - welcoming and friendly to the visitor, but uncanny beings dwell in the bush and roam along its coast. Afloat and ashore, Jack Limekiller, master of the working sailboat Saccharissa, encounters ghosts of the colonial past and monsters far older. Set in the imaginary Central American colony of British Hidalgo (a fictionalized British Honduras / Belize), originally published in various magazines, It includes a preface by Grania Davis, introductions by Lucius Shepard and Peter S. Beagle, and concluding material by Henry Wessells, the author, Grania Davis and Ethan Davidson.
The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a web-design drone, and serendipity, sheer curiosity and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey have landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than its name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything. Instead they “check out” impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he has embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behaviour and roped his friends into helping him figure out just what’s going on. But once they take their findings to Mr. Penumbra, they discover the secrets extend far beyond the walls of the bookstore. Evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or Umberto Eco, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is exactly what it sounds like—an establishment you have to enter and will never want to leave.
One of the Horror Writers Association’s Top 40 Horror Books of All Time—the story of a troubled soldier and his bizarre, violent obsession with vampirism. At the height of an unnamed war, a soldier is confined for striking an officer. Referred to as George Smith in official papers and records, the prisoner comes under the observation of Army psychiatrist Philip Outerbridge, who asks the young man to put his story down on paper. The result is a shocking tale of abuse, violence, and twisted love, a personal history as dark and troubling as any the doctor has ever encountered. Believing the patient to be dangerously psychotic, Dr. Outerbridge must dig deeper into his psyche. And when the truth about the strange case of George Smith is fully revealed, the results will be devastating. Told through letters, transcripts, and case studies, Some of Your Blood is an extraordinary, poignant yet terrifying, genre-defying novel. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Theodore Sturgeon including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the University of Kansas’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library and the author’s estate, among other sources.
The author of The Age #1 bestselling novel The Memory Cathedral returns to Renaissance Italy with a transcendent vision of the ultimate battle between good and evil. In Shadows in the Stone Jack Dann creates a fully-realized, living, breathing universe, a universe where the Vatican is in Venice, Jehovah is really a lesser god known as the Demiurge, and the magus John Dee's experiments with angels are true and repeatable. Here you'll discover a nun who has the expertise and agility of a Ninja warrior, the reincarnated snake goddess known as the Daughter of Light, the famed Florentine magician Pico Della Mirandola, a young magus who is part stone, the Knights Templar of the Crimson Cross, the sapphire tablet: the most secret of the Dead Sea scrolls, and a 15th Century dirigible kept aloft by imprisoned souls. Here you'll find wild adventure and Machiavellian subtlety, treason and heroism, love and carnality, joy and loss, magic, machines, the cosmic machinations of angels, demons, gods, and half-gods; and the absolutely breathtaking vistas that are their battle grounds. New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson has compared Shadows in the Stone with Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, calling it "such a complete world that Italian history no longer seems comprehensible without Dann's] cosmic battle of spiritual entities behind and within every historical actor and event." Join Jack Dann's protagonists--Louisa Morgan and Lucian Ben-Hananiah--and the fellowship of The Dark Companions in their apocalyptic battle against the Demiurge--described in the forbidden Gnostic texts as the demon god Yaldabaoth... and known to us as Jehovah.
Maurice Castle is a high-level operative in the British secret service during the Cold War. He is deeply in love with his African wife, who escaped apartheid South Africa with the help of his communist friend. Despite his misgivings, Castle decides to act as a double agent, passing information to the Soviets to help his in-laws in South Africa. In order to evade detection, he allows his assistant to be wrongly identified as the source of the leaks. But when suspicions remain, Castle is forced to make an even more excruciating sacrifice to save himself. Originally published in 1978, The Human Factor is an exciting novel of espionage drawn from Greene’s own experiences in MI6 during World War II, and ultimately a deeply humanistic examination of the very nature of loyalty. This edition features a new introduction by Colm Tóibín. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
In 1959, at the age of 22, Joanna Russ published her first science fiction story, "Nor Custom Stale," in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. In the forty-five years since, Russ has continued to write some of the most popular, creative, and important novels and stories in science fiction. She was a central figure, along with contemporaries Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, in revolutionizing science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and her 1970 novel, The Female Man, is widely regarded as one of the most successful and influential depictions of a feminist utopia in the entire genre. The Country You Have Never Seen gathers Joanna Russ's most important essays and reviews, revealing the vital part she played over the years in the never-ending conversation among writers and fans about the roles, boundaries, and potential of science fiction. Spanning her entire career, the collection shines a light on Russ's role in the development of new wave science fiction and feminist science fiction, while at the same time providing fascinating insight into her own development as a writer.
