The original 50 cent paperback edition of this book now goes for $100 in rare book auctions. Why? Because it contains 25 of the best, hardest-to-find stories of the writer the Washington Post calls "one of the great living American short story writers," the unpredictable Harlan Ellison.
Bold and uncompromising, Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-up Generation is a watershed moment in Harlan Ellison’s early writing career. Rather than dealing in speculative fiction, these twenty-five short stories directly tackle issues of discrimination, injustice, bigotry, and oppression by the police. Pulling from his own experience, Ellison paints vivid portraits of the helpless and downtrodden, blazing forth with the kind of unblinking honesty that would define his career.
Contents
Foreword (Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation) • (1961) • essay by Frank M. Robinson
Introduction: The Children of Nights • (1975) • essay
Final Shtick • (1960) • short story
Gentleman Junkie • (1961) • short story
May We Also Speak? • (1961) • essay
Daniel White for the Greater Good • (1961) • short story
Lady Bug, Lady Bug • (1961) • short story
Free with This Box! • (1958) • short story
There's One on Every Campus • (1959) • short story
At the Mountains of Blindness • (1961) • short story
This Is Jackie Spinning • (1959) • short story
No Game for Children • non-genre • (1959) • short story
The Late, Great Arnie Draper • (1961) • short story
High Dice • (1961) • short story
Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center • (1961) • short story
Someone Is Hungrier • (1960) • short story
Memory of a Muted Trumpet • non-genre • (1960) • short story
Turnpike • (1961) • short story
Sally in Our Alley • (1959) • short story
The Silence of Infidelity • non-genre • (1957) • short story
Have Coolth • (1959) • short story
RFD #2 • (1957) • short story by Harlan Ellison and Henry Slesar
No Fourth Commandment • (1956) • short story
The Night of Delicate Terrors • (1961) • short story Views: 572
Welcome back to Deep Valley Emily Webster, an orphan living with her grandfather, is not like the other girls her age in Deep Valley, Minnesota. The gulf between Emily and her classmates widens even more when they graduate from Deep Valley High School in 1912. Emily longs to go off to college with everyone else, but she can't leave her grandfather. Emily resigns herself to facing a lost winter, but soon decides to stop feeling sorry for herself. And with a new program of study, a growing interest in the Syrian community, and a handsome new teacher at the high school to fill her days, Emily gains more than she ever dreamed. . . . In addition to her beloved Betsy-Tacy books, Maud Hart Lovelace wrote three more stories set in the fictional town of Deep Valley: Winona's Pony Cart, Carney's House Party, and Emily of Deep Valley, Longtime fans and new readers alike will be delighted to find the Deep Valley books available again for the first time in many years. Views: 572
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair (1847), a panoramic portrait of English society. Thackeray began as a satirist and parodist, with a sneaking fondness for roguish upstarts like Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Barry Lyndon in Barry Lyndon (1844) and Catherine in Catherine (1839). In his earliest works, writing under such pseudonyms as Charles James Yellowplush, Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage Fitz-Boodle, he tended towards the savage in his attacks on high society, military prowess, the institution of marriage and hypocrisy. His writing career really began with a series of satirical sketches now usually known as The Yellowplush Papers, which appeared in Fraser's Magazine beginning in 1837. Between May 1839 and February 1840, Fraser's published the work sometimes considered Thackeray's first novel, Catherine also notable among the later novels are The Fitz-Boodle Papers (1842), Men's Wives (1842), The History of Pendennis (1848), The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., (1852), The Newcomes (1853) and The Rose and the Ring (1855) . Views: 571
Gladys and Annie Barnes are impoverished sisters who have seen better times. They live in a modest cottage in the backstreets of Highate with Mr Fisher, a mild but eccentric old man living secretively in the attic above them. Their quiet lives are thrown into confusion when a new landlord takes over, a dreaded and unscrupulous 'rackman'. He installs his wife in part of the cottages in the hope that there she will recover from an unspecified malady. With a mounting sense of fear, Gladys and Annie become convinced she is possessed by an evil spirit... Views: 571
In 1588 the Spanish Armada had been defeated in the English Channel and the whole of Elizabethan England was alert for the revenge that surely had to follow. Men like John Killigrew, commanding a key position on the Cornish coast, were vital to the survival of the country, and it is through the eyes of his eldest son, Maugan, that the story unfolds. Rich in action, it is also crowded with unforgettable characters, many of them based on actual historical figures. Maugan Killigrew himself emerges, through his loneliness and his love, his physical suffering in a Spanish gaol, as a touchingly honest and believable character who is, above all things, a man of his time. Views: 571
"[A] certifiable masterpiece" from the acclaimed chronicler of New York City's old money elite (The New York Observer). Widely considered Louis Auchincloss's greatest novel, The Rector of Justin is an astute dissection of the social mores of the Northeast's privileged establishment. The story centers on Rev. Frank Prescott, the charismatic founder and rector of a prestigious Episcopal school for boys. With laser-sharp insight, Auchincloss delivers a prismatic portrait of this commanding and complicated man through the eyes of those who knew—or thought they knew—him best. Seamlessly interweaving multiple points of view—from an adoring teacher to that of a rebellious daughter—The Rector of Justin presents a social history of the eighty years of his life: the sources of his virtues and failings, his successes, his love, and his crises of faith. As Jonathan Yardley put it in the Washington... Views: 570
A young artist pursues a search for knowledge through the treatment of homosexuality and the collapse of morality in middle class France. Views: 570
DON'T CLOSE YOUR EYES...
He's watching you. He knows what you're doing. He knows what you're thinking. He's coming after you.
DON'T CLOSE YOUR EYES...
He has a knife. The steel blade gleams. Whenever you close your eyes, you can see it--the tip of his knife, pointing at your chest.
DON'T CLOSE YOUR EYES...
He's closing them for you.
"A master of sheer fright... the tension never lets up, building page by page to a nail-biting, hair-raising finale!" --Florida Times-Union Views: 570
Uncle Fred's nephew Pongo has just smashed the prized statue of his lady love's father. His troubles multiply as the replacement bust is revealed to be a smuggling vessel filled with jewels. This bust busting gut buster has Uncle Fred and Wodehouse himself at the very height of their work. Views: 570
In the Agatha Christie classic Peril at End House, a young woman who has recently survived a series of very close calls appears to be the target of a dedicated killer—and it’s up to Hercule Poirot to save her life.****
On holiday on the Cornish Riviera, Hercule Poirot is alarmed to hear pretty Nick Buckley describe her recent “accidental brushes with death.” First, on a treacherous Cornish hillside, the brakes on her car failed. Then, on a coastal path, a falling boulder missed her by inches. Later, an oil painting fell and almost crushed her in bed.
So when Poirot finds a bullet hole in Nick’s sun hat, he decides that this girl needs his help. Can he find the would-be killer before he hits his target? Views: 569
Sequel to Planet of Peril, the story of Rorgen Takkor's adventures on Venus, Rorgen Takkor, born on Mars, transferred to Earth for a decade, and finally finding his career and place on Venus.excerpt"Good-bye, men and good luck to you."My awakening, after I lay down on the cot in Dr. Morgan's observatory, was quite sudden and startling. It seemed that not more than a few seconds had elapsed since I had heard the doctor's parting words to Grandon and myself.I opened my eyes and sat up abruptly with an inexplicable sense of impending danger. My first glimpse of my surroundings convinced me that I had indeed arrived on Venus. The magnificent riot of vegetation surrounding me--vegetation the like of which I had not seen on Mars, the red, barren planet of my birth, nor on Earth, the more recent planet of my adoption--was sufficient evidence.I was seated on a bank of soft, violet-colored moss which sloped gently to a limpid pool at my feet. The feathery fronds of a giant bush-fern arched above my head, some of them dipping to the surface of the water, where they were snapped at from time to time by playful, grotesque, multi-colored amphibians.I was dressed in garments of shimmering, scarlet material. There was a broad, golden chain-belt about my waist, with a jeweled clasp in front. Riveted to this belt on the right side was an oblong instrument about two feet in length, with a button near the upper end, a small lever on the side, and a tiny hole in the lower end. I had no idea what it was for; but I recognized the weapon which hung at my left side, as it resembled a scimitar. As I was examining the ruby-studded hilt of this beautiful weapon, a noise at my left attracted my attention.Cautiously, without turning my head, I glanced from the corners of my eyes across a stretch of shrubbery to where a high wall of black stone surrounded this estate, and hid the country beyond. Just on the other side of the wall a tall fern-tree spread its mighty fronds. It must have been the cracking of one of these that had attracted my attention, for a heavy-set individual with a coarse red beard, cut off square below the chin, had climbed out on it to a point where it would no longer sustain his weight, in an effort to reach the top of the wall.Someone in the shrubbery quite near me called a whispered warning to him--or such I took it to be, for the language was unknown to me, and I could only judge by the tones. The huge intruder was much more agile than he appeared, for he flung an arm over the top of the wall and drew himself up with catlike quickness. As he struck the wall there was a metallic clank which, I saw as soon as he came into full view, was from an edged weapon at his side, quite like my own but with a less ornate hilt and broader blade.As soon as the red-bearded man reached the top of the wall, the one who had whispered from the bushes cautiously stood up. He was smaller and more wiry than the first, and his beard, which was iron-gray in color, was trimmed in the same manner.Red-beard tiptoed stealthily along the top of the wall, glancing toward me from time to time as if fearful that I would hear him or turn toward him. Then he leaned out, caught his fingers in a tall cone-shaped growth, swung his sandaled feet out, and descended.I wondered if it could be possible that these two prowlers were bent on injury to me, a total stranger on Venus. Then it dawned on me that they could easily be mortal enemies of the prince with whom I had exchanged bodies, and that I--so far as their knowledge went--was that prince. Views: 569
The restored text established by the Library of America
The Library of America has insured that most of Wright's major texts are now available as he wanted them to be read - Alfred Kazin, New York Times Book Review
"We have an opportunity to assess Wright's formidable and lasting contribution to American literature. But this time we have texts intended as the author originally wished them to be read. The works that millions know are, as it turns out, expurgated and abbreviated versions of what Wright submitted for publication. By returning to typescripts, galleys, page proofs, the editors have restored deletions and changes demanded by Wright's publisher...They have returned to the 1970 second printing of Uncle Tom's Children>/i> which included one additional story, Bright and Morning Star, and The Ethics of Jim Crow, thus offering us all the selections Wright wished the collection to have." - Charles Johnson, *Chicago Tribune
Cover Illustration: David Diaz* Views: 569
First published in 1970, nine years after Ernest Hemingway's death, Islands in the Stream is the story of an artist and adventurer — a man much like Hemingway himself. Rich with the uncanny sense of life and action characteristic of his writing — from his earliest stories (In Our Time) to his last novella (The Old Man and the Sea) — this compelling novel contains both the warmth of recollection that inspired A Moveable Feast and a rare glimpse of Hemingway's rich and relaxed sense of humor, which enlivens scene after scene.
Beginning in the 1930s, Islands in the Stream follows the fortunes of Thomas Hudson from his experiences as a painter on the Gulf Stream island of Bimini, where his loneliness is broken by the vacation visit of his three young sons, to his antisubmarine activities off the coast of Cuba during World War II. The greater part of the story takes place in a Havana bar, where a wildly diverse cast of characters — including an aging prostitute who stands out as one of Hemingway's most vivid creations — engages in incomparably rich dialogue. A brilliant portrait of the inner life of a complex and endlessly intriguing man, Islands in the Stream is Hemingway at his mature best. Views: 569
