In what is arguably his greatest book, America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's prisons who became notorious for two reasons: first, for robbing two men in 1976, then killing them in cold blood; and, second, after being tried and convicted, for insisting on dying for his crime. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed paradoxically intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. Norman Mailer tells Gilmore's story--and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad--with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. The Executioner's Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest sources of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement--impossible to put down, impossible to forget. Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize

This invaluable volume, which has been republished to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Faulkner's birth, contains some of the greatest short fiction by a writer who defined the course of American literature. Its forty-five stories fall into three categories: those not included in Faulkner's earlier collections; previously unpublished short fiction; and stories that were later expanded into such novels as The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. With its Introduction and extensive notes by the biographer Joseph Blotner, Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner is an essential addition to its author's canon--as well as a book of some of the most haunting, harrowing, and atmospheric short fiction written in the twentieth century.

Cover Artist: Don Punchatz Contents: Introduction An Infinite Summer (1976) novelette Whores (1978) shortstory Palely Loitering (1979) novelette The Negation (1978) novelette The Watched (1978) novella

Tony loves reading creepy stories about vampires. But when one night he finds a real vampire sitting on his windowsill, he is very surprised and terribly frightened. Luckily the little vampire turns out to be friendly. Thus begin the adventures of Tony, Rudolph, Anna the Toothless, Gruesome Gregory, and Nightwatchman McRookery.

Here are five extraordinary short stories from the perceptive pen of E.I. Konigsburg. Each captures the moment when someone's life changes -- when a chance meeting between two people casts a shadow on what things have been like, and what they can become.

Private dick Herald Childe is sent a snuff movie of his partner being brutally murdered. His pursuit of her killers leads him into a waking nightmare of sexual brutality and supernatural bestiality, as he becomes entangled with sex-starved she-ghosts, snake-women and a filthy human sow.In "Image of the Beast" and its sequel "Blown" both published in this volume-Philip Jose Farmer conjures up a universe of unrelenting sexual degradation and horror populated by erogenous vampires, werewolves and other polymorphic creatures from the darkest recesses of the human imagination. Philip Jose Farmer is the best-selling author of the "Riverworld" series, and winner of 3 Hugo awards for innovations in Science Fiction.

William Kennedy has written in The Washington Post that "the Kosinski hero is unique in literature, as recognizable as the Hemingway hero used to be". Passion Play is the story of Fabian, Kosinski's most romantic and driven hero. A modern knight-errant, he roams America in his custom-built VanHome, his refuge, transport, and stable for his two horses. His livelihood is polo -- not the millionaire's team sport, but the life-threatening duel of clashing horsemen. The prize is more than money and honor; it is the awareness of having drawn upon every resource of body and mind, of man and horse in danger. Passion Play is a masterpiece of violence and seduction, love and loss, by one of the world's greatest writers.

A determined group of colonists are attempting to establish a bridgehead on the planet Pandora, despite the savagery of the native lifeforms, as deadly as they are inhospitable. But they have more to deal with than just murderous aliens: their ship's computer has been given artificial consciousness and has decided that it is a God. Now it is insisting—with all the not inconsiderable force of its impressive array of armaments to back it up—that the colonists find appropriate ways to worship It.

It is a warm June morning in the West End of St. Louis in the mid-thirties––a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of Tennessee Williams’s most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics––the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony. Williams’s unerring dialogue reveals each of the four characters of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur with precision and clarity: Dorothea, who does even her "setting-up exercises" with poignant flutters; Bodey, her German roommate, who wants to pair Dotty with her beer-drinking twin, Buddy, thereby assuring nieces, nephews, and a family for both herself and Dotty; Helena, a fellow teacher, with the "eyes of a predatory bird," who would like to "rescue" Dotty from her vulgar, common surroundings and substitute an elegant but sterile spinster life; and Miss Gluck, a newly orphaned and distraught neighbor, whom Bodey comforts with coffee and crullers while Helena mocks them both. Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women, Williams once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through "the long run of life."

"The richest of the three...mighty...climactic...action and supsense constant, even harrowing." THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Arthur is King! But while unchallenged on the battlefield, sinister powers plot to destroy him in his own Camelot. When the rose-gold witch Morgause, Arthur's half-siser, ensnares him into an incestuous liaison--and bears his son, Mordred, to use to her own evil ends--a fatal web of love, betrayal and bloody vengeance is woven.

Slowly, Slowly in the Wind brilliantly assembles many of Patricia Highsmith's most nuanced and psychologically suspenseful works. Rarely has an author articulated so well the hypocrisies of the Catholic Church while conveying the delusions of a writer's life and undermining the fantasy of suburban bliss. Each of these twelve pieces, like all great short fiction, is a crystal-clear snapshot of lives both static and full of chaos. In "The Pond" Highsmith explores the unforeseen calamities that can unalterably shatter a single woman's life, while "The Network" finds sinister loneliness and joy in the mundane yet engrossing friendships of a small community of urban dwellers. In this enduring and disturbing collection, Highsmith evokes the gravity and horror of her characters' surroundings with evenhanded prose and a detailed imagination.

Only in the world of the theater can Nat Field find an escape from the tragedies that have shadowed his young life. So he is thrilled when he is chosen to join an American drama troupe traveling to London to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream in a new replica of the famous Globe theater. Shortly after arriving in England, Nat goes to bed ill and awakens transported back in time four hundred years -- to another London, and another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Amid the bustle and excitement of an Elizabethan theatrical production, Nat finds the warm, nurturing father figure missing from his life -- in none other than William Shakespeare himself. Does Nat have to remain trapped in the past forever, or give up the friendship he's so longed for in his own time?

KANE & ABEL for a new generation!! They had only one thing in common . . . William Lowell Kane and Abel Rosnovski, one the son of a Boston millionaire, the other a penniless Polish immigrant - two men born on the same day on opposite sides of the world, their paths destined to cross in the ruthless struggle to build a fortune. The marvellous story, spanning sixty years, of two powerful men linked by an all-consuming hatred, brought together by fate to save . . . and finally destroy . . . each other. 'Archer has a gift for plot that can only be described as genius' Daily Telegraph 'Probably the greatest storyteller of our age' Mail on Sunday About The Author: Jeffrey Archer's writing career has spanned almost 30 years. His bestselling novels, which range from Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less to Kane and Abel and The Eleventh Commandment , have sold over 120 million copies throughout the world. In August 2001, he was sentenced to four years in prison for perjury. During that time he wrote three highly praised and bestselling works of non-fiction entitled Prison Diaries . He was released in July 2003. He is married with two children and lives in London and Granchester.

Which Witch? is a brilliantly witty tale of magic and marriage by Eva Ibbotson, and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. 'Find me a witch!' cried Arriman the Awful, feared Wizard of the North. Arriman has decided to marry. His wife must be a witch of the darkest powers - but which witch will she be? To find the most fiendish, he holds a spell-casting competition. Glamorous Madame Olympia performs the terrifying Symphony of Death and conjures up a thousand plague-bearing rats. The magic of gentle Belladonna, the white witch, goes hopelessly wrong. She produces perfumed flowers instead of snakes. And bats roost in her golden hair instead of becoming blood-sucking vampires. Poor Belladonna longs to be an evil enchantress - but how? 'This kind of fun will never fail to delight' Philip Pullman