Daniel Fuchs

Includes stories by Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Pritchett, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Tennessee Williams, Mary McCarthy, Roald Dahl, Dorothy Parker, Nadine Gordimer, Eudora Welty, and John Cheever, among others.

"In the spring of 1937, Daniel Fuchs, twenty-seven years old and the author of three acclaimed novels of Brooklyn tenement life, came to Hollywood to bang out a treatment of one of his short stories. His thirteen-week contract turned into a permanent residence - and a lifelong love affair." "The Golden West collects, for the first time, the best of Fuchs's writings about the movie business, from a novice screenwriter's anxious diaries (1937-38) to a fifty-year veteran's mellow memoirs (1989). The centerpiece of the book is "West of the Rockies," a short novel, set in the late 1950s, about a half-mad woman, immature and incapable, who is, almost despite herself, a star, "a quantity indefinable, ephemeral, everlastingly elusive - Hollywood's chief stock in trade." It is also a bitter portrait of the star's agent, a grifter who is tempted to use her and her weaknesses to his own ends."--Jacket.

A mythmaker of the highest order, China Mieville has emblazoned the fantasy novel with fresh language, startling images, and stunning originality. Set in the same sprawling world of Mieville's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel, Perdido Street Station, this latest epic introduces a whole new cast of intriguing characters and dazzling creations. Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to the fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a renowned linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passage--and escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon.For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On Armada, everyone is given work, and even Remades live as equals to humans, Cactae, and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave.Lonely and embittered in her captivity, Bellis knows that to show dissent is a death sentence. Instead, she must furtively seek information about Armada's agenda. The answer lies in the dark, amorphous shapes that float undetected miles below the waters--terrifying entities with a singular, chilling mission. . . .China Mieville is a writer for a new era--and The Scar is a luminous, brilliantly imagined novel that is nothing short of spectacular.From the Trade Paperback edition.