Joe R. Lansdale

Over a span of almost 60 years, E. Hoffmann Price, a prolific writer during the great pulp magazine fiction era, befriended many of the great and near-great colleagues of the profession—writers like H. P, Lovecraft, August Derleth, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner, Seabury Quinn, Otis Adelbert Kline, W. K. Mashburn, Ralph Milne Farley, Robert Spencer Carr, Albert Richard Wetjen, Norbert C. Davis, Harry Olmstead, Milo Ray Phelps— and Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. Through a vast correspondence, diaries he kept of his many cross-country motor trips, E. Hoffmann Price encapsulates the successes and failures of a score of fascinating lives through a series of engaging biographical essays that also reveal important details about the author's own nomadic life. Historian Richard Bleiler says, "I was absolutely floored by BOOK OF THE DEAD. It is incredible! Price was one of the undisputed masters of the biographical sketch. His works on Smith, Lovecraft and Howard are among the most informative and vital portraits of these people ever done—and now there is a whole book of his portraits of other pulp writers and figures, all vividly portrayed, warts and all." Bleiler continues, "This is one of the most important documents in pulp studies to emerge in recent years, and I thoroughly regret that it was not published 25 years ago when Price was still alive to get honored for it." BOOK OF THE DEAD includes additional essays by and about Price, a bibliography of his fiction, an index, and a photo gallery.

On the run after an infamous landowner murders his father, Willie becomes an expert marksman before turning Buffalo Soldier, befriending Wild Bill Hickok and earning the nickname "Deadwood Dick."

"The seeds for the twelve interconnected crime stories in Darkness came from the pages of the Italian daily papers. In sparse prose that echoes the files of a police report, Dacia Maraini gives a resounding voice to the string of victims who receive only fleeting mention in the media each day. Among them is twelve-year-old Viollca, an Albanian sold into prostitution by her parents, who hope she will soon return with enough money to pay for her dowry and a new roof. And the boy Tano, who brings charges of physical abuse against his father. Two years and the death of his younger brother pass before anyone at the police station will believe him. Linking the collection together is Adele Sofia, a steel-nerved though tenderhearted police commissioner with a penchant for licorice at various points on the investigative trail, and whose job it is to hunt down those who prey on society's weakest and most vulnerable members. Told in a straight forward, unforgettably powerful and affecting manner in which the facts speak for themselves, Darkness illuminates the underbelly of Rome. With absorbing compassion and discretion Maraini creates a cast of characters who wake up each morning to a reality quite different from la dolce vita."--BOOK JACKET.

"Jack Parker knows all too well how treacherous turn-of-the-century East Texas can be. His parents did not survive a smallpox epidemic. His grandfather was murdered. Now his sister Lula has been kidnapped by a criminal who may believe wearing a dead man's clothes protects him from death. With bounty hunter Shorty, a charismatic and cunning dwarf, and Eustace, a gravedigging son of an ex-slave, the heartbroken young Jack sets off on an epic quest to rescue his sister from the corrupt men who control much of the new territory. In the throes of being civilized, East Texas is still a wild feral place. Oil wells spurt liquid money from the ground, but blood and redemption rule supreme"--

What it means to be a warrior has become a pertinent issue of our time. What makes some men and women perform extraordinary deeds on the battlefield? What makes them risk their lives in the pursuit of victory? And do their successes or failures in combat bring them happiness, melancholy, or fulfillment? Max Hastings's "authority [and] humanity" in depicting "the realities of combat" (Alistair Horne, The Wall Street Journal) has been greatly praised on the release of his previous book, Armageddon, which documented the last eight months in the European theater of World War II. In Warriors, Hastings takes up the experience of fourteen soldiers and airmen, together with one remarkable sailor, who fought in the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, portraying their triumphs, follies, and, sometimes, tragedies. We meet Baron Marbot, an exuberant cavalry officer who joined Napoleon's army at the age of seventeen and fought through Waterloo in a happy and shameless pursuit of glory; paratrooper "Slim Jim" Gavin, an orphan who enlisted in World War II to escape his miserable boyhood and went on to become America's youngest general since Custer; Nancy Wake, a dashing Australian who fought for the resistance in Nazi-occupied France; Avigdor Kahalani, an Israeli officer hideously burned in the Six-Day War, who, six years later, was one of the tank commanders who saved his country during the defense of the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War. Each of Hastings's pen portraits depicts a unique and remarkable human story. A tribute to the valor of these fighters and a searching study of combat in modern history, Warriors enhances our understanding of the hearts and minds of the people who serve in war. It is also an appealing book for the reader who is drawn to tales of heroism, human drama, and some of the most exotic characters of modern times.From the Hardcover edition.

Contains: "Final Blackouts," an Introduction / Harlan Ellison -- The End of the World (1872) / Eugene Mouton -- The Comet (1920) / W.E.B. DuBois -- The Pedestrian (1951) / Ray Bradbury -- No Morning After (1954) / Arthur C. Clarke -- Upon the Dull Earth (1954) / Philip K. Dick -- 2 B R 0 2 B (1962) / Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. -- I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967) / Harlan Ellison -- The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973) / Ursula K. LeGuin -- The Engineer and the Executioner (1976) / Brian M. Stableford -- [The End of the Whole Mess (1986) / Stephen King]( Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back (1992) / Joe R. Lansdale -- Judgment Engine (1995) / Greg Bear -- Automatic (2007) / Erika T. Satifka -- The Black Mould (2011) / Mark Samuels -- The Pretence (2013) /Ramsey Campbell -- Inventory (2013) / Carmen Maria Machado.

Spanning from the Wild West to the Great Depression and even into the future, this collection of short stories from the author of Jack Rabbit Smile includes tales of killer machines, a big grizzly bear, shipwrecks, monsters and mystery.

A collection of fourteen fantasy stories by well-known authors, set in the age of steam engines and featuring automatons, clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never existed.