At times literary, at other times surreal, this collection offers an eclectic group of stories that deal with real-life conflicts, human values, and coming-of-age experiences all placed within fantastical settings. One tale recounts the author's search for a Kafka story that can only be found in ...
In The Physiognomy, "fascinatingly unconventional writer" (Locus) Jeffrey Ford introduced Physiognomist First Class Cley, a master of a terrifying science utilized to keep order in a night-mare world known as the Well-Built City. Its sequel, Memoranda, told of a reformed Cley embarking on a surre...
The Great Depression has bound a nation in despair -- and only a privileged few have risen above it: the exorbitantly wealthy ... and the hucksters who feed upon them. Diego, a seventeen-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant, owes his salvation to master grifter Thomas Schell. Together with Schell's...
Нью-Йорк конца XIX века. Преуспевающий салонный портретист Пьеро Пьямбо уже несколько лет страдает от творческой неудоволетворенности. Ему упорно кажется, что, рисуя за хорошие деньги портреты богатых горожан, он с каждым днем только растрачивает последние крупинки собственного таланта. Поэтому с...
In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never display...
I was visiting him in his studio one day, and while we were looking at his latest paintings and shooting the breeze, two things conspired to later give me the beginning idea for this story. The first was that he had just finished a painting for a Halloween show at a local gallery. The picture was...
Inside, the place smelled like a chocolate egg cream laced with cigar smoke and filtered through the hole of a stale doughnut. From beneath a pervasive layer of dust, one could dig out Green Lantern comics and Daredevil: The Man Without Fear. In the back, next to the phone booth with flypaper gla...
Hustle, politics, fervor, struggle, capitulation, wrapped in a crystal firmament, stoppered at the top to keep reality both in and out. Those microscopic lives, striking glass at the edge of things, believed themselves gigantic, their dilemmas universal. Our research sugge...
That same beautifully warm breeze enveloped me, bringing the sweet scents of tree blossoms and wildflowers. I rose up on my elbow and saw Arla sitting across from me, holding a baby in her arms. Next to her, on the ground, sat the Traveler with his legs crossed in front of him. When he saw that I...
While doing so, I was not overly concerned with whether I believed or disbelieved his theories concerning the workings of the human mind. Freud, for whatever merit (or lack there of) his theories have, is a terrific writer with a real flair for the dramatic and the unexpected. The book Three Case...
Meanwhile I sat listlessly, staring at the wall and smoking one cigarette after the other. I knew now what it was like to lose someone close to you. Granted, Ea and Arla and their children had left and gone away to the Beyond, but at least I knew they were still out there somewhere. Anotine, on t...
That way you had a half a year to learn to shoot and get down all the safety garbage before you started senior year. Depending on how well off your parents were, that pretty much dictated the amount of firepower you had. Darcy Krantz’s family lived in a trailer, and so she had a pea-shooter, .22 ...