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Gene Wolfe is producing the most significant body of short fiction of any living writer in the science fiction genre. It has been ten years since the last major Wolfe collection, so Strange Travelers contains a whole decade of achievement. Some of these stories were award nominees, some were controversial, but each is unique and beautifully written. At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In 1919, the same year *Demian* was published, seven of these stories appeared as a book entitled *Märchen*—literally, *Fairy Tales*.

Hailed as "one of the literary giants of science fiction" by The Denver Post, Gene Wolfe is universally acknowledged as one of the most brilliant writers the field has ever produced. Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best fiction collection, Storeys from the Old Hotel contains thirty-one remarkable gems of Wolfe's short fiction from the past two decades, most unavailable in any other form.

In this haunting suite of three fictions, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke cements his reputation as one of the most talented writers of the twentieth century. In "The Long Way Around," a European scientist in Alaska finds himself in isolated "places and spaces" that are disturbed when he relocates to California, a disruption that ultimately drives him back home. "The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire" follows an autobiographical narrator to Provence, to the mountain that fascinated Cézanne, on a quest to restore his sense of self and revitalize his craft.

The astonishing follow-up to 2018's Kolyma Stories. In 1936, Varlam Shalamov, a journalist and writer, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. He survived fifteen years in the prison camps and returned from the Far North to write one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the years he spent in the Gulag.

In this funny, touching collection about music, identity, liars, and love, Geoffrey Becker brings us into the lives of people who have come to a turning point and lets us watch as they take, however clumsily, their next steps. In the title story, an aging Black singer who performs only Elvis songs despite his classic bluesman looks has his regular spot at the local blues jam threatened by a newly arrived Asian American with the unlikely name Robert Johnson.

Merzlakov, once a robust stable-hand, now fights hunger, pain and exhaustion after a year and a half at a labour camp. An enormous man given little food, he sees the larger men dying first, their bodies conquered by starvation. In his desperation for survival, he begins a yearlong struggle of pain and injury. It ends with the inscrutable and punctilious Dr Peter Ivanovich. In a curious mix of empathy and haunting objectivity, this short story describes a snapshot of life in a Russian labour-camp.

The short fiction of a writer who helped shape the course of American literature. With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly—often wickedly—unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination.

This collection brings together twenty-one of Lardner’s best pieces, including the six Jack Keefe stories that comprise You Know Me, Al, as well as such familiar favorites as “Alibi Ike,” “Some Like Them Cold,” and “Gullible’s Travels.” For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.

A collection of short stories from the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author who "has the imagination of six ordinary science fiction writers" (George R.R. Martin)—John Varley. Picnic on Nearside includes nine astonishing stories from an author whose imagination has changed the genre and the way that people envision the future.