Winner of the Pulitzer Prize“A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book ReviewA green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once

This omnibus edition contains the trilogy of science fiction books that introduced the world to Mike Callahan and all of the regulars at Callahan’s Place.Callahan’s Crosstime Saloonis the neighborhood tavern to all of time and space, where the regulars are anything but. These time travelers, talking dogs, alcoholic vampires, and cybernetic aliens really, truly care about each other. It’s the rare kind of place where bad puns are as appreciated as good conversation....

Travel to other planets is now a reality, and with overpopulation stretching the resources of Earth, the necessity of finding habitable worlds is growing ever more urgent. There’s a problem though—because the spaceships are slower than light, any communication between the exploring ships and Earth would take years.Tom and Pat are identical twin teenagers. As twins they’ve always been close, so close that it seemed like they could read each other’s minds. When they are recruited by ...

Flavoring the hard-boiled detective story with a taste of the supernatural, this is the first book in the highly entertaining Vampire Files series."I've always had a weak spot for strange ladies. One very beautiful girl had even warned me that she was—get this—a vampire. But did I listen? No."Before you know it, I'm being chased by an ugly thug with a gun, and a bullet blasts its way through my back, and—believe it or not—nothing happened. I survived! How? You guessed it. I...

Here is the critically acclaimed saga of blood and passion as only vampire Jack Fleming could tell it.Jack Fleming was an investigative journalist in Prohibition-era Chicago until he got shot by an unknown assassin, bitten by his vampire girlfriend—who has since disappeared—and then became one of the undead. Now, this nice-guy Nosferatu has a bunch of crazy vampire hunters on his trail, armed with crosses, silver bullets, and sharp wooden stakes. He doesn't know how they found out ...

The discreet little bar that Jake Stonebender established a few blocks below Duval Street is simply called The Place. There, Fast Eddie Costigan learned to curse back at parrots as he played the house piano, the Reverend Tom Hauptman learned to tend bar bare-chested without blushing, Long-Drink McGonnigle discovered the margarita and several señoritas, and all the other regulars settled into comfortable subtropical niches of their own. Nobody even noticed them save the universe. Over time,...

There had been a battle, and the Berserker met some terrible opponents, taking an awful wound. The cavity reached through level after level of machinery, deck after deck of armor, stopped only by the last inner defenses of the buried, unliving heart. The Berserker survived and crushed its enemy.When Hemphill saw the blasted cavity, he felt a shrinking fear, stunned by the realization of just what it means to fight the Berserker. Hemphill, his pistol ready, his right arm instinctive...

The preeminent popular history of civilization’s rebirth after the Dark AgesFrom tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages. In handsomely crafted prose and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth, the Renaissance, a dense explosio...

Free Air takes one by automobile in search of America, heading toward a West brimming with possibilities for suddenly mobile Americans at the end of a world war. Clair Boltwood and her father drive their Gomez-Dep roadster from Minnesota to Seattle, braving all the perils of early motoring. But the greatest distance to be overcome is the social one between the upper-crust Claire and a traveling mechanic named Milt.First published in 1919, with fame just around the corner f...

Most people associate storms and other big weather with death—with the kind of force that makes each of us wonder about life, and time and the nature of our surroundings. Some people go out looking for bad weather or go to places where they’re likely to encounter it. Others have the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, the stories in Storm have more to say than that. They tell us about what happens when people find that treacherous weather—or when it finds them—...

The “open range” men are free-grazing cattlemen—those who don’t own land but drive their stock through the country to graze. But Boss Spearman knows that times are changing for the open rangers. Local ranchers are staking claims to grazing areas and building up extensive cattle empires. Boss has no quarrel with the other ranchers, but he won’t be scared off either.When Denton Baxter makes it clear, by killing one man and seriously wounding another, that he intends to drive Boss and...

In Blood, the Civil War, the most dramatic moment in this nation's history, also produced some of our greatest literature. From tragic charges to prison escapes to the desolation wrought on those who stayed behind, Blood is an extraordinary collection of reminiscences, fiction, and excerpts from diaries and letters by an array of soldiers, writers and observers that includes Abraham Lincoln, General George Pickett, Walt Whitman, Ulysses S. Grant and Stephen Crane. In The War, no one knew i...