"This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done you will die." But what has Manno the pharmacist done? Nothing that he can think of. He takes the letter as a joke. The next day he and his hunting companion are both dead. The police investigation is inconclusive. However, Professor Laurana, a modest high school teacher with a literary bent, has noticed a clue that, he believes, will allow him to trace the killer. Patiently, methodically,...

Sleepless Nights is a scrapbook of memories: the first pangs of sexual longing, Billie Holiday holding forth in a cheap hotel, and the swagger and heartbreak of New York City.

"The Ten Thousand Things is a novel of shimmering strangeness?the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present....

John Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are works of rare wit, curious insight, and scary implication. They stand out as one of the pinnacles in the critically neglected but perennially popular tradition of weird writing that includes E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Dickens as well as more recent masters like Jorge Luis Borges and Roald Dahl. With a cast of characters that ranges from man-eating flora to disgruntled devils and suburban salarymen (not that...