Chateau D If And Other Stories

Jack Vance mastered his craft over more than sixty years, garnering awards including the Nebula, Edgar, two Hugos, and the 1997 SFWA Grandmaster. The stories in this collection were written through the early-mid period of his career, spanning twenty years from the early 50's on. Vance would dismiss his early work as juvenile, "gadget"-oriented, lacking subtlety and polish. Even so, these stories are hearty and entertaining. Vance's perception, imagination and eventful personal experience are all visible, staking the way for significant things to come.

The collection of stories and sketches giving the readers entertainment, pleasure, glimpses of the authorâs life, as well as information on Myanmar Culture which she is so proud of.

This edition of The Year's Best Science Fiction collects twenty-five of the finest works of speculative fiction to see print in 1990, stories from the genre's every edge, and from its heart. Among the many marvels are tales from the field's most accomplished artists: Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Shobies' Story" returns to the Hainish worlds with a reality-defining story, while Joe Haldeman's "The Hemmingway Hoax" embarks from our world on a time-defying trip through other possibilities. Kate Wilhelm, Michael Moorcock, Robert Silverberg, and John Brunner demonstrate too with their stories why they remain among the most popular science fiction writers of all time. With the closing of a decade and cyberpunk virtually becoming reality, many of the leading writers of the eighties have begun to bring new insight and vision to their fiction: Bruce Sterling examines a classic clash of cultures in "We See Things Differently," and James Patrick Kelly's "Mr. Boy" presents a hard-edged story about the guts of growing up. Lewis Shiner's "White City" and Connie Willis's "Cibola" both seek peace--of sorts--amid spectacle, and works by Nancy Kress, Lucius Shepard and Robert Frazier, Pat Murphy, and John Kessel also dazzle and amaze. Among the many other stories in this volume are powerhouse piece by Terry Bisson, Molly Gloss, Ian McDonald, Charles Sheffield, Alexander Jablokov, and Dafydd ab Hugh, as well as towering new mindscapes from young talents such as Jonathan Lethem, Ian R. MacLeod, Greg Egan and Ted Chiang. A wonderful tour through possible, probable, and virtual realities, The Year's Best Science Fiction is an ideal assemblage of the year's short fiction. This volume is essential to anyone who reads sf. "A virtually indispensable series."--Kirkus Reviews

This translation of twenty tales shows Maupassant at his bitter, bawdy, chilling best. It features some of his grimmest and most famous stories such as A Vendetta and The Grove of Olives, and it also reflects both his moods and his mastery of the short story.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker and former private detective Errol Morris examines the nature of evidence and proof in the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case Early on the morning of February 17, 1970, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret doctor, called the police for help. When the officers arrived at his home they found the bloody and battered bodies of MacDonald’s pregnant wife and two young daughters. The word “pig” was written in blood on the headboard in the master bedroom. As MacDonald was being loaded into the ambulance, he accused a band of drug-crazed hippies of the crime. So began one of the most notorious and mysterious murder cases of the twentieth century. Jeffrey MacDonald was finally convicted in 1979 and remains in prison today. Since then a number of bestselling books—including Joe McGinniss’s Fatal Vision and Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer—and a blockbuster television miniseries have told their versions of the MacDonald case and what it all means. Errol Morris has been investigating the MacDonald case for over twenty years. A Wilderness of Error is the culmination of his efforts. It is a shocking book, because it shows us that almost everything we have been told about the case is deeply unreliable, and crucial elements of the case against MacDonald simply are not true. It is a masterful reinvention of the true-crime thriller, a book that pierces the haze of myth surrounding these murders with the sort of brilliant light that can only be produced by years of dogged and careful investigation and hard, lucid thinking. By this book’s end, we know several things: that there are two very different narratives we can create about what happened at 544 Castle Drive, and that the one that led to the conviction and imprisonment for life of this man for butchering his wife and two young daughters is almost certainly wrong. Along the way Morris poses bracing questions about the nature of proof, criminal justice, and the media, showing us how MacDonald has been condemned, not only to prison, but to the stories that have been created around him. In this profoundly original meditation on truth and justice, Errol Morris reopens one of America’s most famous cases and forces us to confront the unimaginable. Morris has spent his career unsettling our complacent assumptions that we know what we’re looking at, that the stories we tell ourselves are true. This book is his finest and most important achievement to date.