Machen's weird tales of the creepy and fantastic finally come to Penguin Classics. With an introduction from S.T. Joshi, editor of American Supernatural Tales, The White People and Other Weird Stories is the perfect introduction to the father of weird fiction. The title story "The White People" is an exercise in the bizarre leaving the reader disoriented and on edge. From the first page, Machen turns even fundamental truths upside-down, as his character Ambrose explains, "there have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin, who all their lives have never done an 'ill deed'" setting the stage for a tale entirely without logic.

From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon. The Weird is the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

"Cryptic and potent languages, bizarre cults, mysteries that span the gulf between life and death, occult influences that reverberate through history like a dying echo, irresistible cosmic decay, forces of nightmare that distort reality itself, gateways to worlds where esoteric knowledge rots the future. Here is a collection of tales that forms a veritable Rosetta Stone for scholars of cosmic wonder and terror"--Page 4 of cover.

Weird Tales, the acknowledged leader of pulp magazine fantasy from 1923 to 1954, provided many of the genre's wildest and wooliest stories. Here are 100 of the magazine's greatest, written by the best and brightest writers of macabre tales of horror. Every story is guaranteed to bewilder, disturb, and excite. Witness H.P. Lovecraft's tales of extradimensional terror; discover the worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, which in Lovecraft's words are "a universe of remote and paralyzing fright"; then explore Henry S. Whitehead's quest into the spectral mysteries of the West Indies. The distinguished contributors to this collection challenged traditional notions of fiction by writing tales in ways previously unexplored. Seabury Quinn's blend of the detective story and terror in his accounts of occult investigator Jules de Grandin, E. Hoffman Price's retelling of Eastern myths and legends, and Manly Wade Wellman's tales of Souther folklore are all groundbreaking examples of invention through experimentation. Although Weird Tales is renowned primarily for its short stories and novellas, the magazine also introduced its readers to "sudden," or shorter-than-short, fiction. For example, consider the contrast between Florence Crow's vampire in traditional guise in "The Nightmare Road" and that of Richard F. Searight's in "The Sealed Casket." Also discover how Clark Ashton Smith in "The Last Incantation" and H.P. Lovecraft in "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" intensified the psychological setting of their stories by cultivating a stylized prose form appropriate for their arcane horrors. 100 Wild Little Weird Tales is a superb selection of Weird Tales' best and most bizarre. It proves that good things -- or in the case of weird fiction, bad things -- come in small packages.

From the Pulitzer Finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases Karen Russell’s extraordinary, irresistible gifts of language and imagination. Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In“Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors,” two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void—yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.