Maxima Library

Anche pubblicato come “«Pentiti Arlecchino!» disse il Tictacchiere” e “Pentiti, Arlecchino”.

The New York Times called him relentlessly honest and then used him as the subject of its famous Sunday Acrostic. People Magizine said there was no one like him, then cursed him for preventing easy sleep. But in these stories Harlan Ellison outdoes himself, rampaging like a mad thing through love (Cold Friend, Kiss of Fire, Paulie Charmed the Sleeping Woman), hate (Knox, Silent in Gehenna), sex (Catman, Erotophobia), lost childhood (One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty) and into such bizarre subjects as the problems of blue-skinned, eleven-armed Yiddish aliens, what it's like to witness the end of the world and what happens on the day the planet Earth swallows Barbra Streisand. Oh yeah, this one's a doozy!

From Robert Silverberg’s “Earthmen and Strangers” anthology, 1966:

The Budrys story depicts meek, peaceful alien beings, intelligent but simple. Now we meet a very different sort of creature: a ravenous beast out of nightmare, rippling with strength, coursing with barely repressed violence. Yet Harlan Ellison’s Lad-nar and Algis Budrys’ Tylus both regard the Earthmen who visit them as supernatural beings. They recognize in them the skills and powers of superior civilizations. In this story, intelligence meets brute force in a conflict that is not quite a conflict, and a strange, curiously touching relationship develops between man and monster on this rugged lightning-blasted world.

Harlan Ellison has been a professional writer since 1955, and this was one of his first published stories. It reveals the power and intensity of imagination that has since carried him to a successful career as an author of screenplays for television and motion pictures.

When the government wields its power against its own people, every citizen becomes an enemy of the state. Will you fight the system, or be ground to dust beneath the boot of tyranny?

In his smash-hit anthologies

Wastelands

and

The Living Dead

, acclaimed editor John Joseph Adams showed you what happens when society is utterly wiped away. Now he brings you a glimpse into an equally terrifying future — what happens when civilization invades and dictates every aspect of your life?

From

1984

to

The Handmaid’s Tale

, from

Children of Men

to

Bioshock

, the dystopian imagination has been a vital and gripping cautionary force.

Brave New Worlds

collects 33 of the best tales of totalitarian menace by some of today’s most visionary writers.

From Huxley's Brave New World, to Orwell's 1984, to Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, dystopian books have always been an integral part of both science fiction and literature, and have influenced the broader culture discussion in unique and permanent ways. Brave New Worlds brings together the best dystopian fiction of the last 30 years, demonstrating the diversity that flourishes in this compelling subgenre. This landmark tome contains stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Cory Doctorow, M. Rickert, Paolo Bacigalupi, Orson Scott Card, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, and many others.

An anthology of stories edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H Greenberg and Charles G Waugh

Harlan Ellison’s masterwork of myth and terror as he seduces all innocence on a mind-freezing odyssey into the darkest reaches of mortal terror and the most dazzling heights of Olympian hell in his finest collection.

is a collection of 19 of Harlan Ellison's best stories, including Edgar and Hugo winners, originally published between 1960 and 1974. The collection contains some of Ellison's best stories from earlier collections and is judged by some to be his most consistently high quality collection of short fiction. The theme of the collection can be loosely defined as God, or Gods. Sometimes they're dead or dying, some of them are as brand-new as today's technology.

Unlike some of Ellison’s collections, the introductory notes to each story can be as short as a phrase and rarely run more than a sentence or two.

One story took a Locus Poll Award, the two final ones both garnered Hugo Awards and Locus Poll awards, and the final one also received a Jupiter Award from the Instructors of Science Fiction in Higher Education (discontinued in 1979). When the collection was published in Britain, it won the 1979 British Science Fiction Award for Short Fiction.

Ellison Wonderland is a collection of short stories by author Harlan Ellison that was originally published in 1962. Gerry Gross bought the book from Ellison in 1961, providing him with the funds he needed to move to Los Angeles. Subsequent payments after the book was published supplied the author with enough money to survive until he was able to find a job writing for a television series. It was later reprinted in 1974 by New American Library with an introduction by Ellison.

The stories are in the genre of speculative fiction, and concentrate on the themes of loneliness, the end of the world, and the flaws of humanity. Ellison wrote a short introduction to each story, a tradition that he would repeat in many of his later short story collections. Many of the stories in this collection, such as "All the Sounds of Fear", "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" and "In Lonely Lands", would turn up in later anthologies of Ellison's short stories.

La nostalgica storia di un bambino che si rifiuta di crescere, per continuare ad ascoltare i programmi del passato.

Vincitore dei premi Hugo e Nebula per il miglior racconto breve

(Short Story)

in 1978.

Vincitore del British Fantasy Award in 1979.

Nominato per il World Fantasy Award in 1978.

This stellar collection of Jewish science fiction and fantasy carries on in the tradition of its companion volume—the enduring classic Wandering Stars—breaking new ground with every story.

Trouble with mothers; invading aliens and demons; the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah… all these phenomena and more are tackled in these tales from a creative group of extraordinary writers. We go to the edges of the universe, finding humor, pain and humanity in the unlikeliest of places and situations. Filled with wit, vigor and sharp insight, this is a fantastic feast for the imagination that will intrigue and delight everyone who picks it up, Jew and non-Jew alike.

Robert Heinlein says, “This book is raw corn liquor. You should serve a whiskbroom with each shot so the customer can brush the sawdust off after he gets up from the floor.” Perhaps a mooring cable might also be added as necessary equipment for reading these eight wonderful stories: They not only knock you down — they raise you to the stars. Passion is the keynote as you encounter the Harlequin and his nemesis, the dreaded Tictockman, in one of the most reprinted and widely taught stories in the English language; a pyretic who creates fire merely by willing it; the last surgeon in a world of robot physicians; a spaceship filled with hideous mutants rejected by the world that gave them birth. Touching and gentle and shocking stories from an incomparable master of impossible dreams and troubling truths.

Mercurial, belligerent, passionately in love with language and wild ideas, Harlan Ellison has, for half a century, steadily gathered to himself and his thirty-seven books an undeniably fanatical readership. Winner of more awards for imaginative literature than any other living writer, he is the only scenarist ever to win the Writers Guild of America award three times for outstanding teleplay. Though his contemporary fantasies have been compared favorably with the dark visions of Borges, Barthelme, Poe and Kafka, Ellison resists categorization with a vehemence that alienates critics and reviewers seeking easy pigeonholes for an extraordinary writer. The San Francisco Chronicle writes, "The categories are too small to describe Harlan Ellison. Lyric poet, satirist, explorer of odd psychological corners, moralist, purveyor of pure horror and black comedy; he is all these and more." In this, his thirty-seventh book, setting down as never before the mortal dreads we all share, Harlan Ellison has put together his best work to date: sixteen uncollected stories (half of which are award-winners), totaling a marvel-filled 105,000 words and including a brand-new novella, his longest work in over a dozen years.

He claims he’s not a fan of rock-and-roll, but somehow Harlan Ellison’s seminal novel based on the career of Jerry Lee Lewis ended up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One of the first — and still one of the best — dissections of the wildly destructive rock-and-roll lifestyle, Spider Kiss isn’t about giant cockroaches that attack Detroit or space invaders that smell like chicken soup. Instead, it’s the story of Luther Sellers, a poor kid from Louisville with a voice like an angel who’s renamed Stag Preston by a ruthless promoter. Preston’s meteoric rise on the music scene is matched only by the rise in his enormous appetites — and not just for home cooking — and soon the invisible monkey named Success is riding him straight to hell. This raucous early novel reinforces Ellison’s reputation as one of America’s most dynamic writers.

Won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1969.

In his introduction to the The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, 'noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It's the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It's the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad.' Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction.

James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, series editor of the annual The Best American Mystery Stories, mined one hundred years of writing - 1910-2010 - to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's 'Pastorale,' and its post-war heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing in the last decade.

“When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth!”

From White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil to World War Z, zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best express the fears and anxieties of the modern west. Gathering together the best zombie literature of the last three decades from many of today’s most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale, The Living Dead covers the broad spectrum of zombie fiction.

In a career spanning more than 50 years, Harlan Ellison has written or edited 75 books, more than 1700 stories, essays, articles and newspaper columns, two dozen teleplays, and a dozen movies. Now, for the first time anywhere, Troublemakers presents a collection of Ellison's classic stories — chosen by the author — that will introduce new readers to a writer described by the New York Times as having "the spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural warehouse for a mind."

Ancora un premio Nebula e ancora una storia sulla fine del mondo, ma il punto di vista di Ellison è completamente diverso da quello della Willis e anche l’impostazione delle due storie non ha nulla in comune: laddove la Willis è dolce e sensibile Ellison è duro e scioccante, brutale come soltanto lui sa esserlo. C’è una cosa tuttavia che queste due storie hanno in comune, a parte il tema: entrambe fanno ormai parte della storia della fantascienza moderna, e a ragione!

The first time in a science fiction and fantasy collection that the Jewish People—and the richness of their particular points of view—appear without a mask. A showpiece of Jewish wit, culture, and lore, blending humor and sadness, cynicism and faith.