Rediscover the Early Ellison. This collection restores to print fifteen never-collected tales from the first dozen years of his career. Hard-hitting crime stories like "Thrill Kill," "Girl at Gunpoint," "Kill Joy," "Knife/Death" and "Burn My Killers!" share the table of contents with stories of betrayal, including "Death Climb," "Riff," "Mac's Girl," and "The Honor in the Dying." And, together for the first time, Ellison's three detective stories featuring insurance investigator Jerry Killian. Toss in the solo outing of a diminutive private dick named Big John Novak (of whom Ellison expected to write much more, but never did) and a sexy Western called "Saddle Tramp" and you've got quite an assemblage of tales from the seamier side of life. All that, plus "The Final Movement," a never-before-published story from the mid-1950s. Better than a poke in the eye with a white-hot bone of Amenhotep, I think you'll agree.
About the Author: HARLAN ELLlSON(R) has been characterized by The New York Times Book Review as having "the spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural warehouse for a mind." The Los Angeles Times suggested, "It's long past time for Harlan Ellison to be awarded the title: 20th century Lewis Carroll." And the Washington Post Book World said simply, "One of the great living American short story writers." He has written or edited 100 books; more than 1700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns; two dozen teleplays, for which he received the Writers Guild of America most outstanding teleplay award for solo work an unprecedented 4 times; and a dozen movies. Publishers Weekly called him "Highly Intellectual." (Ellison's response: "Who, Me?"). He won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award twice, the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker award 6 times (including The Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996), the Nebula award of the Science Fiction Writers of America 4 times, the Hugo (World Convention Achievement award) 8 1/2 times, and received the Silver Pen for Journalism from P.E.N. Not to mention the World Fantasy Award; the British Fantasy Award; the American Mystery Award; plus 2 Audie Awards and 2 Grammy nominations for Spoken Word recordings. He created great fantasies for the 1985 CBS revival of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, traveled with The Rolling Stones; marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery; created roles for Buster Keaton, Wally Cox, Gloria Swanson, and nearly 100 other stars on Burke's Law; ran with a kid gang in Brooklyn's Red Hook to get background for his first novel; covered race riots in Chicago's "back of the yards" with the late James Baldwin; sang with, and dined with, Maurice Chevalier; once stood off the son of the Detroit Mafia kingpin with a Remington XP-l00 pistol-rifle, while wearing nothing but a bath towel; sued Paramount and ABC-TV for plagiarism and won $337,000. His most recent legal victory, in protection of copyright against global Internet piracy of writers' work-a four-year-long litigation against AOL et al.-has resulted in revolutionizing protection of creative properties on the web. (As promised, he repaid hundreds of contributions [totaling $50,000] from the KICK Internet Piracy support fund.) But the bottom line, as voiced by Booklist, is this: "One thing for sure: the man can write." He lives with his wife, Susan, inside The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars, in Los Angeles.