TO STAN, CHRISTOPHER AND MICHELE RICE TO SUZANNE SCOTT QUIROZ AND VICTORIA WILSON TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN PRESTON TO THE IRISH OF NEW ORLEANS WHO, IN THE 1850S, BUILT ON CONSTANCE STREET THE GREAT CHURCH OF ST. ALPHONSUS, WHILE PASSING ON TO US THROUGH FAITH, ARCHITECTURE AND ART A SPLENDID MONUMENT TO "THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE AND THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME" Of Mrs. Moore and the echo in the Marabar Caves: ...but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. ing at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur "Pathos, piety, courage - they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value."...
I HAD BEEN making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me. At the north end of the island, near the tumbled remains of the slip where the handle of the rusty winch still creaks in an easterly wind, I had two Poles on the far face of the last dune. One of the Poles held a rat head with two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice. I was just sticking one of the mouse heads back on when the birds went up into the evening air, kaw-calling and screaming, wheeling over the path through the dunes where it went near their nests. I made sure the head was secure, then clambered to the top
Anselme, who has ever been acknowledged as the first and perhaps the greatest of all the troubadours of Arbonne, was of modest birth, the youngest son of a clerk in the castle of a baron near Cauvas. He was of middling height, dark haired, with a quiet manner in speech that was nonetheless wondrously pleasing to all who heard him. While yet tender in years, he showed great skill and interest in music and was invited to join the celebrated choir of the Cauvas sanctuary of the god. It was not long, however, before he felt the beginnings of a desire to make music very different from that acceptable in the service of the god, or indeed of the goddess Rian in her temples. And so Anselme left
December 29th: A lone figure, hunched down against the howling winter wind, moved step by frozen step through the Colorado wilderness. He was ill clad for such a winter trek, wearing soft thin boots and a clinging mauve with-sparkles tunic. His only defenses against the cold were an engineer cap on his platinum-blond thin hair and a scarf made of an old piece of furniture fabric wrapped several times around his thin pale neck. The wanderer was nearly frozen to death, his cracked and bleeding gloveless hands shoved into small pockets lined with tissue paper. His pale face, buried in the fabric of the scarf, was likewise a mass of cracks. His reddish albino eyes were swollen. Anyone could t
Gentle reader, hear Poliphilo tell of his dreams, Dreams sent by the highest heaven. You will not waste your labour, nor will listening irk you, For this wonderful work abounds in so many things. If, grave and dour, you despise love-stories, Know, I pray, that things are well ordered herein. You refuse? But at least the style, with its novel language, Grave discourse and wisdom, mands attention. If you refuse this, too, note the geometry, The many ancient things expressed in Nilotic signs . . . Here you will see the perfect palaces of kings, The worship of nymphs, fountains and rich banquets. The guards dance, dressed in motley, and the whole Of human life is expressed in dark labyrinths.
On a Saturday morning in early August in 1969, a series of bizarre and inexplicable events occurred aboard the fifty-five-thousand-ton luxury liner S.S. Bretagne as it was preparing to sail from the Port of New York to Le Havre. Claude Dessard, chief purser of the Bretagne, a capable and meticulous man, ran, as he was fond of saying, a "tight ship". In the fifteen years Dessard had served aboard the Bretagne, he had never encountered a situation he had not been able to deal with efficiently and discreetly. Considering that the S.S. Bretagne was a French ship, this was high tribute, indeed. However, on this particular summer day it was as though a thousand devils were conspiring against him
Acknowledgments A casebook edition of any work of literature is necessarily the result of work and good will by numerous people. We are deeply indebted to the writers who contributed the original materials contained in this volume. We also wish to thank the authors, editors, and publishers who so kindly granted permissions for use of the previously published materials collected in this volume. Full acknowledgment for their valuable aid is printed in the headnote for each of the articles as well as original sources of publication. The editors gratefully acknowledge the special courtesies of William Golding, J. T. C. Golding, Frank Kermode, Donald R. Spangler, Bruce P. Woodford, A. C. Will
Inasmuch as the scene of this story is that historic pile, Belpher Castle, in the county of Hampshire, it would be an agreeable task to open it with a leisurely description of the place, followed by some notes on the history of the Earls of Marshmoreton, who have owned it since the fifteenth century. Unfortunately, in these days of rush and hurry, a novelist works at a disadvantage. He must leap into the middle of his tale with as little delay as he would employ in boarding a moving tramcar. He must get off the mark with the smooth swiftness of a jack-rabbit surprised while lunching. Otherwise, people throw him aside and go out to picture palaces. I may briefly remark that the present Lor
The whine of Troft thrusters drifted in through the window on the late-summer breezes, jarring Jonny Moreau awake. For one heart-wrenching moment he was back in the midst of the Adirondack war; but as he tipped his recliner back to vertical the abrupt stab of pain in elbows and knees snapped him back to the present. For a minute he just sat there, gazing out the window at the Capitalia skyline and trying to bring his brain and body back on-line. Then, reaching carefully to his desk, he jabbed at the inter button on his phone. "Yes, Governor?" Theron Yutu said. Jonny leaned back in his chair again, snagging a bottle of pain pills from the desktop as he did so. "Is Corwin back from the Coun
What I did was take all the spades out of a deck of cards plus a joker. Ace to King = 1-13. Joker = 14. I shuffled the cards and dealt them. The order in which they came out of the deck became the order of the stories, based on their position in the list my publisher sent me. And it actually created a very nice balance between the literary stories and the all-out screamers. I also added an explanatory note before or after each story, depending on which seemed the more fitting position. Next collection: selected by Tarot. Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art Autopsy Room Four The Man in the Black Suit All That You Love Will Be Carried Away...
Douglas Preston dedicates this book to Stuart Woods. Acknowledgments Lincoln Child wishes to thank Bruce Swanson, Bry Benjamin, M.D., Lee Suckno, M.D., Irene Soderlund, Mary Ellen Mix, Bob Wincott, Sergio and Mila Nepomuceno, Jim Cush, Chris Yango, Jim Jenkins, Mark Mendel, Juliette Kvernland, Hartley Clark, and Denis Kelly, for their friendship and their assistance, both technical and otherwise. Thanks also to my wife, Luchie, for her love and unstinting support. And I would especially like to acknowledge as an inspiration my grandmother Nora Kubie. Artist, novelist, archaeologist, independent spirit, biographer of Nineveh excavator Austen Henry Layard, she instilled in me from a very ea
It was the same old rigmarole. Sometimes I found it amusing; sometimes it only bored me; sometimes it gave me a pronounced pain, especially when I had had more of Wolfe than was good for either of us. This time it was fairly funny at first, but it developed along regrettable lines. Mr. Jasper Pine, president of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., 914 William Street, down where a thirty-story building is a shanty, wanted Nero Wolfe to e to see him about something. I explained patiently, all about Wolfe being too lazy, too big and fat, and too much of a genius, to let himself be evoked. When Mr. Pine phoned again, in the afternoon, he insisted on speaking to Wolfe himself, and Wolfe made it short, sour, an