Vintage

From the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams, a highly charged, stunningly original work of fictiona passionate response to the changes shaping our country today. In nine fictional testimonies, men and women who have resisted the mainstream and who are now suddenly parties of interest to the government tell their stories.A young...

What Makes Sammy Run?Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symp-toms of our timesfrom the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out of a job in the office to the Fuehrer who shoves you out of the world. And all of us have stopped to wonder, at some time or another, what it is that...

In this searching tragicomedy of manners, personalities, and world views, E. M. Forster explores the idea of England he would later develop in Howard&'s End. Bookish, sensitive, and given to wild enthusiasms, Rickie Elliot is virtually made for a life at Cambridge, where he can subsist on a regimen of biscuits and philosophical debate. But the...

As a programmer for Galapagos Wetware, Hal Briggs is responsible for writing the genetic code for simple, efficient creatures to be employed in menial jobssweeping streets or washing dishes. But the demands for wetware are changing, and Briggs is given a project that calls for more sophisticated models: clients are demanding more human appearance...

As an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation: the belief that one day he will be a great poet. The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf...

StoriesOne of the most stunning literary debuts of our time, these energized, irreverent, and deliciously inventive stories introduce an astonishing new talent.In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man gets a special dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. The Wig takes an aging wigmaker and makes her, for a single...