Böcker av Barry N. Malzberg

COLLABORATIVE CAPERSSome writers feel that collaboration requires twice the work for half the reward. Barry N. Malzberg is not one of them.You hold the proof in your hands. In Collaborative Capers, you'll find more than two dozen extraordinary short stories written in collaboration with an assortment of wild talents during the past five decades. That includes writers like Mike Resnick, Kris Neville, Jack Dann, Paul Di Filippo, Batya Swift Yasgur, Robert Friedman, and many more.In these remarkable duets, Barry N. Malzberg's powerful, compelling voice blends with those of his collaborators to create unique harmonies that linger.

READY WHEN YOU AREThis remarkable collection highlights the quality, range, and idiosyncratic creativity of Barry N. Malzberg's work both inside and outside of the science fiction genre.Some of these stories could have been published anywhere (and, in fact, two of them appeared in BEST MYSTERIES OF THE YEAR anthologies). Many of them read as if Samuel Beckett woke up one day and decided to write absurdist science fiction exploring the existential comedy and sorrow of modern life. Other stories can break a reader's heart. And often the comic and tragic live side by side in the same story.It's amazing to see what Malzberg was able to pull off while working within - and expanding - the confines of salable genre fiction. The fascinating introduction and afterwords explain what he was up to and why. But don't take our word for it. Read this splendid collection and find out for yourself.

"Come on," Wulff said after a while. "You can talk now. Tell me."Díaz lay there. It would be interesting to study the psychology of a man who had reached absolute hopelessness, Wulff thought, but he did not have the time for that now. "Names and addresses," he said, "or I'll kick you again, and this time I won't go low." Díaz began to talk. He told Wulff what he wanted to know, with admirable specifics. Wulff listened without comment. It was highly interesting. He would not have imagined, having gone this far in, that there was this much of a new echelon left. It just went to show you that enterprise was endless."All right," Wulff said when the man was finished. "Thank you very much." He leveled the gun at Díaz and shot him in the head three times. Then he put the gun away and went out of the room and started immediately upon his final mission...The final, climactic conclusion to the Lone Wolf series, originally published by Berkley Books in the early 1970s under the name "Mike Barry."

Burt Wulff, after two years in the army, most of it in Vietnam, had been entitled to something nice for his trouble, so they had made him a narco. A New York City narcotics cop, with the freedom and the plainclothes and the graft money... but something had happened to this Wulff overseas: he had gone crazy. He had become a man of integrity. Eventually he tried to bust an informant, and they knew they would have to do something about this wild man...When Wulff saw his fiancée OD'd out on the floor, he thought that he might go mad on the spot but quite strangely he did not. Wulff went straight home and discarded everything except his gun and a spare. They were hardly the equipment he would need but they were a beginning. By mid-summer, he had the beginnings of an operation in his mind. The rest he would have to play by ear. Wulff hit the streets to kill a lot of people. The 11th and 12th books in Malzberg's vigilante series, The Lone Wolf, originally published by Berkley Books in the early 1970s under the name "Mike Barry."

Some innocent people were going to be badly hurt. But he had to remember that there was no innocence in this trade, that anyone and everything touched by junk became irretrievably rotten and then had to pay the price. If he began to think of checks and balances, levels of thought, then he was beginning only to think like a cop or a bureaucrat again. That was why the enforcers were only another component of the disease; because they refused to accept responsibility and follow it through.To fight vermin you had to be one.Burt Wulff is beyond forgiveness, beyond vengeance. He is the Lone Wolf.

A collected columns explore every aspect of the literary genre, from writing to marketing to publishing, combining wit and insight with decades of experience in 25 topics.