The need for love-obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable-takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In the suspenseful "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men-can she "outplay" them? In "Smother!" a young woman's nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble...

25 crime stories published between 1952-1957 written by Ed McBain under various pseudonyms.

In the stories and novellas he wrote for Black Mask and other pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Dashiell Hammett took the detective story and turned it into a medium for capturing the jarring textures and revved-up cadences of modern American life. In this volume, The Library of America collects the finest of these stories: 24 in all, along with some revealing essays and an earlier version of his novel The Thin Man. Mixing melodramatic panache...

A collection of 34 detective stories, tracing the development of the genre from Edgar Allen Poe's The Murder in the Rue Morgue, through William Faulkner's An Error in Chemistry, up to the present.