"A master storyteller at his best--the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story. Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the...

Holly Gibney (from Stephen King's Bill Hodges trilogy and The outsider) must face her fears and possibly another outsider--this time on her own. In "Mr. Harrigan's Phone," an intergenerational friendship has a disturbing afterlife. "The Life of Chuck" explores, beautifully, how each of us contains multitudes. And in "Rat," a struggling writer must contend with the darker side of ambition. If these stories show King's range, they also prove that certain...

"John Mellencamp is not your typical rock star. Not only has he absorbed into his own work the influence of Faulkner, Williams, Steinbeck and other such literary giants, but he himself could have stepped straight from the pages of any of their great American novels. A complex, colorful and larger than life character, Mellencamp, like Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash before him, walks to the beat of his own drum. Or, as he told author and veteran music journalist,...