"Adoro la serie di Matthew Scudder e adoro le storie brevi; e questa e la collezione completa delle storie di Scudder. Una delle piu belle e Alle prime luci dell'alba, vincitrice del premio Edgar Allan Poe." - Otto Penzler, Los Angeles Times, Ten Most Wanted Books of 2011 "La storia che da il titolo alla raccolta e un pezzo d'atmosfera, brillantemente raccontato, che piacera a quelli che hanno seguito Scudder nel suo viaggio lungo la vita. E' un raro momento di pura umanita nel mondo di Scudder e serve a fare capire che Scudder e molto di piu di un investigatore privato, che la sua storia non...

A partir de su debut en 1977, Bernie Rhodenbarr se ha ganado la entusiasta admiracion de un publico internacional cada vez mas numeroso. Este caballero, con su corazon ligero y sus dedos mas ligeros aun, cuyos talentos detectivescos lo sacan de los apuros en que lo meten sus habilidades de ladron, se roba de paso los corazones y las mentes de los lectores. Los ladrones no pueden escoger es su primera aparicion."

One morning in the spring of 1958 I woke up in my room at the Hotel Alexandria with a paralyzing hangover (which was not unusual) and an idea for a book (which was). I sat in front of my typewriter, and within a few hours I had produced a chapter-by-chapter outline of a novel. I had all the characters sketched out and knew how they'd relate to one another, and how the rather elementary storyline would resolve itself. I even had a title: SHADOWS. At the time I was working as an editor at a shady literary agency, but I'd already arranged for my departure, as I'd be resuming college in the fall...

Here's what someone wrote as the book description for an earlier edition of WARM AND WILLING: "An emotionally and sexually frustrated divorcee explores her mounting attraction to women. Rhoda's divorce has her thinking that romance is not for her. But maybe she just needs to look in a new direction. Megan is an attractive blonde who instantly sees what Rhoda's love life has been missing: a woman's touch. As Megan guides Rhoda into the sensuous - but hidden - world of women who love women, the two unlock a passion that may be too hot to contain. There are a lot of beautiful women in the...

Here's what someone wrote as the book description for an earlier edition of ENOUGH OF SORROW: "From master storyteller Lawrence Block comes one girl's journey toward self-discovery and sexual freedom....Karen Winslow is starting over. But she's not sure how to move forward when her deepest secret haunts her and keeps her from enjoying her carefree youth. She's a sweet but troubled young thing, and not until she meets Rae, a confident young lesbian, does she realize what she's been missing. Meanwhile, she's also intrigued by a man and can't help but wonder if a normal life will put an end her...

THIRTY, as intensely erotic a book as I'd ever written, is what happened after I stopped writing erotica. Beginning with CARLA in 1958, I spent half a dozen years laboring in the vineyards of Midcentury Erotica, writing no end of books for Midwood, Nightstand, Beacon, et.al. It was a wonderful training ground, a comfortingly forgiving medium, and I've never regretted the timer I spent there, although for a time I wanted to disown the work I produced. (That changed with the passage of time, and now I've been eagerly reissuing much of that early work in my Collection of Classic Erotica. I like...

Jill Emerson, whose first three works were gentle explorations of the lesbian experience, took a sharp turn toward candor in THIRTY, her first book for Berkley. As I've explained in the book description for that novel, around the time Berkley came calling (via my agent) I'd become disenchanted with the whole notion of fiction recounted by some disembodied third- or first-person narrator. It struck me as artificial, and my response was to pile artifice upon artifice and produce a novel in the guise of an actual document. In THIRTY, the novel pretended to be a diary. That worked fine, and the...

After spending her girlhood writing gentle and thoughtful novels of the lesbian experience (SHADOWS, WARM AND WILLING, ENOUGH OF SORROW), Jill Emerson reinvented herself in the early 1970s, just when contemporary literature was experiencing an enormous flowering of sexuality. Even as the whole culture rocked with the sexual revolution, popular fiction echoed this change with a flinging off of censorship and a surge of sexual candor. And Jill wrote three books for Berkley. The first, THIRTY, was in the form of a diary, piling incident upon incident as the diarist, a woman in her thirtieth...

In early 1969, I moved with my wife and daughters to an 18th century farmhouse on twelve rolling acres a mile east of the Delaware River. We kept a variety of animals and grew things in the garden, and this was as I'd expected. But there were two things I did not anticipate. One was that I would have to go away from there, all the way back to New York City, to get any work done. The other was that I'd open an art gallery. The art gallery was in New Hope, right across the river from Lambertville. New Hope had long had a reputation as an artists' colony and boasted a little theater and a batch...