Search Worlds Without End

Her Grandmother may be dead, but she's not done with life... yet.

As Jessamyn packs for Malaysia, it's not a good time to start hearing a bossy voice in her head. Broke, jobless and just graduated, she's abandoning America to return 'home'. But she last saw Malaysia as a toddler - and is completely unprepared for its ghosts, gods and her eccentric family's shenanigans.

Jess soon learns her 'voice' belongs to Ah Ma, her late grandmother. She worshipped the Black Water Sister, a local deity. And when a business magnate dared to offend her goddess, Ah Ma swore revenge. Now she's decided Jess will help, whether she wants to or not.

As Ah Ma blackmails Jess into compliance, Jess fights to retain control. But her irrepressible relative isn't going to let a little thing like death stop her, when she can simply borrow Jess's body to make mischief. As Jess is drawn ever deeper into a world of peril and family secrets, getting a job becomes the least of her worries.

This huge anthology offers a kaleidoscope of brilliant writing from the Magi of the imagination. Alberto Manguel has selected 72 fantastic tales from life on the edge of the twilight zone, with stories from Marguerite Yourcenar, Herman Hesse, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, and many, many more. This is a collection of irresistible masterpieces, many of which have never before appeared in the English language.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - Alberto Manguel
• House Taken Over - Julio Cortázar - 1967
• How Love Came to Professor Guildea - Robert S. Hichens - 1897
• Climax for a Ghost Story - I. A. Ireland - 1919
• The Mysteries of the Joy Rio - Tennessee Williams - 1954
• Pomegranate Seed - Edith Wharton - 1931
• Venetian Masks - Adolfo Bioy Casares
• The Wish House - Rudyard Kipling - 1924
• The Playground - Ray Bradbury - 1953
• Importance - Manuel Mujica Lainez - 1978
• Enoch Soames - Max Beerbohm - 1916
• A Visitor from Down Under - L. P. Hartley - 1926
• Laura - Saki - 1914
• An Injustice Revealed - Anon.
• A Little Place Off the Edgware Road - Graham Greene - 1947
• From "A School Story" - M. R. James - 1911
• The Signalman - Charles Dickens - 1866
• The Tall Woman - Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
• A Scent of Mimosa - Francis King - 1975
• Death and the Gardener - Jean Cocteau - 1923
• Lord Mountdrago - W. Somerset Maugham - 1939
• The Sick Gentleman's Last Visit - Giovanni Papini - 1907
• Insomnia - Virgilio Pinera
• The Storm - Jules Verne - 1884
• A Dream (from The Arabian Nights Entertainments) - Anon.
• The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - Edgar Allan Poe - 1845
• Split Second - Daphne du Maurier - 1952
• August 25, 1983 - Jorge Luís Borges - 1982
• How Wang-Fo Was Saved - Marguerite Yourcenar - 1963
• From "Peter and Rosa" - Isak Dinesen - 1942
• Tattoo - Junichiro Tanizaki - 1910
• John Duffy's Brother - Flann O'Brien - 1941
• Lady into Fox - David Garnett - 1923
• Father's Last Escape - Bruno Schulz - 1937
• A Man by the Name of Ziegler - Hermann Hesse - 1954
• The Argentine Ant - Italo Calvino - 1957
• The Lady on the Grey - John Collier - 1951
• The Queen of Spades - Alexander Sergeievitch Pushkin- 1834
• Of a Promise Kept - Lafcadio Hearn - 1901
• The Wizard Postponed - Juan Manuel - 1973
• The Monkey's Paw - W. W. Jacobs - 1902
• The Bottle Imp - Robert Louis Stevenson - 1891
• The Rocking-Horse Winner - D. H. Lawrence - 1926
• Certain Distant Suns - Joanne Greenburg - 1979
• The Third Bank of the River - João Guimarães Rosa - 1967
• Home - Hilaire Belloc
• The Door in the Wall - H. G. Wells - 1906
• The Friends - Silvina Ocampo - 1982
• Et in Sempiternum Pereant - Charles Williams - 1935
• The Captives of Longjumeau - Léon Bloy - 1967
• The Visit to the Museum - Vladimir Nabokov - 1958
• "Autumn Mountain" - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
• The Sight - Brian Moore - 1977
• Clorinda - André Pieyre de Mandiargues - 1979
• The Pagan Rabbi - Cynthia Ozick - 1966
• The Fisherman and His Soul - Oscar Wilde - 1891
• The Bureau d'Echange de Maux - Lord Dunsany - 1915
• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin - 1973
• In the Penal Colony - Franz Kafka - 1919.
• A Dog in Durer's Etching "The Knight, Death and The Devil" - Marco Denevi - 1968
• The Large Ant - Howard Fast - 1960
• The Lemmings - Alex Comfort
• The Grey Ones - J. B. Priestley - 1953
• The Feather Pillow - Horacio Quiroga - 1907
• Seaton's Aunt - Walter de la Mare - 1922
• The Friends of the Friends - Henry James - 1896
• The Travelling Companion - Hans Christian Andersen - 1835
• The Curfew Tolls - Stephen Vincent Benét - 1935
• The State of Grace - Marcel Aymé - 1959
• The Story of a Panic - E. M. Forster - 1904
• An Invitation to the Hunt - George Hitchcock - 1960
• From the "American Notebooks" - Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1868
• The Dream - O. Henry - 1910

The original Black Water was hailed by the Washington Post as "a celebration of nightmarish imagination." Now master anthologist Alberto Manguel assembles 70 more hypnotic tales from such writers as Julian Barnes, Joseph Conrad, V.S. Naipaul, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.B. White, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Elizabeth Bowen.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - Alberto Manguel
• The Child Who Believed - Grace Amundson - 1950
• It's a Good Life - Jerome Bixby - 1953
• The Door - E. B. White - 1939
• Mysterious Kôr - Elizabeth Bowen - 1945
• Nights at Serampore - Mircea Eliade - 1970
• The Dead Fiddler - Isaac Bashevis Singer - 1966
• The Phoenix - Sylvia Townsend Warner - 1940
• The Spider - Hanns Heinz Ewers - 1915
• Changeling - Dorothy K. Haynes - 1978
• The July Ghost - Antonia S. Byatt - 1982
• Poor Girl - Elizabeth Taylor - 1955
• Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched - 1922
• The Complete Gentleman - Amos Tutuola - 1952
• The Professor and the Mermaid - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - 1962
• The Sausage - Friedrich Dürrenmatt - 1989
• A Woman Seldom Found - William Sansom - 1956
• Mummy to the Rescue - Angus Wilson - 1950
• Aghwee the Sky Monster - Kenzaburõ Õe - 1977
• Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe - Liliana Heker - 1986
• The Saint - Antonia White - 1931
• The Ghost of Firozsha Baag - Rohinton Mistry - 1986
• The Miracle of Ash Wednesday - Yevgeny Zamyatin - 1968
• Heartburn - Hortense Calisher - 1951
• The Accident - Ann Bridge - 1936
• The Old Woman - Joyce Marshall - 1960
• A Short Trip Home - F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1927
• The Brute - Joseph Conrad - 1906
• Mr. Sleepwalker - Ethel Wilson - 1961
• A Self-Possessed Woman - Julian Barnes - 1975
• The Woman Who Talked to Horses - Leon Rooke - 1984
• The White Rooster - William Goyen - 1947
• The Labrenas - Tommaso Landolfi - 1986
• The Dead Fish - Boris Vian - 1965
• Major Aranda's Hand - Alfonso Reyes - 1973
• Giving Birth - Margaret Atwood - 1977
• The Jewbird - Bernard Malamud - 1963
• The Misanthrope - John D. Beresford - 1918
• Bartleby - Herman Melville - 1853
• Private--Keep Out! - Philip MacDonald - 1949
• Dreams - Timothy Findley - 1988
• Mr. Dombey, the Zombie - Geoffrey Drayton - 1951
• Why I Changed into a Nightingale - Wolfgang Hildesheimer - 1986
• The Troll - T. H. White - 1935
• Two Words - Isabel Allende - 1991
• Ch'ien-niang - Chen Xuanyou - 1990
• The Visiting Star - Robert Aickman - 1966
• Ratanbabu and the Man - Satyajit Ray - 1987
• How It Happened - Arthur Conan Doyle - 1913
• Same Time, Same Place - Mervyn Peake - 1963
• The Enigma of Arrival - V. S. Naipaul - 1986
• Faithful Peter - Lion Feuchtwanger - 1945
• The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship - Gabriel García Márquez - 1972
• The House-Hunters - Peter Green - 1963
• The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman - 1892
• Eckhardt at a Window - Eric McCormack - 1987
• The Lefthanders - Günter Grass - 1989
• Mr. Arcularis - Conrad Aiken - 1922
• The Times My Father Died - Yehuda Amichai - 1984
• The Haunted House - Luigi Pirandello - 1939
• The Finder - Elizabeth Spencer - 1971
• Desire - James Stephens - 1920
• The Miraculous Revenge - George Bernard Shaw - 1951
• Room of Blood - Brett Balon - 1984
• The Shadow - Ben Hecht - 1926
• The Nine Billion Names of God - Arthur C. Clarke - 1953

Now, McDowell's masterpiece--the serial novel, Blackwater--returns to thrill and terrify a new generation of readers, with all six volumes available for the first time as a single e-book.

Featuring an insightful new introduction by John Langan, Blackwater traces more than fifty years in the lives of the powerful Caskey family of Perdido, Alabama, under the influence of the mysterious and beautiful--but not quite human--Elinor Dammert.

The Flood heralds the arrival of a visitor who will change the Caskey family--and the town--forever...

When the town builds The Levee, it proves a vain attempt to control a horrific power that can never be contained...

The House hides terrible secrets that whisper in closed rooms and scrabble at locked doors...

The War reveals family secrets more deadly and devastating than anything Perdido has ever dreamed in its deepest nightmares...

The Fortune brings happiness and power--but even greater terror...

And finally, the mysterious saga of the Caskey family ends the only way it can--in terrible judgment and fury delivered under the cover of a relentless, earth-shattering Rain.

The mysterious saga of the Caskey family begins in Blackwater I: The Flood, as a devastating flood brings a strange and beautiful visitor to the small, sleepy lumber town of Perdido, Alabama.

Elinor Dammert's arrival will forever change the town and the wealthy and powerful Caskey family.

James, who dotes on Elinor like a second daughter...

Sister, who pines for Elinor's strength and independence...

Oscar, who loves Elinor and determines to build a life with her...

And matriarch Mary-Love, perhaps the only person in Perdido with an inkling of Elinor's true power and purpose.

For Elinor is more than she appears, and she brings to Perdido--and to the Caskeys--a deadly, inexplicable otherness from which no one can ever be safe.

In Blackwater I: The Flood, McDowell introduced readers to the powerful Caskey family of Perdido, Alabama, whose lives were irrevocably changed by the arrival of the strange and beautiful Elinor Dammert.

Now the mysterious saga of the Caskey family continues in Blackwater II: The Levee.

Through a startling sacrifice, Elinor has finally managed to wrench her husband Oscar away from his powerful and demanding mother, Mary-Love.

But Mary-Love Caskey is not one to relinquish power easily, and she knows precisely the revenge that will hurt Elinor most.

As work begins on the levee that will block Elinor's beloved river from view, the two women battle for control of the Caskey family and perhaps the very soul of the town itself.

A strange child is born and baptized secretly in the dark waters of the Perdido River...

A lonely spinster turns to dark magic that will haunt her for the remainder of her life...

And a damaged boy goes for a walk in the moonlight and encounters something beyond his wildest nightmares...

Elinor Caskey's daughters, Miriam and Frances, have grown up next door to one another but separated by a veritable ocean of differences.

Miriam is spoiled and doted upon by her grandmother Mary-Love, while Frances is entirely Elinor's little girl... with all the mystery and otherness such a legacy entails.

As the Great Depression begins, the Caskey family grows ever more wealthy and powerful, and the enmity between Elinor and Mary-Love grows ever more deadly.

An unwelcome visitor makes the fatal mistake of attacking the Caskeys and then seeking escape across the dark river...

Oscar begins to suspect that Elinor is hiding secrets he can never hope to fathom...

And Mary-Love finally realizes the true and terrible extent of her adversary's overwhelming power...

A family war has ended, but a world war is about to begin--one that will prove yet another boon to the wealthy and powerful Caskeys.

As lumber orders pour in from the war effort, the Caskeys seem at times almost preternaturally charmed.

But secrets flow about the family as well, treacherous as the murky waters of the Perdido River.

A secret hidden deep in the woods, discovered by two young soldiers on their way to the war...

A secret revealed in the waters of a nearby lake, far more dangerous than the alligator that sometimes swims there...

And soon the mysterious Elinor will reveal the biggest secret of all--the secret that will change the Caskey family forever.

Already the most powerful family in Perdido, the Caskeys will soon experience success beyond their wildest imaginings. But prosperity comes with a price, and in the end even the Caskeys must pay.

One woman will risk everything to rid herself of the dreams she once begged for...

Another will make herself brutal in business and even more unyielding with the family that loves her...

And a third will finally confront her mysterious and terrible otherness as she faces marriage and motherhood and the relentless pleading call of the dark river...

Time heals old wounds and dissipates old illusions as a new generation of Caskeys ascends to power.

But even unimaginable wealth can't protect the Caskey family from the sins of its past or the judgment that is soon coming due.

An unexpected union brings joy and tragedy in equal measure...

Secrets long forgotten bubble to the surface of the dark river, and scrabble at the door of an abandoned room...

And a tragic encounter in the swamp conjures a storm the likes of which Perdido hasn't seen since the great flood of 1919...

Table of Contents:

• Blackwater Days - interior artwork by Shaun Tan
• Downloading - (1998) - novelette
• Beckoning Nightframe - (1996) - shortstory
• First Interview: A Journey - shortstory
• Basic Black - novelette
• Second Interview: Psychosleuths - shortstory
• The Saltimbanques - (2000) - novelette
• Third Interview: A Forgetting - shortstory
• Jenny Come to Play - (1997) - novelette
• Light from the Deep Pavilion - shortstory
• Blackwater Days - novelette
• L'Envoi: A Homecoming - shortstory