Barry N. Malzberg's fiction earned him the 1973 John W. Campbell Memorial Award, nominations for the Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, as well as two Hugo and six Nebula Award nominations. Born in 1939, he earned a degree from Syracuse University, worked for the New York City government, and made his first professional fiction sale in 1966. He wrote in a variety of genres under several pseudonyms, and also worked as an agent, editor, and reviewer.
But he is perhaps best known for his essays. His two earlier collections of essays, The Engines of the Night (1982) and Breakfast in the Ruins (2007) both won the Locus Award, and both were finalists for the Hugo Award.
As he says in his own afterword to this volume, "Very few writers of fiction are able to produce personal essays at the level of their best (or even worst) fiction; Mailer is an exception, but it could be argued that he was always a polemicist; Nabokov was usually an exception but VN conformed to no ordinary standard as we know. I did get better, and somewhere in the course of that improvement I found that my interest in fiction was steadily diminishing. The bibliographers can prove that I wrote it to some standard, but ever more as the polity and its politics crawled toward disaster, I found that I was losing patience and faith in the form. In 1960, Phillip Roth had published a subsequently famous essay arguing that in the United States, technology and its disastrous consequences had utterly overwhelmed fiction's feebler ability to invent, influence, sway a wide audience. Evident 58 years ago, that declaration seems now to be inarguable. There was not a novelist in town unshaken by 9-11, the catastrophic event seemed to mock the authors' necessary belief in the importance of the form itself. And now we have encountered a spectacle of power so cruel, remote, distanced, and self-serving that recognizing one's helplessness seems the only logical default. Non-fiction, the personal essay, has at least the possibility of testimony, an unshielded immediacy."
Collected here are nearly fifty of Malzberg's latest essays. They may upset you, may depress you, may shock you, but they will make you think, and lead you to a different view of the world. Also included are introductions by Mike Resnick and Paul Di Filippo.
