Playboy stories

From the inception of Playboy in 1953, the magazine made it clear that publishing fiction of the highest quality would be an essential part of its philosophy. This superlative gathering of stories offers persuasive proof of how well the magazine has lived up to that intent. It was a daunting task to select the very best short story from each of Playboy's forty years - with a special bonus from 1971, when tales by Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, at his most magically sensuous, and Vladimir Nabokov, at his most wickedly witty, both irresistibly demanded to be included. The result is an enthralling array that well may amaze even the most ardent Playboy fans, not to mention those unfamiliar with the stellar quality of the magazine and the rich variety of literary genius that has graced its pages. Marquez is but one of the Nobel Prize winners offered here. There is Isaac Bashevis Singer's marvelous story of Holocaust survivors in Miami, and Nadine Gordimer's probing questions of life and death in South Africa. Such names as Joyce Carol Oates, James Jones, Jack Kerouac, James Thurber, Nelson Algren, Bernard Malamud, Shirley Jackson, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, John Cheever, Jo