Sympathy

The devil appears in many guises in these stories and fables collected by science fiction and fantasy writer Tim Pratt. He's often nattily dressed in sharkskin or a pinstriped double-breasted suit with fedora, or, as in Stephen King's story, a simple black suit with gold watch chain. Whatever his appetites, for tasty little boys, nuclear destruction, or a little fun with a bored teenager on a summer afternoon, with his knacks for shape-changing and time/space travel, the devil doesn't play fair.

The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon. For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction.