Melchior A La Carte

With a life as wild as his fiction, the award-winning sci-fi screenwriter and novelist serves up an "e;addictive"e; anthology of short stories (Andrew Kaplan, author of the Homeland novels). A larger-than-life character before picking up the pen, Ib Melchior fought the Nazis as a counterintelligence officer and decoded Shakespeare's tomb. He was an actor in Paris and a Nordic student of Viking history. He honed his craft at the dawn of television's "e;golden age"e; in the 1950s, imagining the realms beyond as a writer and director of some of the most memorable science-fiction cult films of the 1960s, including Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Time Travelers. In this rich volume, Melchior draws on all these life experiences to deliver a literary epicurean's smorgasbord of short fiction historical, speculative, and visionary. One story explores a woman's reawakening in post-war Europe; others investigate the war zones of Iraq; expose the backstage havoc of a television quiz show; and cover the life-and-death challenge in a dystopian future and more. Melchior serves up an addendum of "e;desserts"e; in which he reveals the inspiration for each story, from the debatable identity of the Bard, to a Gestapo dog, to Hans Christian Andersen. Featuring twenty-one stories in all, Melchior A La Carte "e;is more than a potpourri of delicacies it is a feast of literary delights, reminiscent of the tales told by those master storytellers, Conrad and Maugham. In short . . . Melchior's book is a must have"e; (S. L. Stebel, author of Spring Thaw). "e;The Racer,"e; featured in this collection, was adapted twice for film as Death Race 2000 and Death Race. "e;An extraordinary storyteller . . . always provocative and wise, as he lays out the stuff of which dreams are made."e; Mann Rubin, screenwriter of The Best of Everythin