Collecting Myself: The Uncollected Stories of Barry N. Malzberg
(Stark House, March 8, 2024). Cover by Jeff Jordan

Barry N. Malzberg has had an enormously prolific career. He published his first science fiction story the August 1967 issue of Galaxy magazine, and over the next six decades has produced an astounding 500+ short stories, dozens of novels, eleven anthologies, and nearly two dozen collections. These days he’s well known as a genre historian and critic. That’s him on the back cover above, looking suitably curmudgeonly.

He’s currently enjoying something of a career renaissance, courtesy of editor Robert Friedman and publisher Gregory Shepard at Stark House Press, who together have returned some thirty-five Malzberg books to print. To mark that accomplishment, their latest Malzberg volume is something special. Not a reprint at all, but a brand new volume gathering thirty-five uncollected short stories. Collecting Myself: The Uncollected Stories of Barry N. Malzberg will be available on March 8.

[Click the images to collect bigger versions.]

A sample of the many Malzberg volumes from Stark House: three pairs of novels (Fire/Machine,
A Way with All Maidens A Satyr’s Romance, and Oracle of the Thousand Hands/In My Parents’
Bedroom) and three volumes of collections (The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady/In the Stone
House, Collaborative Capers, and Ready When You Are & Other Stories). Stark House, 2021-2023

Until I started receiving review copies from Stark House, I had no idea of the depth and range of Malzberg’s catalog. I’d followed his SF career with keen interest — especially his early novels like Beyond Apollo, Phase IV, and Galaxies, and his very fine anthologies, like The End of Summer: Science Fiction of the Fifties (with Bill Pronzini), The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (with Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini), and The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time. His splendid collection of critical essays on SF, The Engines of the Night, won the Locus Award in 1983.

But I had no idea he’d produced such a wide range of mystery, contemporary, crime, and even erotic fiction. Stark House has covered the gamut of his early career, bringing long-neglected work back onto the shelves, like his Vietnam novel Fire, his comic romp Underlay, his early erotic novels Oracle of the Thousand Hands and In My Parents’ Bedroom, and fourteen volumes of his Lone Wolf thriller series, starting with Night Raider.

Collecting Myself: The Uncollected Stories of Barry N. Malzberg gathers no less than 35 short stories, originally published in places like Nova 1 and 2, F&SF, New England Ghosts, Fantastic, Twilight Zone Magazine, Weird Tales, and Terry Carr’s Universe 15.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

Introduction
“Terminus Est”
“Making Titan”
“Exploration”
“Conquest”
“Two Odysseys into the Center”
“Dreaming and Conversations: Two Rules by Which to Live”
“Conversations at Lothar’s”
“Triptych”
“The Wonderful, All-Purpose Transmogrifier”
“Revelation in Seven Stages”
“There the Lovelies Bleeding”
“1984”
“Johann Sebastian Brahms”
“The Queen of Lower Saigon”
“Ambition”
“No Hearts, No Flowers”
“Safety Zone”
“One Ten Three”
“Dumbarton Oaks”
“Gotterdammerung”
“Is This the Presidential Palace”
“Of Dust and Fire and the Night”
“It Came From Nothing”
“Sinfonia Expansiva”
“Close-Up Photos Reveal JFK’s Skull on Moon!”
“Getting There”
“The Third Part”
“Crossing the Border”
“These, the Inheritors”
“The Passion of Azalea”
“Why We Talk to Ourselves”
“Richard Nixon Saved From Drowning”
“Terminal Villa”
“The Phantom Gentleman”
“January 2018”
Bibliography

In his introduction, Malzberg talks about his early days as a starving writer in the 60s and 70s, with chums Harry Harrison and Gardner Dozois, before getting hired to work at the Scott Meredith Agency, “which taught me a whole lot and showed me an entirely different kind of market (“the popular”).”

Bug-Eyed Monsters, edited by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini (Harvest, March 1980). Cover by Ruby Mazur

Collecting Myself: The Uncollected Stories of Barry N. Malzberg was edited by Robert Friedman and Gregory Shepard, and will be published by Stark House Press on March 8, 2024. It is 185 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback. Check out their catalog and order direct from the publisher here.

Our previous coverage of Barry N. Malzberg includes:

The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural, compiled by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (2022)
The 1973 John W. Campbell Memorial Award: Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg by Rich Horton (2019)
Birthday Reviews: Barry N. Malzberg’s “Tap-dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life” by Steven H Silver (2018)
Barry Malzberg on the Pocket Best Of…. Volumes (2018)
Underlay by Barry N. Malzberg (2015)
Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini on Astounding Science Fiction in the 1950s (2015)
Bug-Eyed Monsters, edited by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (2012)

See all our recent coverage of the best new science fiction and fantasy here.