Melchior A La Carte — I.B. Melchior

With a life as wild as his fiction, the award-winning sci-fi screenwriter and novelist serves up an addictive 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 golden age 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 fictionhistorical, 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 futureand more. Melchior serves up an addendum of desserts 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 La Carte is more than a potpourri of delicaciesit 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 (S.L. Stebel, author of Spring Thaw ). The Racer, featured in this collection, was adapted twice for film as Death Race 2000 and Death Race. An extraordinary storyteller... always provocative and wise, as he lays out the stuff of which dreams are made. Mann Rubin, screenwriter of The Best of Everythin