Shatterday
Mercurial, belligerent, passionately in love with language and wild ideas.  Harlan Ellison has, for exactly a quarter of a century, steadily gathered to himself and his thirty-seven books  an undeniably fanatical readership.  Winner of more awards for imaginative literature than any other living writer, he is the only scenarist ever to win the Writers Guild of America award three times for most outstanding teleplay.  Though his contemporary fantasies have been compared favorably with the dark visions of Borges, Barthelme, Poe and Kafka, Ellison resists categorization with a vehemence that alienates critics and reviewers seeking easy pigeonholes for an extraordinary writer.  The San Francisco Chronicle writes, "The categories are too small to describe Harlan Ellison.  Lyric poet, satirist, explorer of odd psychological corners, moralist, purveyor of pure horror and black comedy; he is all these and more.  In  this, his thirty-seventh book, celebrating twenty-five years of setting down the mortal dreads we all share, Harlan Ellison has put together his best work to date: sixteen uncollected stories (half of which are award-winners), totaling a marvel-filled 105,000 words and including a brand-new novella, his longest work in over a dozen years.
Fiction, Manners and customs, Fiction, science fiction, general, American Short stories
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a Jewish-American family.  His family moved to Painesville, Ohio, but returned to Cleveland in 1949 after the death of his father.  As a child, he performed in minstrel shows, and frequently ran away from home, taking odd jobs.  He attended Ohio State University but was expelled after 18 months for hitting a professor who had denigrated his writing ability.  He moved to New York City in 1955 to become a science fiction writer.  Over the next two years, he published more than 100 short stories and articles.  In 1957, he joined a street gang in Brooklyn as research for his novel Web of the City/Rumble and short story collection The Deadly Streets.  In the late 1950s, he wrote erotic fiction under the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird.  Later, he used the pseudonym for works that he felt were warped beyond his original intention by editors or producers.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1957 and returned to New York in 1960, before moving to Chicago, to write for Rogue magazine and work as an editor for Regency Books.  In 1962, he moved to California and began writing for Hollywood film studios in.  His first screenplay was for the film The Oscar.  He also wrote scripts for television shows such as The Flying Nun, Burke's Law, Route 66, The Outer Limits, Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Cimarron Strip.  
During the late 1960s, he also wrote a column about political and social issues in television for the Los Angeles Free Press titled "The Glass Teat."

Ellison has won ten Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, and five Bram Stoker Awards (presented by the Horror Writers Association) including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.  He has written nine novels, hundreds of short stories, and many articles and essays.  He continues to write from his home in Los Angeles, California with Susan, his fifth wife.