The Harlan Ellison Hornbook and Other Works

Summary

The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

The Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author probes topics ranging from departed pets to Lenny Bruce and San Quentin in this provocative collection of essays.

A major collection of Harlan Ellison’s incomparable, troublemaking, uncompromising, confrontational essays and newspaper columns, The Harlan Ellison Hornbook mines deep into the author’s colorful past. Failed love affairs, departed pets, a defense of comic books—in lesser hands, these subjects would be pabulum or treacle. When Harlan Ellison is behind the typewriter, the mundane becomes an all-out intellectual brawl. Emotionally moving and verbally stimulating, these columns cannot be missed, especially Ellison’s article on controversial comedian Lenny Bruce or the chilling account of the author’s trip to visit a death row inmate in San Quentin State Prison.

Harlan Ellison's Movie: The Screenplay

Herein lies in written form Harlan Ellison’s Movie, the full-length feature film Ellison created when a producer at 20th Century-Fox said, “If we gave you the money, and no interference, what sort of movie would you write?” Well, that producer is no longer at the studio; he left the entire venue of moviemaking after Harlan Ellison’s Movie was seen by the Suits. There is no use even trying to describe what the film is about, except to confirm the long-standing rumor that it contains a scene in which a 70-foot-tall boll weevil chews and swallows an entire farmhouse and silo on-camera. (It is Scene 33C.)