In The Stacks, edited by Michael Cart, America’s leading librarian, is a volume of most unusual stories about that most evocative place: the library

Libraries are created worlds. Row upon row of shelves holding miles of books arranged meticulously down to the last decimal point, they combine the glories of a tale out of The Arabian Nights with the hidden terrors of an ordered, card-filed bureaucracy from Kafka. That the books within libraries contain terrors and pleasures aplenty has been a source of delight since before the Great Library of Alexandria, and for many budding writers and bookworms the public library off Main Street was the magic portal to new worlds.

Contents:
• A General in the Library by Italo Calvino
• The Phoenix by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Gloss on a Decision of the Council of Nicaea by Joanne Greenberg
• Miss Vincent by Maria Dabrowska
• Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am? by Gina Berriault
• The Public Library by Isaac Babel
• Community Life by Lorrie Moore
• The Cobweb by Zona Gale
• The Retirement Party by Lisa Koger
• Summer Librarian by Sue Kaufman
• QL 696.C9 by Anthony Boucher
• Ed Has His Mind Improved by Walter R. Brooks
• The Tractate Middoth by M.R. James
• The Story of St. Vespaluus by Saki
• The Trouble of Marcie Flint by John Cheever
• Rubber Life by Francine Prose
• Hard-Luck Stories by Alice Munro
• Exchange by Ray Bradbury
• The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges