essays, film reviews and television criticism

An essayist who also writes fiction? Or a fantasist who can't resist nonfiction narrative?

Anyone who has read a collection of Harlan Ellison's short stories has also sampled his work as an essayist; he almost always supplements such collections with introductions, individual prefaces and explanatory notes that sometimes constitute up to half the book's length. To get a true taste for Ellison's supreme talent as a nonfiction writer, however, one must plunge into one of the volumes listed here.

• Memos From Purgatory
• The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television
• The Other Glass Teat: Further Essays of Opinion on Television
• The Book of Ellison
• Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed: Essays
• An Edge In My Voice
• Harlan Ellison's Watching
• The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

"Television ... is now -- in the most McLuhanesque idiom -- merely a medium. A moving, talking, nonreacting adjunct to the life going on in the room wherein it stands."

-- from The Other Glass Teat