This beat-up old paperback is the January, 1960, issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories. The main event in this book is the story “Night of the Long Knives” by Fritz Leiber Jr., which is described as a “book-length novel,” though it’s closer in size to a novella, weighing in at around 70 pages.
This bleak novel tells of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where the sudden appearance of another person is often a matter of life or death. The book focuses on the narrator’s internal monologue, as he sizes up other characters he encounters in great amounts of detail.
This amazing (see what we did there?) cover art is by Edward Valigursky, who had a long history of creating covers for pulp-fiction magazines. In fact, we’ve featured some of his art before — the cover for Amazing Science Fiction Stories from October of 1958.
Valigursky lived an interesting life, joining the Navy in the final year of World War II. After his stint in the Navy, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago and eventually the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. As we mentioned earlier, he worked heavily in magazine and book covers, but he also got to visit NASA to create artwork of their space program for Popular Mechanics.