*Early Novels and Short Fiction* is the first of three volumes covering Peter Cowlam's adventures into fiction, dating from the mid-1970s and into the twenty-first century. *Early Novels and Short Fiction* covers the period from 1974 to 1998 (approximately), and opens with *Penumbra*, a collection of short stories, which is followed by the novels and novellas *The Border and Back*, *Bim Shay*, a re-imagining of the detective yarn, *Electric Letters Z*, a satire on literary celebrity, first published in 1998, which under the title *Who's Afraid of the Booker Prize?* won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction in 2015, and *Caliban's Machine*, the memoir of George du Plé, a young English poet in American exile.