What I've read of Harlan Ellison has been outstanding.
I've only read
"Repent Harlequin" cried the Tick-Tock Man and
Jeffty is Five. Repent
Harlequin is the more Well known one but I find that
Jeffty is my favourite of the two. Powerful stuff. It's funny that there are some writers that are so talented but manage to make so many enemies. It's like you either love or you hate the guy if you meet him and there's no middle ground (based on what I heard). Maybe it's just a first impression thing, but while I heard he can be a real dick, his friends respect him and stand by him close. Bu it's best not to confuse the artist with the art. Say what you want about the person, the stories are great.
On a different note, I just finished reading
the Elephant Vanishes, which I had problems with. I had the same problems when I was reading Kurt Vonnegut's
Bogombo Snuff Box: the stories aren't quite to my taste and they just aren't as wowing as the creators other works. Murakami has sort of a David Lynch meets the mundane feel for most of the stories in this book: there's weird crap going down but it's really focusing on normal human emotions and realistic quirks. My favourite story was probably the not-weird-at-all story called
the Silence, about a bookish boxer's painful memory about a rival at school, and we see that while his rival is a wholly unsavory person, the real scary people are the ones who let themselves fall into mob mentality so quickly and show little empathy for others at the drop of a hat.
Sleep is another good story, but it could have been a little shorter and I didn't quite understand the end (though maybe I wasn't supposed to. I do have some theories however, but maybe there's not supposed to be an answer and looking is a waste of time) It focuses on a woman who discovers she doesn't need sleep to function and how she starts to question th nature of the waking world and her own mortaility. Powerful and engaging stuff despite the fact that she's really spending most of the story reading a book and eating chocolate.