Unabashedly classic in the great tradition of Asimov and Clarke, Liu Cixin's science-fiction is firmly rooted in the cosmic. “[most] literature has always left me with the impression of indulging an intense anthropocentric narcissism. […] In the world of literature, the Sun exists for no other reason than to illuminate the pure, unadulterated countryside, the Moon has no other reason to shine than to cast the shadows of the seaside lovers, [but] if the universe is the Sahara, then all that makes the Earth a grain of gold within it, is that a particular bacteria called humanity clinging to its surface.” Liu Cixin uses the unique perspective of science-fiction to take us on a journey into this majestic, desolate cosmos. He gives us the chance to reacquaint ourselves with the fundamental truth that in the face of a vast universe we are no more than a speck of dust; That the Earth is just another celestial body – And an extremely vulnerable one at that. The flash of a gamma-ray burst or the blast of a nearby supernova could, at any moment, reduce our cherished home to nothing but ashes.It can be terrifying to contemplate the end of our world and stories that describe such destruction can be disturbing. At the same time however, they can leave us feeling not only entertained, but exhilarated and inspired. Maybe, they can even give us a chance to renew our love of life. Most stories found in the “The Wandering Earth” collection take us to a sci-fi vision of Earth's end. But here, there are no Hollywood aliens, descending from the depths of space to blow up our cities. In these futures, the dangers humanity faces are much stranger and whimsical than that. The unexpected calamities that befall his richly detailed worlds are only eclipsed by humanity's epic, but always plausible, attempts to escape destruction.In all this peril and doom, Liu Cixin always feels for humanity. His stories are full of a deep love for all of Earth's peoples. But even this love does not escape reflection and even ridicule when viewed through his unrelenting cosmic lens. No matter how dearly one loves the Earth, humanity and all its cultures, there is no avoiding the cold, hard truth that they mean absolutely nothing when viewed against the vastness of the universe. But even an infinite universe could not change the simple fact that we are worthy of love, that we need love. It is this twist that lies at the very heart of the stories in this collection.Table of Contents 1 The Wandering Earth 2 Mountain 3 Of Ants and Dinosaurs 4 Sun of China 5 The Wages of Humanity 6 Curse 5.0 7 The Micro-Age 8 Devourer 9 Taking Care of Gods 10 With Her Eyes 11 The Longest Fall

    The stories in Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul truly capture the special joy these four-legged creatures bring to our lives and hearts. The family that learns the true meaning of Christmas when their Lab needs medical care during the holidays. The intimidating Doberman who becomes a loving mother to an orphaned duckling. The homeless man whose life is changed when he meets a special dog. The pocket-size assistance dog who dials 9-1-1.The crafty beagle-mix with the munchies who helps himself from the refrigerator . . . and many more unforgettable canine characters.From exciting and entertaining accounts of courage and humor to heartwarming tales of healing and learning, each touching story in this book will inspire dog lovers to rejoice in the unique bond they share with their canine companions.

    Whether impish kittens, regal adult cats or serene seniors, it's impossible for us to remain indifferent to them--especially at 4 A.M. when the food bowl runs dry! So smile at their many "c'attitudes," and feed your feline passion by "purr-using" wonderful stories like these: A Russian blue comforts his mourning owner by faithfully bringing her flowers An heroic red tabby Manx saves the family he loves from a lethal gas leak in their home A Devon rex with extraordinary talents--including playing the piano--expands people's notions of what a cat can do A fish-loving shorthair nearly loses his head while scavenging in the garbage disposal--but lives to meow about it A three-legged kitty befriends a lonely third-grade girl, transforming her world and inspiring her future success in lifeFrom playful and hilarious accounts of life with cats to heartwarming tales of cat courage, healing and learning, each touching story in Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul celebrates the special bond we share with our cats.

    . . . When dealing with these changes, it's no wonder preteen girls can freak out from time to time.Consider Chicken Soup for the Girl's Soul your survival guide! From reading the true experiences of other preteen girls, as well as women who've been there, you'll see that you're not the only one who feels clueless and insecure sometimes. You'll read about tough subjects, such as peer pressure, cliques, divorce and loss, as well as fun “girls only” stories about friendship, embarrassing moments (these could take up an entire book!), body changes and first crushes. These stories will make you laugh, cry and realize that girl power is truly something to celebrate. You'll turn to this book again and again, whenever you need the advice only girls can give.Chicken Soup for the Girl's Soul is sure to be what a girl wants!Book Details: Format: Paperback Publication Date: 9/7/2005 Pages: 350 Reading Level: Age 10 and Up

    A philosophical parable about death.

    Harley Quin / by Agatha Christie ; The coming of Mr. Quin ; The shadow on the glass ; At the Bells and Motley ; The sign in the sky ; The soul of the croupier ; The world's end ; The voice in the dark ; The face of Helen ; The dead harlequin ; The bird with the broken wing ; The man from the sea ; Harlequin's Lane ; The love detectives --Part III: Hercule Poirot: The third-floor flat ; The adventure of Johnnie Waverly ; Four and twenty blackbirds ; The double clue ; Double sin ; Wasps' nest ; The theft of the royal ruby ; The second gong --Part IV: Miss Jane Marple: Strange jest ; Tape-measure murder ; The case of the perfect maid ; The case of the caretaker ; Greenshaw's folly ; Sanctuary.

    Now the major motion picture "Brokeback Mountain" is being hailed as equally masterful, with performances that are "the stuff of Hollywood history" "(The New York Times)." "Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay" offers readers insight into how this classic short story was turned into an award-winning screenplay and film. "Brokeback Mountain" was originally published in "The New Yorker." It won the National Magazine Award. It also won an O. Henry Prize. Included in this volume is Annie Proulx's haunting story about the difficult, dangerous love affair between a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy. Also included is the Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning screenplay for the major motion picture, written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. All three writers have contributed essays on the process of adapting this critically acclaimed story for film. This book is an indispensable tool for film students and aficionados.

    Coyote has developed a reputation as one of North America’s most disarming storytellers; her tales of life as an out dyke on the roads and trails of the North as well as rural America are rich in their plainspoken, honest truths. In Loose End, her third story collection, Ivan focuses her attention on the city: urban life, specifically in the East End of Vancouver, a diverse neighborhood of all types—old, young, gay, straight, white, black, Asian—communing at local coffee bars over hot rods, the art of skinny-dipping, and changes in the weather. Ivan presides over this circus of activities with her cool gaze, whether it’s trying to impress the woman with the hot tub next door, or showing her mother how to use a cordless drill.Ivan’s world is the world of being out and open and unafraid; it’s also a world in which no ghettos—racial, cultural, or defined by sexuality or gender—exist. With the calm, observant eye of a master storyteller, Ivan E. Coyote shows us how to break free of the rigors of authority and be true to ourselves, warts and all.

    Included are pieces from many of the acknowledged masters of Russian literature - including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn - alongside tales by long-suppressed figures such as the subversive Kryzhanowsky and the surrealist Shalamov. Whether written in reaction to the cruelty of the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of communism or the torture of the prison camps, they offer a wonderfully wide-ranging and exciting representation of one of the most vital and enduring forms of Russian literature.

    From Sherwood Anderson to Virginia Woolf, this anthology encompasses a rich global and historical mix of the very best works of short fiction and presents them in a way students will find accessible, engaging, and relevant. The book's unique integration of biographical and critical background gives students a more intimate understanding of the works and their authors.Contents:Part I. Introduction. The art of the short story.-- Part II. Stories [A-J]. Chinua Achebe: Dead men's path ; Author's perspective, Achebe: modern Africa as the crossroads of culture -- Sherwood Anderson: Hands ; Author's perspective, Anderson: Words not plot give form to a short story -- Margaret Atwood: Happy endings ; Author's perspective, Atwood: On the Canadian identity -- James Baldwin: Sonny's blues ; Author's perspective, Baldwin: Race and the African-American writer -- Jorge Luis Borges: The garden of forking paths ; Author's perspective, Borges: Literature as experience -- Albert Camus: The guest ; Author's perspective, Camus: Revolution and repression in Algeria -- Raymond Carver: Cathedral ; A small, good thing ; Author's perspective, Carver: Commonplace but precise language -- Willa Cather: Paul's case ; Author's perspective, Cather: Art as the process of simplification -- John Cheever: The swimmer ; Author's perspective, Cheever: Why I write short stories -- Anton Chekhov: The lady with the pet dog ; Misery ; Author's perspective, Chekhov: Natural description and "The center of gravity" -- Kate Chopin: The storm ; The story of an hour ; Author's perspective, Chopin: My writing method -- Sandra Cisneros: Barbie-Q ; Author's perspective, Cisneros: Bilingual style -- Joseph Conrad: The secret sharer ; Author's perspective, Conrad: The condition of art -- Stephen Crane: The open boat ; Author's perspective, Crane: The sinking of the Commodore -- Ralph Ellison: A party down at the square ; Author's perspective, Ellison: Race and fiction -- William Faulkner: Barn burning ; A rose for Emily ; Author's perspective, Faulkner: The human heart in conflict with itself -- F. Scott Fitzgerald: Babylon revisited ; Author's perspective, Fitzgerald: On his own literary aims -- Gustave Flaubert: A simple heart ; Author's perspective, Flaubert: The labor of style -- Gabriel García Marquez: A very old man with enormous wings ; Author's perspective, García Marquez: My beginnings as a writer -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The yellow wallpaper ; Author's perspective, Gilman: Why I wrote "The yellow wallpaper" -- Nikolai Gogol: The overcoat ; Author's perspective, Gogol: On realism -- Nadine Gordimer: A company of laughing faces ; Author's perspective, Gordimer: How the short story differs from the novel -- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown ; The birthmark ; Author's perspective, Hawthorne: On the public failure of his early stories -- Ernest Hemingway: A clean, well-lighted place ; Author's perspective, Hemingway: One true sentence -- Zora Neale Hurston: Sweat ; Author's perspective, Hurston: Eatonville when you look at it -- Shirley Jackson: The lottery ; Author's perspective, Jackson: The public reception of "The lottery" -- Henry James: The real thing ; Author's perspective, James: The mirror of a consciousness -- Ha Jin: Saboteur ; Author's perspective, Jin: Deciding to write in English -- James Joyce : Araby ; The dead ; Author's perspective, Joyce: Epiphanies. Contents: Part II[ Cont.]. Stories [K-W]. Franz Kafka: Before the law ; The metamorphosis ; Author's perspective, Kafka: Discussing The metamorphosis -- D.H. Lawrence: Odour of Chrysanthemums ; The rocking-horse winner ; Author's perspective, Lawrence: The novel is the bright book of life -- Ursula K. Le Guin: the ones who walk away from Omelas ; Author's perspective, Le Guin: On "The ones who walk away from Omelas" -- Doris Lessing: A woman on a roof ; Author's perspective, Lessing: My beginnings as a writer -- Jack London: To build a fire ; Author's perspective, London: Defending the factuality of "To build a fire" -- Katherine Mansfield: Miss Brill ; The garden-party ; Author's perspective, Mansfield: On "The garden-party" -- Bobbie Ann Mason: Shiloh ; Author's perspective, Mason: Minimalist fiction -- Guy de Maupassant: The necklace ; Author's perspective, Maupassant: The realist method -- Herman Melville: Bartleby, the scrivener : a story of Wall-Street ; Author's perspective, Melville: American literature -- Yukio Mishima: Patriotism ; Author's perspective, Mishima: Physical courage and death -- Alice Munro: How I met my husband ; Author's perspective, Munro: How I write short stories -- Joyce Carol Oates: where are you going, where have you been? ; Author's perspective, Oates: Productivity and the critics -- Flannery O'Connor: A good man is hard to find ; Revelation ; Author's perspective, O'Connor: The element of suspense in "A good man is hard to find" -- Edgar Allan Poe: The fall of the House of Usher ; The Tell-tale heart ; Author's perspective, Poe: The tale and its effect -- Katherine Anne Porter: Flowering Judas ; Author's perspective, Porter: Writing "Flowering Judas" -- Leslie Marmon Silko: The man to send rain clouds ; Author's perspective, Silko: the basis of "The man to send rain clouds" -- Isaac Bashevis singer: Gimpel the Fool ; Author's perspective, Singer: The character of Gimpel -- Leo Tolstoy: The death of Ivan Ilych ; Author's perspective, Tolstoy: The moral responsibility of art -- John Updike: Separating ; Author's perspective, Why write? -- Alice Walker: Everyday use ; Author's perspective, Walker: The Black woman writer in America -- Eudora Welty: Why I live at the P.O. ; Author's perspective, Welty: The plot of the short story -- Edith Wharton: Roman fever ; Author's perspective, Wharton: The subject of short stories -- Virginia Woolf: A haunted house ; Author's perspective, Woolf: Women and fiction. Contents: Part III. Writing. The elements of short fiction -- Writing about fiction -- Critical approaches to literature. Formalist criticism: Light and darkness in "Sonny's Blues" / Michael Clark -- Biographical criticism: Chekhov's attitude to romantic love / Virginia Llewellyn Smith -- Historical criticism: The Argentine context of Borges's fantastic fiction / John King -- Psychological criticism: The father-figure in "The tell-tale heart" / Daniel Hoffman -- Mythological criticism: Myth in Faulkner's "Barn Burning" / Edmond Volpe -- "Sociological criticism: Money and labor in "The rocking-horse winner" / Daniel P. Watkins -- Gender criticism: Gender and pathology in "The yellow wallpaper" / Juliann Fleenor -- Reader-response criticism: An Eskimo "A Rose for Emily" / Stanley Fish -- Deconstructionist criticism: The death of the author / Roland Barthes -- Cultural studies: What is cultural studies? / Makr Bauerlein. Part IV. Glossary of literary terms.

    Now, after twenty-one annual collections, comes the ultimate in science fiction anthologies, The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction, in which legendary editor Gardner Dozois selects the very best short stories for this landmark collection. Contributors include: * Stephen Baxter * Greg Bear * William Gibson * Terry Bisson * Pat Cadigan * Ted Chiang * John Crowley * Tony Daniel * Greg Egan * Molly Gloss * Eileen Gunn * Joe Haldeman * James Patrick Kelly * John Kessel * Nancy Kress * Ursula K. Le Guin * Ian R. MacLeod * David Marusek * Paul McAuley * Ian McDonald * Maureen F. McHugh * Robert Reed * Mike Resnick * Geoff Ryman * William Sander * Lucius Shepard * Robert Silverberg * Brian Stableford * Bruce Sterling * Charles Stross * Michael Swanwick * Steven Utley * Howard Waldrop * Walter Jon Williams * Connie Willis * Gene WolfeWith work spanning two decades, The Best of the Best stands as one of the ultimate science fiction anthologies ever published.Contents xi • Foreword (The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction) • essay by Robert Silverbergxvii • Preface (The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction) • essay by Gardner Dozois1 • Blood Music • (1983) • novelette by Greg Bear19 • A Cabin on the Coast • (1984) • shortstory by Gene Wolfe28 • Salvador • (1984) • shortstory by Lucius Shepard42 • Trinity • (1984) • novella by Nancy Kress78 • Flying Saucer Rock and Roll • (1985) • novelette by Howard Waldrop (aka Flying Saucer Rock & Roll)93 • Dinner in Audoghast • (1985) • shortstory by Bruce Sterling103 • Roadside Rescue • (1985) • shortstory by Pat Cadigan109 • Snow • (1985) • shortstory by John Crowley121 • The Winter Market • (1985) • novelette by William Gibson137 • The Pure Product • (1986) • novelette by John Kessel152 • Stable Strategies for Middle Management • (1988) • shortstory by Eileen Gunn162 • Kirinyaga • [Kirinyaga • 2] • (1988) • novelette by Mike Resnick177 • Tales from the Venia Woods • [Roma Eterna] • (1989) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg191 • Bears Discover Fire • (1990) • shortstory by Terry Bisson199 • Even the Queen • (1992) • shortstory by Connie Willis213 • Guest of Honor • (1993) • novelette by Robert Reed238 • None So Blind • (1994) • shortstory by Joe Haldeman246 • Mortimer Gray's History of Death • (1995) • novella by Brian Stableford (aka Mortimer Gray's "History of Death")293 • The Lincoln Train • (1995) • shortstory by Maureen F. McHugh303 • Wang's Carpets • (1995) • novelette by Greg Egan328 • Coming of Age in Karhide • [Hainish] • (1995) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin342 • The Dead • (1996) • shortstory by Michael Swanwick352 • Recording Angel • (1996) • shortstory by Ian McDonald363 • A Dry, Quiet War • (1996) • novelette by Tony Daniel380 • The Undiscovered • (1997) • novelette by William Sanders400 • Second Skin • (1997) • shortstory by Paul J. McAuley418 • Story of Your Life • (1998) • novella by Ted Chiang454 • People Came from Earth • (1999) • shortstory by Stephen Baxter464 • The Wedding Album • [Cathy] • (1999) • novella by David Marusek502 • 10 to 16 to 1 • (1999) • novelette by James Patrick Kelly (aka 1016 to 1)520 • Daddy's World • (1999) • novelette by Walter Jon Williams541 • The Real World • [Silurian Tales] • (2000) • shortstory by Steven Utley561 • Have Not Have • (2001) • novelette by Geoff Ryman577 • Lobsters • [Macx Family] • (2001) • novelette by Charles Stross597 • Breathmoss • (2002) • novella by Ian R. MacLeod647 • Lambing Season • (2002) • shortstory by Molly Gloss

    Fiction writer and essayist Charles D'Ambrosio inspects manufactured homes in Washington state; tours the rooms of Hell House, a Pentecostal "haunted house" in Texas; visits the dormitories and hallways of a Russian orphanage in Svrstroy; and explored the textual space of family letters, at once expansive and claustrophobic. In these spaces, or the people who inhabit them, he unearths a kind of optimism, however guarded. He introduces us to a defender of gray whales; the creator of Biosquat, a utopian experiment in Austin, Texas; and a younger version of himself, searching for "culture" in Seattle in 1974. He analyzes the nuances of Mary Kay Letourneau's trial and contemplates the persistence of rain and of memory.

    But now Ligotti has pulled together a collection of his favorite fiction, both old and new, representing his best and most characteristic works.Thomas Ligotti's stories are perhaps best described as dark magical realism. Many of his stories center on the distorted perspective of a frequently doomed narrator. The title story, "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World," reimagines a kind of Bradbury-like small town that encounters the appearance of a kind of existential darkness, written with a sharp imagery like that of William S. Burroughs. In story after story in this collection, Ligotti does not merely present his readers with isolated incidents of supernatural horror - he challenges them to confront nightmares that are entwined in the very fabric of life itself.QUOTES:"The best new American writer of weird fiction to appear in years" - The Washington Post"Ligotti is wonderfully original; he has a new vision of a dark and special kind, a vision that no one had before him." - Interzone"Aficianados of the macabre consider Ligotti one of the finest writers in the field" - The Sunday Times"Thomas Ligotti is an absolute master of supernatural horror and weird fiction, and a true original. He pursues his unique vision with admirable honesty and rigorousness and conveys it in prose as powerfully evocative as any writer in the field. I'd say he might just be a genius." - Ramsey Campbell ("Britain's most respected living horror writer," according to the Oxford Companion toEnglish Literature)

    This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman's children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

    Kiernan's third collection of short fiction, a haunting parade of the terrible things which may lie beyond the boundaries of science, the minds which may exist beyond psychology, and the forbidden places which will never be located in any orthodox globe.

    No longer available online - now in Tales of the Otherworld How Logan ends up in Stonehaven.

    We're In Trouble is, for the most part, a book about death - quite often, about how death affects the young ... Sometimes, when you're reading the stories, you forget to breathe, which probably means that you read them with more speed than the writer intended ... They're beautifully written, and they have bottom ... striking and dramatic' Nick Hornby, Believer

    Lost, teetering on the edge of normalcy, Puchner's characters seek to define themselves in a frequently absurd and hostile world -- a world that threatens to make outcasts of us all. Caught up in loneliness or solitude, they can't quite hear the music of their own lives.In "Children of God," a young loner becomes the caretaker and companion for two mentally retarded men, seeking solace in their outsider status. "Essay #3: Leda and the Swan" is told in the forlorn, be-nighted, and tragically funny voice of a high school girl who longs more than anything to be loved. In "Mission," an idealistic ESL teacher is faced with the inscrutable wrath of one of his immigrant students. And in the unsettling "Child's Play," Puchner explores the price of nonconformity by following a pack of boys wreaking havoc on Halloween.Writing from an impressive range of perspectives -- men and women, children and adults, immigrants and tourists -- Puchner deftly exposes the dark, ten-der undersides of his characters with arresting beauty and precision. Here are people fumbling for identity in a depersonalized world, captured in moments that are hilarious, shocking, and transcendent -- sometimes all at once. Unfailingly true, surprisingly moving, and impossible to forget, these nine stories mark the arrival of a brilliant young writer and one of our most promising literary voices.

    Adam's mother discovers what he is.Now included in Otherworld Nights

    Understanding that history is nothing but a fable purged of grit and grime, Ruland transforms historical fiction into something slick, brutal and weird. Whether he's spinning a lurid yarn about the previous adventures of Popeye, imagining Dick Tracy as a San Fernando Valley police detective, or retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood in Nazi Germany, Ruland's tales are full of crime and punishment. He isn't afraid to set a teenage mob story in St. Petersburg, Florida, or tell the story of an unlucky pair of pants in the style of a catechism--and every line resonates with the truth of lessons learned the hard way.

    This book has the following stories translated into EnglishRani Sarandha (Queen Saerandha) --Bade Ghar Ki Beti (Daughter of a Cultured Family) --Raja Jardaul (King Hardaul) --Garib ki hai (Curse of the Poor) --Pareeksha-1 (The Test-1) --Namak ka daroga (The Salt Inspector) --Khoon safed (White Blood) --Saut-1 (Co-wife-1) --Do bhai (Two Brothers) --Ghamand ka putla (The Embodiment of Pride) --Maryada ki vedi (Altar of Honour) --Atmaram (Atmaram) --Shankhnad (War Trumpet) --Brahma ka swang (Mocking at Brahma) --Shanti-1 (Peace-1) --Pareeksha-2 (The Test-2) --Guptdhan (Hidden Treasure) --Nairashya leela ((The Play of Despair) --Satyagraha (Civil Disobedience) --Vair ka ant (End of Enmity) --Shatranj ke khilari (Chess Players) --Sava ser Gehun (11/4 ser Wheat) --Kajaki (Kajaki) --Ramleela (Ramlila) --Sati-1 (Sati-1) --Actress (Actress) --Sujan Bhagat (Sujan Bhagat) --Fatiha (Fatiha) --Ghar janwai (The Resident Son-in-law) --Poos ki raat (Night of Poush) --Maikoo (Maiku) --Saut-2 (The co-wife-2) --Sadgati (Deliverance) --Do bailon ki katha (Story of two Bullocks) --Holi ka uphaar (Gift of Holi) --Sati-2 (Sati-2) --Beton wali vidhwa (Widow with Sons) --Kayar (Coward) --Rangeele babu (A Flirtatious Gentleman) --Quaidi (The Prisoner) --Shanti-2 (Peace-2) --Bade bhai saheb (Elder Brother) --Do Behnen (Two Sisters) --Cricket match (Cricket Match)

    His conversational, self-effacing style and adroit use of the language make his writing appealing to all types of riders.

    This collection's new novella is vintage Gilchrist, taking on the continuing joys and perils of Nora Jane and company.

    In three stunning books of stories, she has established a voice as unique and recognizable as the photographs of Cindy Sherman or the brushstrokes of Robert Motherwell. The Dog of the Marriage, Hempel's fourth collection, is about sexual obsession, relationships gone awry, and the unsatisfied longings of everyday life. In "Offertory," a modern-day Scheherazade entertains and manipulates her lover with stories of her sexual encounters with a married couple as a very young woman. In "Reference # 388475848-5," a letter contesting a parking ticket becomes a beautiful and unnerving statement of faith. In "Jesus Is Waiting," a woman driving to New York sends a series of cryptically honest postcards to an old lover. And the title story is a heartbreaking tale about the objects and animals and unmired desires that are left behind after death or divorce. These nine stories teem with wisdom, emotion, and surprising wit. Hempel explores the intricate psychology of people falling in and out of love, trying to locate something or someone elusive or lost. Her sentences are as lean, original, and startling as any in contemporary fiction.

    Presented here for historical value.Found here: http://www.burningbuilding.com/zombie...

    He sets his eyes upon the people, the beautiful places and the spectacular wildlife. He captures the adventure and joy filled in the way of life in the hills vividly. This collection of fiction and non-fiction works is a must-read for ardent Ruskin Bond fans.

    Scott Wolven is such a talent, and his raw, blistering tales of hard-bitten convicts, dodgy informers, and men running from the law make for "the most exciting, authentic collection of short stories I have read in years," says George Pelecanos. Brooding, edgy, and sometimes violent, Controlled Burn's loosely linked stories are each in some way a distillation of hard time -- spent either in prison, the backwoods of Vermont, or the badlands of the American West. Peopled by boxers, drunks, truck drivers, murderers, bounty hunters, drifters traveling under assumed names, and men whose luck ran out a thousand miles ago, these stories feel hard-won from life, and if they are moody and stark, so too are they filled with human longing. Controlled Burn is divided into two sections: "The Northeast Kingdom" and "The Fugitive West." In each, Scott Wolven reveals a broken world where there is no bottom left to hit. In the haunting "Outside Work Detail," convicts stoically dig graves for their fellow prisoners yet reserve their deepest grief for the senseless death of a deer. "Crank" introduces Red Green, a maniacally brilliant addict who brews his own crystal meth in a backwoods lab, and whose high-energy antics inspire both cautious admiration and mortal fear in his business associates. In "Ball Lightning Reported," Red Green's ultimate fate is revealed. In "Atomic Supernova," a revenge-obsessed sheriff deputizes a known cop-killer to help him hunt down a counterfeiter and drug lord. The unexpectedly tender and heartbreaking "The Copper Kings" concerns a father facing the dark truth behind his son's disappearance. And in "Vigilance," a hunted man struggles to escape his past, always yearning for an honorable yet perhaps unreachable future. Powered by a spare, ruminative prose style that recalls the best of Denis Johnson and Thom Jones, Controlled Burn is an unforgettable debut.

    In these dozen glimpses into the future Egan continues to explore the essence of what it is to be human, and the nature of what - and who - we are, in stories that range from parables of contemporary human conflict and ambition to far-future tales of our immortal descendants. Return to the universe of the meta-civilisation known as the Amalgam, which Egan explored in his critically acclaimed novel Incandescence: 'Riding the Crocodile', which recounts an epic endeavour a million years from now to bridge the divide between the Amalgam and the reclusive Aloof; 'Glory', set in the same future, in which two archaeologists strive to decipher the artefacts of an ancient civilisation, and 'Hot Rock', where an obscure, sunless world conceals mind-spinning technological marvels, bitter factional struggles, and a many-layered secret history. This superb collection also includes the title story, the Hugo Award-winning 'Oceanic': a boy is inducted into a religion that becomes the centre of his life, but as an adult he must face evidence that casts a new light on his faith.Contents:Border Guards (1999)Crystal Nights (2008)Dark Integers (2007)Glory (2007)Hot Rock (2009)Induction (2007)Lost Continent (2008)Oceanic (1998)Oracle (2000)Riding the Crocodile (2005)Singleton (2002)Steve Fever (2007)

    Winner of the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year and the Aboriginal Fiction Book of the Year--a collection of twenty short stories told in Thomas King's classic, wry, irreverent, and allegorical voice.

    3 IS THE LAST OF A THREE VOLUME SET OF RICHARD MATHESON'S COLLECTED STORIES. VOLUME THREE INCLUDES SOME OF MATHESON'S MOST FAMOUS STORIES INCLUDING "DUEL" UPON WHICH THE STEVEN SPIELBERG MOVIE WAS BASED. 33 STORIES IN AN AFFORDABLE TRADE PAPERBACK.

    While our dad was upstairs broadcasting something to the world, and we were listening in, or trying to find his frequency and listen to his voice . . . we would give up and go out in the snow with a phone rigged with alligator clips so we could listen in on others’ conversations. There’s something nearly sexual about this, hearing what other people are saying to their lovers, children, cousins, psychics, pastors. . . .The cumulative effect of this stunningly original collection seems to work on the reader in the same way—we follow glimpses of dispossessed lives in the snow-buried reaches of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, where nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear forever. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices and radio schematics, Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves and electricity are characters in themselves, affecting a community held together by the memories of those they have lost.Ander Monson is the editor of DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. He teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in Michigan. Tupelo Press recently published his poetry collection, Elegies for Descent and Dreams of Weather.

    Here and in the stories that accompany it, including "The Conversion of the Jews" and "Defender of the Faith," Roth depicts Jewish lives in 1950s America with an unflinching sharpness of observation." In Letting Go, a sprawling novel set largely against the backdrop of Chicago in the 1950s, Roth portrays the moral dilemmas of young people cast precipitously into adulthood, and in the process describes a skein of social and family responsibilities as they are brought into focus by issues of marriage, abortion, adoption, friendship, and career. The novel's expansiveness provides a wide scope for Roth's gift for vivid characterization, and in his protagonist Gabe Wallach he creates a nuanced portrait of a responsive young academic whose sense of morality draws him into the ordeals of others with unforeseen consequences.Library of America #157

    A high school football rivalry turns absurd—and deadly. A much-loved cat seems to have been a different animal all along. A pair of identical twins aren’t identical at all—or even related. A man finds his own yellowed birth announcement inside a bureau bought at auction. Set in a small upstate New York town, told in a conversational style, Pieces for the Left Hand is a stream of a hundred anecdotes, none much longer than a page. At once funny, bizarre, familiar, and disturbing, these deceptively straightforward tales nevertheless shock and amaze through uncanny coincidence, tragic misunderstanding, strange occurrence, or sudden insight. Unposted letters, unexpected visitors, false memories—in J. Robert Lennon’s vision of America, these are the things that decide our fate. Wry and deadpan, powerful and philosophical, these addictive little tales reveal the everyday world as a strange and eerie place.

    After a wandering, precarious life during which he produced poems, essays, stories, and novels, Walser entered an insane asylum, saying, “I am not here to write, but to be mad.” Many of the unpublished works he left were in fact written in an idiosyncratically abbreviated script that was for years dismissed as an impenetrable private cipher. Fourteen texts from these so-called pencil manuscripts are included in this volume—rich evidence that Walser’s microscripts, rather than the work of incipient madness, were in actuality the product of desperate genius building a last reserve, and as such, a treasure in modern literature. With a brisk preface and a chronology of Walser’s life and work, this collection of fifty translations of short prose pieces covers the middle to later years of the writer’s oeuvre. It provides unparalleled insight into Walser’s creative process, along with a unique opportunity to experience the unfolding of his rare and eccentric gift. His novels The Robber (Nebraska 2000) and Jakob von Gunten are also available in English translation.

    Blissed out club kids dying at the speed of sound. The un-dead and the very soon-to-be-dead. They're all here, trying to claw their way free. From the radioactive streets of a war-scarred future, where the nuclear bombs have become self-aware, to the fallow fields of Nebraska where the kids are mainlining lightning bugs, this is a world both alien and intensely human. This is a place where self-discovery involves scalpels and horse tranquilizers; where the doctors are more doped-up than the patients; where obsessive-compulsive acid-freaks have unlocked the gateway to God and can't close the door. This is not a safe place. You can turn back now, or you can head straight into the heart of. the Angel Dust Apocalypse

    No names or places have been changed because we are all guilty."

    In the title novella, Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan Indian loved by Harrison's readers, is trying to parent his two step-children and take care of his family's health on meager resources - it helps a bit that his charms are irresistible to the new dentist in town. Republican Wives is a witty satire on the sexual neuroses of the Right, the mystery of why any person desires another, and the irrational power of love that, when thwarted, can turn so easily into an urge to murder. Tracking is a meditation on Harrison's fascination with place, telling his own familiar mythology through the places he has seen and the intellectual loves he has known in a vivid stream of consciousness that transfigures how we look at our own surroundings.

    It consists of a series of texts that, like musical phrases, take up the theme and advance it by means of repetition, contrast, and variation. To love someone dead is merely nostalgia, but to make love with someone dead is necrophilia, and this book is about that.Although a work of fiction, Necrophilia Variations uses literary means to probe the psychopathology of sexual perversion. Eros, the book asks, is naturally drawn to beauty, and yet nothing would seem to be less inherently beautiful than a cadaver. How is it that a necrophile ends up confusing the two, or making the leap, such that he finds beauty in what most people would find repugnant? How does he come to desire that which would seem to be intrinsically undesirable?Written in a style that ranges from the lugubrious to the ludicrous — from purple prose to black humor — Necrophilia Variations exhibits a world of depravity from the inside out. Each of its texts utilizes the first person — not because it is autobiographical but rather because it is personal, even intimate. Why intimate? Because that's how death is — near you, beside you, eventually inside you as well. It would be nice to say that that's how sex is too — intimate — but then it's no secret just how impersonal sex can be, especially when your lover is unconscious or worse.If you have ever contemplated the curious points of contact between eros and thanatos — if you have ever wondered why femmes fatales are alluring, or why sex can be made more exciting by games that simulate danger and pain, or why that bit of French slang that deems orgasm a "little death" seems so appropriate — then you may well enjoy this book. And if you do, then your joy in reading may even unlock the necrophiliac mind for you — since a text is, like a corpse, the remains of a living being, and as a reader you will no doubt be determined to extract pleasure from it.

    No longer available online - now in Tales of the OtherworldAbout Aaron and how he got reborn into a vampire

    The tales in this collection are haunting and ghostly and will thrill readers. The thirteen creepy tales in Scary Stories are literary masterpieces by Kipling, Saki, Algernon Blackwood et al, filled with chilling and unfathomable terror.

    She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945.... Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town.... Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot-tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing....John Finney is locked in a basement that's stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead....The past isn't dead. It isn't even past...

    This short story was originally published in Joe Hill's collection 20TH CENTURY GHOSTS.

    Miranda July is a filmmaker, performance artist, writer and multi-media tour-de-force. Read this and you'll understand why Miranda July is intriguing in any genre.

    The table of contents has been slightly modified: "Phalaenopsis" has been replaced by "Her Mother's Ghosts," which first appeared in 2004 in The Rose and Twelve Petals and Other Stories, released by Small Beer Press."The Rose in Twelve Petals""Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold""The Rapid Advance of Sorrow""Lily, With Clouds""Miss Emily Gray""In the Forest of Forgetting""Sleeping with Bears""Letters from Budapest""The Wings of Meister Wilhelm""Conrad""A Statement in the Case""Death Comes for Ervina""The Belt""Her Mother's Ghosts""Pip and the Fairies""Lessons with Miss Gray"

    In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.“Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives. “After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations.These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.From the Hardcover edition.

    Devilishly thought-provoking, this collection explores some of the darkest aspects of humanity. Travel with the downtrodden and the disillusioned through personal hells of their own making, populated by terrifying monsters and skulking demons. Not for the feint of heart, this collection is a wild ride.

    K. Chesterton's Father Brown is not senile, nor easily rattled. In fact, this village priest wanders into challenges that pale in comparison to the things he has heard through the screen of the confessional. For to hear Father Brown tell it, crime is a manifestation of sin: the criminal must be caught, but he or she must also be saved; the culprit has to be locked up, but the spirit must be freed.G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was a larger-than-life writer who fascinates and perplexes us to this day. An art student who became a poet, and then by turns a journalist, playwright, biographer, novelist, storyteller, philosopher, and "Christian apologist," his fame rested on an uncanny ability to produce vast quantities of crystalline prose quickly and without apparent effort. His fiction--particularly the Father Brown stories and the delirious suspense novel The Man Who Was Thursday--remains his most widely read and entertaining works.

    A cross between William Faulkner (Times-Picayune) and John Irving (Detroit Free Press), Dufresne once again masterfully charts the power of truth and lies and the magic hidden in the mundane.

    Included here are the works of masters of the form and of bright new talents, including: Daniel Abraham • Eleanor Arnason • Pauolo Bacigalupi • Kage Baker • Stephen Baxter • Terry Bisson • James L. Cambias • Albert E. Cowdrey • Colin P. Davies • Paul Di Fillipo • Brendan DuBois • Michael F. Flynn • Peter F. Hamilton • M. John Harrison • James Patrick Kelly • Caitlin R. Kiernan • Nancy Kress • Paul Melko • David Moles • Pat Murphy • Robert Reed • Benjamin Rosenbaum • Mary Rosenbaum • Christopher Rowe • William Sanders • Vandana Singh • Vernor Vinge • Walter Jon WilliamsSupplementing the stories are the editor's insightful summation of the year's events and a list of honorable mentions, making this book a valuable resource as well as the single best place in the universe to find stories that stir the imagination and the heart.Cover design by Shea M. KornblumCover illustration by Stephan MartiniereDescription from back cover Contents xi • Acknowledgments (The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection) • (2005) • essay by Gardner Dozoisxiii • Summation: 2004 • essay by Gardner Dozois1 • Inappropriate Behavior • (2004) • novelette by Pat Murphy27 • Start the Clock • (2004) • shortstory by Benjamin Rosenbaum42 • The Third Party • (2004) • novelette by David Moles72 • The Voluntary State • (2004) • novelette by Christopher Rowe105 • Shiva in Shadow • (2004) • novelette by Nancy Kress153 • The People of Sand and Slag • (2004) • novelette by Paolo Bacigalupi172 • The Clapping Hands of God • (2004) • novelette by Michael F. Flynn214 • Tourism • (2004) • shortstory by M. John Harrison228 • Scout's Honor • (2004) • shortstory by Terry Bisson244 • Men Are Trouble • (2004) • novelette by James Patrick Kelly283 • Mother Aegypt • [Company] • (2004) • novella by Kage Baker348 • Synthetic Serendipity • (2004) • shortstory by Vernor Vinge366 • Skin Deep • (2004) • shortstory by Mary Rosenblum389 • Delhi • (2004) • shortstory by Vandana Singh405 • The Tribes of Bela • [Colonel Kohn] • (2004) • novella by Albert E. Cowdrey465 • Sitka • (2004) • shortstory by William Sanders478 • Leviathan Wept • (2004) • shortstory by Daniel Abraham499 • The Defenders • (2004) • shortstory by Colin P. Davies504 • Mayflower II • [Xeelee] • (2004) • novella by Stephen Baxter562 • Riding the White Bull • (2004) • novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan588 • Falling Star • (2004) • shortstory by Brendan DuBois603 • The Dragons of Summer Gulch • (2004) • novelette by Robert Reed628 • The Ocean of the Blind • (2004) • shortstory by James L. Cambias649 • The Garden: A Hwarhath Science Fictional Romance • [Hwarhath] • (2004) • novella by Eleanor Arnason688 • Footvote • (2004) • shortstory by Peter F. Hamilton706 • Sisyphus and the Stranger • (2004) • shortstory by Paul Di Filippo (aka Sisyphe et l'étranger)718 • Ten Sigmas • (2004) • shortstory by Paul Melko726 • Investments • [Dread Empire's Fall] • (2004) • novella by Walter Jon Williams811 • Honorable Mentions: 2004 • essay by Gardner Dozois

    Simplify mines the often surreal terrain of people on the margins of life: from the man with a photo of Elvis bleeding on his wall in "Comeback Special," to the profoundly troubled boy genius of the title story "Simplify," to the family that must traverse "The Distance Between Us" to finally get to the truth about their son the murderer, each story hums with sharp drama, mystery, wonder, and startling humor. Simplify, the first collection of short fiction by Tod Goldberg, portrays a world where redemption, hope, and violence are never too far apart.

    Stylish, intricate and sensuous, these five wickedly inventive stories are a rich combination of humour and horror: exploring questions of literature, love, madness and memory.

    McKillip has created worlds of intricate beauty and unforgettably nuanced characters. For 25 years, she's drawn readers into her spell, spinning modern-day fables with a grace rarely seen. Now she presents a book of previously uncollected short stories, full of beautiful dragons, rueful princesses, and handsome bards, and written in the gorgeous--and often surprisingly funny--prose she's known for. This is her world, wrapped up in the finery of fairy tales.

    Whether you're a veteran grandma or a Nana-to-be, this collection of stories will warm your heart and make you laugh about the universal experiences of being a grandmother: the phone call that announces your baby will become a mom herself; the first time you hold the most beautiful grandson or granddaughter in the world; and the day you're on baby-sitting duty and realize that major issues are minor infractions best solved with love instead of lectures.This book celebrates the memories we make and the times we cherish with grandmothers: the women who can both spoil and be stern; who provide unconditional love and invaluable wisdom; who can share sage advice while sharing an ice cream.Chicken Soup for the Grandma's Soul is the perfect thank-you to grandmothers everywhere- those special women who enrich our lives with joy and love.

    From small towns to major metropolitan areas, scrapbooking has become the quilting bee of the 21st centuryin fact, there's a scrapbook enthusiast in one out of every four households across America. With stories from everyday scrapbookers, scrapbook celebrities and scrapbook artists, this unique Chicken Soup volume relates how scrapbooking helps us through challenging times, celebrates our heritage and ancestral journeys and reminds us of the best moments of our lives. With special design elements interspersed throughout, this book is a delightful read for scrapbook newbies and junkies alike.

    This new collection includes all of D'Allesandro's published stories (including those first collected in the out-of-print cult classic The Zombie Pit) as well as unpublished stories found among D'Allesandro's papers years after his death by his editor, the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, who worked with the literary estate to create this extended edition of his writing. The Wild Creatures explores a strange terrain of urban legend, the power of sexual obsession, and the thin line where the too-cool becomes the too-hot. Sam D'Allesandro's focused, vivid writing is the stuff of legend: writing so powerful it drags the reader in by the neck.

    Unfortunately, these nightmares all too often come true. People perform almost superhuman feats in their fight to survive bear attacks. Jim Marriott, for instance, was attacked andmauled by a grizzly while carving out a moose head. When playing dead didn’t work, he slammed his skinning knife into the attacker’s neck. The surprised bear backed off only to charge again, cut his tongue trying to bite at the knife, and got the knife sunk into thesame place. By the third charge, Marriott was on his feet despite chewed buttocks and damaged legs. This time the bear left with the knife still sticking in his neck. “In bear attacks, the human survival instinct is extraordinary,” says a doctor who sees the terrible punishment victims of bear attacks live through. “And equally amazing are the heroics and seemingly superhuman efforts of those around the victims.”BEAR ATTACKS OF THE CENTURY gathers together these stories of courage,chronicling the most horrific encounters between bears and people. With expert advice on avoiding attacks and information that may help both species leave an encounter unscathed, this book is required reading for hikers, hunters, campers, or anyone visiting bear country, and those who want to learn more about these sometimes deadly but always fascinating animals.

    Now available in Tales of the Otherworld.Jeremy is having flashbacks from the past while Clay and Elena are in Toronto (event in Bitten).

    Animals also populate this book; beavers, hamsters, salamanders, black widows, owls, llamas, bats, and many more are characters who befriend the narrator. This collection of stories is told by a woman compelled to divulge her secrets, fantasies, and obsessions with native Californian animals, glam rock icons, and horror movies, among other things. With a setting rooted in urban Los Angeles but colored by mythic tales of beauty borrowed from medieval times, Shakespeare, and Grimm's fairy tales, Wide Eyed makes the difficulties of surviving in a contemporary American city more palatable by showing the reader that magic and escape is always possible.Stories include, "Hummingbird Moonshine," in which the narrator's frustrated hunt for authentic religion in botanicas and science books culminates in a spiritual connection made with a hummingbird. In "Oceanic," she resolves to marry a manatee after a drunken pre-party for her best friend's wedding. In "Tiles," four vignettes about bloody accidents in tiled bathrooms intermingle with scenes from Dalton's favorite scary movies.Featuring oddball prose in the traditions of Dalton's literary heroes--Denton Welch, Robert Walser, and Jane Bowles--these stories have a dreamy, imaginative quality that reveal a peculiar state of mental ecstasy. To be inside the mind of Trinie Dalton is to be escorted into bliss.

    Adaptations gathers together 35 pieces that have been the basis for films, many from giants of American literature (Hemingway, Fitzgerald) and many that have not been in print for decades (the stories that inspired Bringing Up Baby, Meet John Doe, and All About Eve).Categorized by genre, and featuring movies by master directors such as Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Frank Capra, and John Ford, as well as relative newcomers such as Chris Eyre and Christopher Nolan, Adaptations offers insight into the process of turning a short story into a screenplay, one that, when successful, doesn’t take drastic liberties with the text upon which it is based, but doesn’t mirror its source material too closely either. The stories and movies featured in Adaptations include: - Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report,” which became the 2002 blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise- “The Harvey Pekar Name Story” by reclusive graphic artist Harvey Pekar, whose life was the inspiration for American Splendor, winner of the 2003 Sundance Grand Jury Prize- Hagar Wilde’s “Bringing Up Baby,” the basis of the classic film Bringing Up Baby, anthologized here for the first time ever- “The Swimmer” by John Cheever, an example of a highly regarded story that many feared might prove unadaptable•The predecessor to the beloved holiday classic A Christmas Story, “Red Ryder Nails the Hammond Kid” by Jean ShepherdWhether you’re a fiction reader or a film buff, Adaptations is your behind-the-scenes look at the sometimes difficult, sometimes brilliantly successful process from the printed page to the big screen.

    Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.The Best American Short Stories 2005 includesDennis Lehane • Tom Perrotta • Alice Munro • Edward P. Jones • Joy Williams • Joyce Carol Oates • Thomas McGuane • Kelly Link • Charles D'Ambrosio • Cory Doctorow • George Saunders • and othersMichael Chabon, guest editor, is the best-selling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and, most recently, The Final Solution. His novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

    Botolphs or Bullet Park or mid-century Manhattan or some other mythic place, are all recognizable as citizens of Cheever country. Vintage Cheever contains an essential selection of the master’s short stories and selections from the novels The Wapshot Chronicle, Bullet Park, Falconer and Oh What a Paradise It Seems.Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    “Who are you?” a homeless man asks his would-be benefactor in the title story. On the surface it’s a simple question, but one that would stump many of the characters who inhabit these carefully rendered tales.In the edgy novella “Click” Jonathan’s ongoing photo-documentary of a prostitute exposes how little intensity remains between him and his fiancée, Margaret. While Jonathan is plagued with doubts about his motivations and abilities as an artist, Margaret is worn out by her obligations not just to her needy husband-to-be but to all the men in her life. In “The Ugliest Boy,” Justin develops an odd friendship with Steven, his girlfriend’s brother. Steven was disfigured by fire in a childhood accident. Justin bears wounds more deeply hidden. The two forge a strange bond based on their anger and pain.Crouse’s stories often involve people trapped on the margins of society, confronted by diminishing possibilities and various forms of mental illness. The junior executive in “Code” worries about his job--and his sanity--amid a sudden and wide-sweeping corporate layoff. A manic-depressive father and his teenage daughter dress as vampires and embark on a strange Halloween journey through their suburban neighborhood in the darkly humorous “Morte Infinita.” In “Swimming in the Dark” a family gives up on itself. Shredded slowly over the years since the accidental drowning of the eldest son, the remaining family members seek their own separate peace, however imperfect.The men and women in Copy Cats are unwilling and often unable to differentiate reality from fantasy. Cursed with what one of them calls “a pollution of ideas,” these are people at war with their own imaginations.

    These eleven stories show why Jayne Anne Phillips has called Montemarano an American stylist capable of redeeming our darkest dreams.Redemption in these intense and sometimes violent stories is found in the lyrical prose, in the act of storytelling itself. A young man tries to rescue his sister from her abusive lover, and in the process must revisit his own family's violent history (Note to Future Self); a home healthcare worker pops pills and takes two men with cerebral palsy to a strip club (The Usual Human Disabilities); a man has a breakdown years after witnessing a brutal murder and doing nothing to help the victim (The Other Man). In The November Fifteen, a man is taken from his home and tortured, though he has no idea why; when he returns home he finds a different kind of torture awaiting him.Two of the stories -- Shift and the Pushcart Prize--winning The Worst Degree of Unforgivable -- are stylistic tours de force. But style in this collection is always at the service of story. Montemarano's fiction maintains that rare balance between traditional storytelling and experimentation: his work is innovative without being flashy, sincere without being sentimental. In an age of hype, If the Sky Falls truly is the real thing -- an original and important achievement in the short-story form.

    The subjects include marriage, abortion, character, relative truth and macroevolution. Immediately following each parable is a specific statement of the underlying Lie, its corresponding Truth and several nonfiction resources for further study of the issue. These resources include other books, scripture references and websites. The purpose of the book is to arm believers with a memorable story (and facts) about an important issue. And to disarm unbelievers by pulliing them into a realistic situation which then requires them to rethink what they have always thought was the Truth. An engaging, nonthreatening conversation starter with friends and family members who hold secular views on important cultural issues.

    Jones Dues Dale Peck Speckle Trout Ron Rash Sphinxes Timothy Crouse Grace Paula Fox Snowbound Liza Ward Tea Nancy Reisman Christie Caitlin Macy Refuge in London Ruth Prawer Jhabvala The Drowned Woman Frances De Pontes Peebles The Card Trick Tessa Hadley What You Pawn I Will Redeem Sherman Alexie

    Lovecraft's favorite horror stories, those that inspired and awed him!In 1929-30, H.P. Lovecraft made some lists of both literary and popular stories "having the greatest amount of truly cosmic horror and macabre convincingness." These lists of his favorite weird tales make for a truly landmark Lovecraftian anthology. We present Lovecraft's own favorites horrorstories, including some well-known classics, alongside of a number of excellent rare tales by forgotten authors. Many of these stories are classics, inspiring several generations since of the world's best horror authors. Contributors include Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, M. P. Shiel, A. Merritt, Walter de la Mare, Paul Suter, M. L. Humphreys, H.F. Arnold, Everil Worrell, Arthur J. Burks, and John Martin Leahy. This is the anthology of favorite weird tales that Lovecraft himself hoped to compile!"To understand why Lovecraft regarded these stories as the touchstone for greatness in the literature of supernatural horror is to understand the significance of the genre itself. The classic works included in this collection, along with Lovecraft's own best tales, both justify and represent the essence of this form of human expression." – Thomas Ligotti

    http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/ju...

    The wisdom—or foolhardiness—of that approach is at the heart of each of these stories.  In “I’ll Be Home,” a young man who has converted to Judaism goes home for Christmas in Miami, and finds that his desire to connect to his parents conflicts with his need to move on. “The Movements of the Body” introduces us to a woman who believes that she can control the disintegration of her life through a carefully measured balance of whiskey and mouthwash. These are stories about loss and fear, but also about the courage that drives us all to continue to reach out to the people around us.

    Viktor Chemayev is the Philip Marlowe of Russian detectives, a sad-eyed, heavy drinking romantic who refuses to stay beat. In the title novella of this extraordinary collection, he goes head-to-head with an Irish assassin in the depths of a Moscow nightclub in an attempt to win back his true love, who has been sold to the Beelzebub-like king of the Moscow underworld... Lucius Shepard is known for his dark, unpredictable vision, and in this assemblage of some of his best writing he takes us from Moscow to Africa; from the mountains of Iraq, where Specialist Charlie N. Wilson encounters a very different sort of enemy, to Central America, where a bloody-handed colonel meets his doom via lizards. In these seven tales Shepard's imagination spans the globe and, like an American Gabriel Garcia Marquez, refuses to be restricted by mere reality.

    Sometimes they assume human form--usually in answer to desperate prayer. These true stories from Guide Magazine--not an urban legend among them--will renew your faith. The angel of the Lord still encamps around those who fear Him.

    This book is intended to be read aloud to young children and to be read by older children for themselves. These abridged stories are intended to introduce a young audience to the prophets of God and to encourage thought and discussion in the family about the eternal wisdom these stories embody.

    His works range from literary and experimental to SF, fantasy, and mystery, and many of the stories in The Keyhole Opera began as subscription stories and went on to be published in magazines and anthologies.

    In The Elagin Affair, Mr. Hettlinger continues to acquaint English-language readers with a Bunin they may not have appreciated. Bunin's sensual, elaborate, and highly rhythmic prose has proven deeply resistant to earlier translations. In these new stories, Mr. Hettlinger captures both the music and the grace, as well as the literal meaning, of Bunin's renowned prose. The Elagin Affair contains three of the author's greatest novellas, the title piece, "Mitya's Love," and "Sukhodol" as well as a broad range of stories written between 1900 and 1940 and centered on themes of love, loss, and the Russian landscape, including several of Bunin's most haunting stories from his final collection, Dark Avenues. Praise for Sunstroke, Graham Hettlinger's first translations of Ivan Bunin: "Bunin is, unaccountably, the least translated of the great Russian writers (and his best work ranks with that of Turgenev and Chekhov). This splendid volume takes an important step toward righting a long-standing wrong."--Kirkus Reviews "Graham Hettlinger's new translation...gives us a Bunin startling in his vividness, sensuality, and restraint."--Virginia Quarterly Review "Vibrant...a fine introduction to Bunin's work and a reminder of its importance."--New York Sun

    It contains 53 extremely short stories and several B&W illustrations by Adam Rickwood.

    They are bound together by the voice of one woman, whose language spands cultures and continents. With a multiplicity of moods tumbling through its lines--joyous and introspective, tender and ruthless, self mocking and sincere, often funny and sometimes wild and ruse--Loose Woman offers intoxicating poems of extraordinary insight and vivid imagining. And what makes this particularly special audio is hearing the poems recited in the author's own voice.Woman Hollering Creek and Other StoriesFrom the author of the widely acclaimed The House on Mango Street comes a story collection whose characters give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border. From a young girl revealing secrets to a witch woman circling above the village on a predawn flight, the women in these stories offer pure discovery. Woman Hollering Creek confirms Sandra Cisneros's stature as a writer of electrifying talent--and hearing the stories in the author's own voice makes this audio even more poignant.

    Populated by pretenders, ex-cons, and wannabes who bend the rules, break the law, and risk everything to salvage their own hearts, the twelve stories in The Usual Mistakes conduct readers into a world where betrayal is just a beginning. Deception, infidelity, even death—where a person goes from there is the mainspring of Erin Flanagan’s fiction, and in the turns her characters take, we find rare insights: that we are often wedded to one another because of, not in spite of, our flaws and that this paradoxical connection may be cause for hope. An impostor medical assistant and an ex-neo-Nazi, covered head-to-toe in swastika tattoos; a seemingly oafish but suddenly sympathetic husband and a boorish mother-in-law in need of comforting; a young boy who finds adulthood by learning to forgive: the characters in these stories are by turns inappropriate, outlandish, selfish, and kind, complicated in the ways only real people are. Though they ask for little and rarely get even that, they do astonishing things with whatever does come their way; and their stories, in Flanagan’s sure hands, never fail to surprise.

    Moore ever published. It features a frontispiece by Richard Powers, and an introduction by the book’s editor, David Curtis. The stories, ranging from across their entire career, include: Shambleau, The Graveyard Rats, Mimsy Were the Borogoves, Vintage Season, Private Eye, and more.Contents7 • Introduction (Two-Handed Engine) • (2005) • essay by David Curtis9 • Shambleau • [Northwest Smith] • (1933) • novelette by C. L. Moore39 • The Graveyard Rats • (1936) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner47 • A Gnome There Was • (1941) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner ]75 • The Twonky • (1942) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ]99 • Compliments of the Author • (1942) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ]137 • Mimsy Were the Borogoves • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ]173 • Shock • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ]191 • Reader, I Hate You! • (1943) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner207 • The World Is Mine • [Gallegher] • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Lewis Padgett ]243 • When the Bough Breaks • (1944) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ]271 • The Cure • (1946) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ]285 • The Code • (1945) • novelette by C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O'Donnell ]331 • Line to Tomorrow • (1945) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ]345 • Clash by Night • [Keeps • 1] • (1943) • novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O'Donnell ]407 • Ghost • (1943) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner425 • The Proud Robot • [Gallegher] • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ]463 • Nothing But Gingerbread Left • (1943) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner ]483 • No Woman Born • (1944) • novelette by C. L. Moore533 • Housing Problem • (1944) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner ]549 • What You Need • (1945) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ]565 • Absalom • (1946) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner ]581 • Call Him Demon • (1946) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Keith Hammond ]607 • Daemon • (1946) • shortstory by C. L. Moore633 • Vintage Season • (1946) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O'Donnell ]681 • The Dark Angel • (1946) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner ]697 • Before I Wake • (1945) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner (variant of Before I Wake . . .)715 • Exit the Professor • [Hogben • 2] • (1947) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner ]731 • The Big Night • (1947) • novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Hudson Hastings ]763 • A Wild Surmise • (1953) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore775 • Don't Look Now • (1948) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner789 • Private Eye • (1949) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ]821 • By These Presents • (1953) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner835 • Home Is the Hunter • (1953) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore847 • Or Else • (1953) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner ]857 • Year Day • (1953) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner871 • A Cross of Centuries • (1958) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner885 • Two-Handed Engine • (1955) • novelette by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

    Fanciful tales of strange adventure in imaginary exotic locales and depictions of otherworldly grim creepiness abound.

    The Tuesday Night Club read by Joan Hickson The Fourth Man read by Christopher Lee The Affair at the Victory Ball read by David Suchet The Case of the Discontented Soldier read by Hugh Fraser

    Holland creates an exhilarating tension between the satisfactions of meaning and the attenuated beauty of lyric, making her fiction felt as deeply as it is understood. An unstable sister whose misconceived pregnancy replays the endless nightmare of childhood siblings and a wrecked marriage occasioning the misery of a horse: these are the frozen events around which Holland's words congeal. The poetry of her images, powerful but immediately absorbed, can bring consciousness to a standstill: "By then I've reached her: Sister spluttering, spitting out the plug of snow. Her mouth is bleeding. Her face is the grotesque of a face, a soul in flames, some rung of hell, and she is sobbing, spit puddling under her tongue." The Faulknerian echoes of Holland's prose invoke a dreamscape, a panorama enclosing barns and men and guns and Mother, as she trudges the cold hills in her nightgown. This writing is exquisite, a gorgeousness as unforgettable as a stabbing pain or the after-image of a howl in the pitch of night.

    The last in the beloved series of stories about the fictional western town everyone wants to inhabit.

    He knew that oddity is the norm, not the exception." This finely attuned sense, coupled with an understanding that nothing in life is mundane, is what makes these stories so immensely enjoyable. Drawing on a vast treasure chest of writings, Treglown has selected sixteen of Pritchett's gems, including "A Serious Question," which makes its debut in book form here. Featuring some of the best work from a long career, this new compilation of Pritchett's brilliantly compact stories illuminates his legendary skills.

    Even so, many of Hammett’s stories—including some of his best—have been out of the reach of anyone but a handful of scholars and collectors, until now. This essential compendium rescues 21 long-lost Hammett stories, all either never collected in an anthology or unavailable for decades. These stories appear nowhere else, and represent a variety of styles from the famous mysterysmith: his first detective fiction, humorous satires, adventure yarns, a sensitive autobiographical piece, and a Thin Man story told with photos. In addition, all stories have been restored to their original versions, replacing often wholesale cuttings with the original text for the first time. To round out this celebration of Hammett, three-time Edgar Award–winner Joe Gores has written an introduction describing how Hammett influenced literature, movies, television, and Gores’ own life.

    This star-studded follow-up to the acclaimed "Firebirds" contains riveting, original stories by some of today's masters of science fiction and fantasy, including Fancesca Lia Block, Alan Dean Foster, Diana Wynne Jones, and Tanith Lee.

    Tibor Dery Committees formed around the world in protest, among the many involved: Picasso, Camus, Satre, Bertrand Russell, and E.M. Forster. Today, Tibor Dery is venerated as one of the most important literary figures of Hungary. Love & Other Stories presents a selection of his finest short stories. Dive into the underworld of ordinary lives in Budapest trying to survive the winter of war, menaced by Arrow-cross men (enthusiastic local supporters of the Nazi SS). A loyal Party worker quietly breaks down under oppression, and a political prisoner is released after seven years and returns home. Permeating the whole are questions of responsibility and conscience, of social justice and renewal.

    Here, too, are superb, action-packed entries from today's outstanding Western storytellers -- distinguished award winners as well as daring newcomers, including Peter Brandvold · Randy Lee Eickhoff · Marcus Galloway · Ed Gorman · Elmer Kelton · Rod Miller · Robert J. Randisi · James Reasoner · Dusty Richards · Troy D. Smith · L. J. Washburn Edited by renowned author and anthologist Robert J. Randisi, Lone Star Law spans the existence of this elite investigative law enforcement agency. From fending off hostile Comanche to tracking serial killers, from aiming Winchesters and Colt revolvers to firing up laptops and state-of-the-art forensics technology, from targeting rustlers and outlaw gangs to leading harrowing hostage negotiations, the men and women who don the badge and white hat of the Texas Ranger stand as steadfast deliverers of American justice -- the Lone Star way.

    The Ocean and All Its Devices won't disappoint. Spencer's first collection, The Return of Count Electric was acclaimed by reviewers in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Cemetery Dance, Publishers Weekly and other magazines and newspapers. Science fiction legend Roger Zelazny, once introduced to Spencer's work, became a lifelong devotee. He wrote: William Browning Spencer is one of those rare short story writers who comes along once in a generation -- like Saki, Collier, Sheckley -- and manages to combine all of the virtues within that restricted format. The Ocean and All Its Devices collects some of Spencer's finest published work. Three of these stories appeared in year's best anthologies. Another, The Death of the Novel, was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award, while The Essayist in the Wilderness was on the final ballot for a World Fantasy Award.Contains: Introduction (The Ocean and All Its Devices) • essayThe Ocean and All Its Devices • (1994) • noveletteThe Oddskeeper's Daughter • (1995) • noveletteThe Death of the Novel • (1995) • short storyDownloading Midnight • (1995) • noveletteYour Faithful Servant • (1993) • short storyThe Foster Child • (2000) • short storyThe Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness • (1998) • short storyThe Lights of Armageddon • (1994) • short storyThe Essayist in the Wilderness • (2002) • novelette

    Thirty years later, one of the brothers-the only remaining survivor of a family he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in words forever-narrates these precise and heartbreaking tales. Suffused with the beauty of Richard McCann's extraordinary language, Mother of Sorrows introduces us to an elegant writer like no other in contemporary fiction.

    

    But the boys’ bravado fades at home when, alone, they check e-mail again and again for word from their fathers at the front.Often from fractured homes and communities, the young men in these breathless stories do the unthinkable to prove to themselves—to everyone—that they are strong enough to face the heartbreak in this world. Set in rural Oregon with the shadow of the Cascade Mountains hanging over them, these stories bring you face-to-face with a mad bear, a house with a basement that opens up into a cave, a nuclear meltdown that renders the Pacific Northwest into a contemporary Wild West. Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy is a bold, fiery, and unforgettable collection that deals with vital issues of our time.

    "It's the continual fairytale transformation from the mundane to the insane that gives this magical book its lift." --Stewart O'Nan

    Through four distinct historical units, the author looks at the development of the short story as a genre. The historical introductions and visual spreads that begin each unit help instructors and students place the stories they read in a broader context. In addition to delineating the history and future of the short story, the anthology provides a comprehensive collection of classical and traditional stories and demonstrates the liveliness, flexibility, and dynamic nature of the genre. This dual focus grounds students in the tradition of the short story genre and gives them an appreciation for its contemporary context. Unlike many introductions to short fiction, this anthology includes a strong representation of newer works by international and American writers.

    Each of the eight stories is unique, has a dynamic story line, and a marvelous ending These stories reached in and gripped my heart and soul and just did not let go. They gave me a new vision for myself as an elder woman, and gave me new perspectives on earlier life experiences as well. SpiderHawk does word magic

    Will he debunk the curse of Macbeth, or will it be curtains for Danny?

    This collection includes some of Xiao Hong's most famous short stories, such as "On the Oxcart," "Spring in a Small Town," "The Family Outsider," "Flight from Danger," "Vague Expectations," "The Bridge," and "Hands."

    Many of the stories take place in the home, where what is behind the thin domestic barriers of doors tends toward violence, unseemly sexual encounters, and mental anguish. Schutt opens these doors in sudden, bold moments and exposes the unsettling intimacy of the rooms and corridors of our innermost lives. Yet at the same time, her characters are often hopeful, even optimistic.Startling and smartly wrought, A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer is a breathtaking follow-up to Schutt's widely revered debut collection, Nightwork, and her critically acclaimed debut novel, Florida, which was a National Book Award Finalist.

    First published in the New Yorker magazine, 2002. And extracts from: Extremely loud and incredibly close (first published: Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

    Howe takes her readers through the chaos of lost lives, the cannibalism of fallen lovers, and invites readers into her world of Choctaw Code Talking. These poems are rebellious and like the Choctaws, they will endure.

    Aira, with his fuga hacia adelante or "flight forward" into the unknown, gives us imponderables to ponder and bizarre and seemingly out-of-context plot lines, as well as thoughtful and passionate takes on everyday reality. The title story, first published in the New Yorker, is the creme de la creme of this exhilarating collection.

    . . Strange and wonderful." —The New York Times Book Review, in praise of McIlvoy's previous fictionI am going to write about the state of New Mexico and put in some maps and stuff from the encyclopedia. My theme is the Don Juan Onate trail and the Jornada Del Muerto. But I might write some other important things which as it turns out my stepmother got angry about and said she wouldn't type this until my Dad said "Dammit now it is history" and told her maybe there weren't commas in those days."The Complete History of New Mexico" is no ordinary research paper, and this is no ordinary collection of short stories. Eleven-year-old Chum's "history" unfolds over three distinctive and increasingly disturbing sections. He writes that "Coronado explored around and found Santa Fe in 1610"; that "William Becknell was tracking wagons over everyplace in 1821"; and that every day his best friend, Daniel, is afraid to go home.Kevin McIlvoy intersperses the title novella with equally distinctive stories set in New Mexico. Laura, a plain, overweight nurse, encounters a terrified young man on his way to the Vietnam War and takes matters into her own hands. Zach spends time with his "white-trash" relatives and finds love's terrible and true face.The Complete History of New Mexico is a stunningly original collection that will further McIlvoy's growing reputation.