Reprinted in Beyond the Pale, edited by Henry Herz.Gentleman Johnnie Marcone clashes with a rival supernatural power. Told from Marcone’s point of view.Takes place between Turn Coat and Changes.“B is for Bigfoot” — from Under My Hat: Tales From the Cauldron, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Republished in Working for Bigfoot.Takes place between Fool Moon and Grave Peril.“I Was A Teenage Bigfoot” — from Blood Lite 3: Aftertaste, edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Republished in Working for Bigfoot.Takes place circa Dead Beat.“Bigfoot on Campus” — from Hex Appeal, edited by P.N. Elrod. Republished in Working for Bigfoot.Takes place between Turn Coat and Changes.“Bombshells” — Molly-POV novella from Dangerous Women, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Duzois.Molly teams up with Justine and Andi to thwart a Fomor plot.Takes place between Ghost Story and Cold Days.“Jury Duty” — short story for Unbound, edited by Shawn Speakman.Harry endures Jury Duty.Set after Skin Game.“Cold Case” — short story from Shadowed Souls, edited by Jim Butcher and Kerrie Hughes.In Molly’s first job in her new role, she teams up with Ramirez to take on a Lovecraft-esque cult.Takes place shortly after Cold Days.“Day One” — short story for Unfettered II, edited by Shawn Speakman.Butters’ first mission.Set after Skin Game.“A Fistful of Warlocks” — short story for Straight Outta Tombstone, edited by David Boop.Luccio takes on necromancers in the Wild West.Set long before the events of the series.

    Compiling favored stories suggested by the author and his fans, this delightful treasury contains the most esteemed and beloved selections that de Lint has to offer. Innovative characters in unexpected places are the key to each plot: playful Crow Girls who sneak into the homes of their sleeping neighbors; a graffiti artist who risks everything to expose a long-standing conspiracy; a half-human girl who must choose between her village and her strange birthright; and an unrepentant trickster who throws one last party to reveal a folkloric tradition. Showcasing some of the finest offerings within the realms of urban fantasy and magical realism, this essential compendium of timeless tales will charm and inspire.Contents IntroductionIn Which We Meet Jilly Coppercorn Coyote Stories Laughter in the Leaves The Badger in the Bag And the Rafters Were Ringing Merlin Dreams in the Mondream Wood The Stone Drum Timeskip Freewheeling A Wish Named Arnold Into the Green The Graceless Child Winter Was Hard The Conjure Man We Are Dead Together Mr. Truepenny's Book Emporium and Gallery In the House of My Enemy The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep Crow Girls Birds Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines In the Pines Pixel Pixies Many Worlds Are Born Tonight Sisters Pal o' Mine That Was Radio Clash Old Man Crow The Fields Beyond the Fields

    Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here... but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon.

    The collection was followed by her best-selling and critically acclaimed novel The Namesake—a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama. Presenting these works together here, this edition displays Lahiri’s enormous talent as a storyteller.

    M. Homes. “It is a place where things are not what they seem; even on a morning that is sunny and clear there is always the threat of darkness looming, of things taking a turn for the worse.” Jackson’s characters–mostly unloved daughters in search of a home, a career, a family of their own–chase what appears to be a harmless dream until, without warning, it turns on its heel to seize them by the throat. We are moved by these characters’ dreams, for they are the dreams of love and acceptance shared by us all. We are shocked when their dreams become nightmares, and terrified by Jackson’s suggestion that there are unseen powers–“demons” both subconscious and supernatural–malevolently conspiring against human happiness.In this volume Joyce Carol Oates, our leading practitioner of the contemporary Gothic, presents the essential works of Shirley Jackson, the novels and stories that, from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, wittily remade the genre of psychological horror for an alienated, postwar America. She opens with The Lottery (1949), Jackson’s only collection of short fiction, whose disquieting title story–one of the most widely anthologized tales of the twentieth century–has entered American folklore. Also among these early works are “The Daemon Lover,” a story Oates praises as “deeper, more mysterious, and more disturbing than ‘The Lottery,’” and “Charles,” the hilarious sketch that launched Jackson’s secondary career as a domestic humorist.Here too are Jackson’s masterly short novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the tale of an achingly empathetic young woman chosen by a haunted house to be its new tenant, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), the unrepentant confessions of Miss Merricat Blackwood, a cunning adolescent who has gone to quite unusual lengths to preserve her ideal of family happiness. Rounding out the volume are 21 other stories and sketches that showcase Jackson in all her many modes, and the essay “Biography of a Story,” Jackson’s acidly funny account of the public reception of “The Lottery,” which provoked more mail from readers of The New Yorker than any contribution before or since.

    The pieces in this collection are characterized by an incorrigible sense of humour and an eye for ordinary-and most often unnoticed-details that are so essential to the geographic, social and cultural fabric of a place.

    But this selection brings old favorites to those fans in a sparkling package and will introduce new readers to the funniest writer in the English language. Right Ho, Jeeves; Joy in the Morning; and Very Good, Jeeves follow the adventures of two magnificently improbable characters. Bertie Wooster is an amiable young gentleman of excellent and ancient family—so he says—with plenty of money and no professional ambitions. Jeeves is his gentleman's gentleman, the soul of discretion, and a deep thinker, at least compared to Wooster. Jeeves brings tea and hangover cures in the morning, tempers his master's dubious taste in clothes, and invariably manages to extricate Wooster from fantastic predicaments of his own devising. Without Jeeves, Wooster would either be in jail or married to one or another terrifying young woman of his Aunt Agatha's choosing. Unlike life, a Wodehouse story always works out well in the end.

    Filling some gaps of time and interest, these stories, some of which have been published before, will lead Tammy's fans, and new readers into one of the most intricately constructed worlds of modern fantasy.The Dragon's TaleDaine's dragonling, Kitten, helps an outcast from society.Elder BrotherA tree, made human by Numair, must learn the intricacies of being a man.The Hidden GirlDespite the laws of her patriarchal society, a girl wants to learn...and teach.HuntressA contemporary teen tries to fit in with the cool group at school, at a terrible price.LostA darking shows a self-doubting math genius how smart she can be.MimicRi helps any wounded creature, no matter how ugly or strangeNawatNawat the crow-man faces a choice no father wants to make.Plain MagicWhat happens when you lose a lethal lottery?Student of OstrichesA young girl fights a proven warrior to protect her sister's honor.TestingWhen trying out a new housemother, how hard do you push?Time of ProvingArimu of the Wind People meets a poet from the Veiled City.

    Coyote is a master storyteller and performer; their beautiful, funny stories about growing up a lesbian butch in the Canadian north have attracted big audiences whether gay, straight, or otherwise. Missed Her is Ivan's fifth story collection, following 2008's Lambda-nominated The Slow Fix and Bow Grip, their novel that was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association. Whether discussing the politics of being a butch with a pet lapdog or berating a gay newspaper for considering butches and trans people as "extreme," Ivan traverses issues of gender and identity with a wistful, perceptive eye.

    Countless authors — and mystery fans — owe Poe a great debt for his contributions to American literature. Canterbury Classics is proud to present the stories and collected works of Edgar Allan Poe in this handsome, leather-bound volume. Fans will discover some of his most famous works, including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Pit and the Pendulum," as well as some of his notable poems, including "The Raven" and "Lenore." These masterpieces get the royal treatment, and are printed on high quality ivory paper with gilded edges.

    WHAT'S REALLY HOOD!Black Is Blue by Victor L. Martin delves into the life of a corporate woman who falls in love with a thug and finds out just how easy it is to stray from the straight and narrow. Eighteen and hungry Wiz's only addiction to drugs is the money it made. But Crystal changed all of that and shows him just how powerful a woman can be in The P is Free by LaShonda Teague. In The LastLaugh by Bonta, Bobo, a member of the infamous Eight-Trey street gang, learns that gang life isn't all it's cracked up to be as "street wars" take on a whole new meaning. Shawn "Jihad" Trump tells the story of loyalty, love and honor, when The Point Blank Mob is brought to its knees leaving the crew fighting for their lives and freedom in All for Nothing. And New York Times bestselling author, Wahida Clark, introduces Nina, a woman tired of being disrespected by men who takes revenge to the ultimate level in Makin' Endz Meet.

    In the strangers’ house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. And then a secret is revealed and suddenly, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.Winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize, Foster is now published in a revised and expanded version. Beautiful, sad and eerie, it is a story of astonishing emotional depth, showcasing Claire Keegan’s great accomplishment and talent.

    In 'The River Nemunas', a teenaged orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. 'Village 113' is about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the seedkeeper who guards the history of a village soon to be submerged. And in 'Afterworld,' the radiant, cathartic final story, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson.The stories in Memory Wall show us how we figure the world, and show Anthony Doerr to be one of the masters of the form.

    For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness. In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself. "Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment. When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitely ends a good marriage. Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.(front flap)Contains:1922Big DriverA Fair ExtensionA Good Marriage

    He has to give a speech today for his Oral Communications class, and he's terrified of public speaking. Worse yet, he's being bullied by one of the most popular kids at school. He just has to make it through his third-hour gym class and then give his speech, and everything will be all right. The events about to transpire, however, may make this what proves to be the worst day of his life.

    It is rare that an author can capture the complexities of a place as though it were a person, and rarer still that one can reveal a land as dichotomous and fractious as Appalachia—a muse; a siren; a rugged, brutal landscape of exceptional beauty, promise, and suffering—with the honesty and precision of a photograph. "If you haven't heard of the Southern writer Ron Rash, it is time you should" (The Plain Dealer).In Burning Bright, the stories span the years from the Civil War to the present day, and Rash's historical and modern settings are sewn together in a hauntingly beautiful patchwork of suspense and myth, populated by raw and unforgettable characters mined from the landscape of Appalachia. In "Back of Beyond," a pawnshop owner who profits from the stolen goods of local meth addicts—including his own nephew—comes to the aid of his brother and sister-in-law when they are threatened by their son. The pregnant wife of a Lincoln sympathizer alone in Confederate territory takes revenge to protect her family in "Lincolnites." And in the title story, a woman from a small town marries an outsider; when an unknown arsonist starts fires in the Smoky Mountains, her husband becomes the key suspect.In these stories, Rash brings to light a previously unexplored territory, hidden in plain sight—first a landscape, and then the dark yet lyrical heart and the alluringly melancholy soul of his characters and their home.

    A soul-sucking Mummy stalks Elvis and John F. Kennedy. Joe Bob Briggs has a moral dilemma: If your girlfriend turns zombie on you, what do you do?And that’s the tame stuff.In this red-hot collection from world-champion Mojo storyteller Joe R. Lansdale, you’ll find his best, most outrageous stories. The high priest of Texan weirdness does it all: horror, mystery, satire, suspense, and even Westerns. Prepare to be offended, shocked, and cackling like a crazed redneck.Featuring five Bram Stoker Award–winning stories, this career retrospective contains some of Lansdale’s rarer work, his nonfiction forays into drive-in theaters and B-movies, and the novella Bubba Ho-Tep, later made into a cult-classic major motion picture.Come on in—the weirdness is fine.

    The fifty-two stories and critical introductions are organized chronologically as well as thematically for classroom use. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, and startling futuristic speculations, these stories will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of science fiction as a modern literary genre. They also provide a fascinating look at how our Western technoculture has imaginatively expressed its hopes and fears from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century to the digital age of today. A free online teacher's guide accompanies the anthology and offers access to a host of pedagogical aids for using this book in an academic setting.The stories in this anthology have been selected and introduced by the editors of Science Fiction Studies, the world's most respected journal for the critical study of science fiction.

     Four-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, three-time winner of the Whitbread Prize, and five-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, William Trevor is one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. Over a career spanning more than half a century, Trevor has crafted exquisitely rendered tales that brilliantly illuminate the human condition. Bringing together forty-eight stories from "After Rain, The Hill Bachelors, A Bit on the Side," and "Cheating at Canasta," this second volume of Trevor's collected fiction offers readers "treasures of gorgeous writing, brilliant dialogue, and unforgettable lives" ("The New York Times Book Review").

    From the National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, "rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide."Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival.Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.

    P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.He returns with his second collection, Occultation. Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation’s nine tales of terror (two published here for the first time) were nominated for just as many Shirley Jackson awards, winning for the novella “Mysterium Tremendum” and the collection as a whole. Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron’s fans have come to expect. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

    In the cathedral-city of Lodellan and its uneasy hinterland, babies are fashioned from bread, dolls are given souls and wishes granted may be soon regretted. There are ghosts who dream, men whose wings have been clipped and trolls who long for something other. Love, loss and life are elegantly dissected in Slatter's earthy yet poetic prose. As Rob Shearman says in his Introduction: 'Sourdough and Other Stories manages to be grand and ambitious and worldbuilding-but also as intimate and focused as all good short fiction should be . . . The joy of Angela Slatter's book is that she's given us a set of fairy tales that are at once both new and fresh, and yet feel as old as storytelling itself.'

    These bewitching poems and stories unwind a fevered world of magic and longing and young women who chance the uncanny and gain wisdom beyond their years.

    In each of her stories, Danielle Evans explores the non-white American experience with honesty, wisdom, and humor. They are striking in their emotional immediacy, based in a world where inequality is a reality, but the insecurities of young adulthood and tensions within family are often the more complicating factors. One of the most lauded debuts of the year, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self announces a major new talent in Danielle Evans.

    Brave New Worlds brings together the best dystopian fiction of the last 30 years, demonstrating the diversity that flourishes in this compelling subgenre. This landmark tome contains stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Cory Doctorow, M. Rickert, Paolo Bacigalupi, Orson Scott Card, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, and many others.Table of ContentsIntroduction / John Joseph Adams --Lottery / Shirley Jackson --Red card / S.L. Gilbow --Ten with a flag / Joseph Paul Haines --Ones who walk away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le. Guin --Evidence of love in a case of abandonment / M. Rickert --The Funeral / Kate Wilhelm --O happy day! / Geoff Ryman --Pervert / Charles Coleman Finlay --From homogeneous to honey / Neil Gaiman & Bryan Talbot --Billennium / J.G. Ballard --Amaryllis / Carrie Vaughn --Pop squad / Paolo Bacigalupi --Auspicious eggs / James Morrow --Peter Skilling / Alex Irvine --The Pedestrian / Ray Bradbury --Things that make me weak and strange get engineered away / Cory Doctorow --Pearl diver / Caitlin R. Kiernan --Dead space for the unexpected / Geoff Ryman --"Repent harlequin!", said the Ticktockman / Harlan Ellison --Is this your day to join the revolution? / Genevieve Valentine --Independence day / Sarah Langan --Lunatics / Kim Stanley Robinson --Sacrament / Matt Williamson --Minority report / Philip K. Dick --Just do it / Heather Lindsley --Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut Jr. --Caught in the organ draft / Robert Silverberg --Geriatric ward / Orson Scott Card --Arties aren't stupid / Jeremiah Tolbert --Jordan's waterhammer / Joe Mastroianni --Of a sweet slow dance in the wake of temporary dogs / Adam-Troy Castro --Resistance / Tobias S. Buckell --Civilization / Vylar Kaftan.

    Alberich's new horse had been stolen from the enemy--but it wasn't the only thing stolen.This story was originally published in the anthology HORSE FANTASTIC, December 1991.

    It’s the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It’s the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad.” Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction.James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, series editor of the annual The Best American Mystery Stories, mined one hundred years of writing—1910–2010—to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir’s twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain’s “Pastorale,” and its post-war heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing in the last decade.

    Half-dead from pneumonia and on the brink of giving up, he was taken in as a boy and nursed back to health by a young couple. Growing up, Johnny harbored nothing but resentment and jealousy of their biological son, Sam. But now Sam is in big trouble, and it seems that Johnny may be the only person who can come between his half brother and a pair of gunmen.Ross Haney is “The Rider of Ruby Hills.” At twenty-seven, he’s broke, armed, and ready to settle down. But when a feud breaks out between the owners of two of the biggest spreads in Ruby Hills, it looks like the fair town is on the brink of destruction. Ross was a loner at first, but now he’s got allies and a plan . . .In the title story, Krag Moran is a rider who becomes involved in a range war among ranchers and nesters. The town is divided, and by the time shots are fired and the body count starts to rise, Krag will have a lot of explaining to do to the wrong people.Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction that takes place in the old West. Westerns—books about outlaws, sheriffs, chiefs and warriors, cowboys and Indians—are a genre in which we publish regularly. Our list includes international bestselling authors like Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour, and many more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

    For those who haven't read the original, or don't remember, although they are soulmates, the stargazer Mary-Lynnette sent the vampire Ash packing when she heard about the sins of his past. Ever since, a reformed Ash has been trying to make amends. But will it ever be enough for Mary-Lynnette? And what's on the disk that Mary-Lynnette's friend claims will save humankind?Rating: PG for mild violence. For romantics.

    "Rachel Glaser has written a game-changer. I have a couple of rules about things I allow myself to like. Rachel breaks all of them and her stories leave me hunting for my rule book. Where is my rule book? Damn her. Bless her. Say what you will. PEE ON WATER is a new way to breathe"--Giancarlo DiTrapano.

     Of course, they must return it to the Living Library, a haunted collection of ten million magical tomes, a collection where the rules of time, space, weather, and reality itself are subject to sudden change. Escorted by armored battle-librarians, a group of four students must face mysteries and monsters in a fight to get their books back on the shelves in this brisk, darkly whimsical sword and sorcery tale. Originally published in 2010, the Author's Enhanced Edition of "In the Stacks" is newly revised and expanded, featuring new dialogue, new scenes, and a new introduction from the author, internationally best-selling fantasist Scott Lynch, creator of Locke Lamora and the Gentleman Bastard Sequence.

    Howard is famous for creating such immortal heroes as Conan the Cimmerian, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn. Less well-known but equally extraordinary are his non-fantasy adventure stories set in the Middle East and featuring such two-fisted heroes as Francis Xavier Gordon—known as “El Borak”—Kirby O’Donnell, and Steve Clarney. This trio of hard-fighting Americans, civilized men with more than a touch of the primordial in their veins, marked a new direction for Howard’s writing, and new territory for his genius to conquer.The wily Texan El Borak, a hardened fighter who stalks the sandscapes of Afghanistan like a vengeful wolf, is rivaled among Howard’s creations only by Conan himself. In such classic tales as “The Daughter of Erlik Khan,” “Three-Bladed Doom,” and “Sons of the Hawk,” Howard proves himself once again a master of action, and with plenty of eerie atmosphere his plotting becomes tighter and twistier than ever, resulting in stories worthy of comparison to Jack London and Rudyard Kipling. Every fan of Robert E. Howard and aficionados of great adventure writing will want to own this collection of the best of Howard’s desert tales, lavishly illustrated by award-winning artists Tim Bradstreet and Jim & Ruth Keegan.

    This gorgeous full-color illustrated book version was born of a unique collaboration between writer Neil Gaiman and artist Eddie Campbell, who brought to vivid life the characters and landscape of Gaiman's story. In August 2010, The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains was performed in the concert hall of the Sydney Opera House to a sold-out crowd—Gaiman read his tale live as Campbell's magnificent artwork was presented, scene-by-scene, on large screens. Narrative and art were accompanied by live music composed and performed especially for the story by the FourPlay String Quartet.

    This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.CONTENTSErle Stanley Gardner: Come and Get ItFredric Brown: Cry SilencePeter Collison: Arson PlusFredrick Nebel: Doors in the DarkLester Dent: LuckDashiell Hammett: The Maltese FalconStewart Sterling: Ten Carats of LeadWyatt Blassingame: Murder Is Bad LuckTalmadge Powell: Her Dagger Before MeCharles G. Booth: One ShotRichard Sale: The Dancing RatsKatherine Brocklebank: BraceletsThomas Walsh: Diamonds Mean DeathRoul Whitfield: Murder in the RingWalter C. Brown: The Parrot That Wouldn’t TalkMerle Constiner: Let the Dead AloneCarrol John Daly: Knights of the Open PalmWilliam Cole: Waiting for RustyRamon Decolta: Rainbow DiamondsWilliam Rollins Jr.: The Ring on the Hand of DeathTheodore A. Tinsley: Body SnatcherD wight V. Babcock: Murder on the GaywayCleve F. Adams: The KeyWilliam Campbell Gault: The Bloody BokharaBrett Halliday: A Taste for CognacDay Keene: Sauce for the GanderW.T. Ballard: A Little DifferentCharles M. Green: The Shrieking SkeletonHank Searls: Drop Dead TwiceDale Clark: The Sound of the ShotFrederick C. Davis: Flaming AngelDon M. Mankiewicz: Odds on DeathNorvell Page: Those CatriniHugh B. Cave: Smoke in Your EyesRobert Reeves: Blood, Sweat and BiersWhitman Chambers: The Black BottleMilton K. Ozaki: The Corpse The Didn’t KickRaymond Chandler: Try the GirlNorbert Davis: Don’t You Cry for MeRay Cummings: T. McGuirk Steals A DiamondSteve Fisher: Wait For MeFrank Gruber: Ask Me AnotherHorcase McCoy: Dirty WorkJulius Long: Merely MurderJohn D. MacDonald: Murder in One SyllableH.H. Stinson: Three Apes from the EastD.L. Champion Death Stops PaymentRichard Connell: The Color of HonorBruno Fischer: Middleman for MurderRichard Deming: The Man Who Choose the DevilC.M. Kornbluth: Beer-Bottle PolkaCornell Wollrich: Borrowed Crime

    Featuring 31 favorite tiny stories and illustrations by 45 writers and artists from the 2,312 contributions to wirrow's endlessly popular Tiny Stories collaboration; plus a special introductory interview by RegularJOE & wirrow. Designed for hitRECord by Marke, wirrow, & 45 hitRECorders.

    It contains a broad spectrum of his work, from his first published story, "Nunivak Snowflakes," through "The Receivers" and "Monkey Suit," both published within the last year, plus an introduction by his friend, and former Boskone Guest, Stephen Baxter. It is well-known that the scope of Dr. Reynolds' stories is vast; his Revelation Space stories alone attest to that. This collection shows his impressive range, from the claustrophobic Antarctic station, "Byrd Land Six," to the branespanning "Tiger, Burning," to the millennia-long quest of "Fury." His viewpoints are as varied as his constant production of big, new ideas. A lone artist calmly painting the universe. A planetary ecological struggle reduced to a game. A fleeing assassin drawn into an alien rescue between the stars. The full-color dust jacket is by John Picacio, the Boskone 47 Official Artist.Table of Contents:-Introduction by Stephen Baxter-Nunivak Snowflakes-Monkey Suit-The Fixation-Feeling Rejected-Fury-Stroboscopic-The Receivers-Byrd Land Six-The Star Surgeon's Apprentice-On the Oodnadatta-Fresco-Viper-Soirée-The Sledge-Maker's Daughter-Tiger, Burning

    Yet the literary landscape of this dynamic part of the world has been bound together not by borders and nationalities, but by a common experience of Western imperialism. Keenly aware of the collected scars left by a legacy of colonial rule, the acclaimed writer Reza Aslan, with a team of four regional editors and seventy-seven translators, cogently demonstrates with Tablet and Pen how literature can, in fact, be used to form identity and serve as an extraordinary chronicle of the disrupted histories of the region.Acting with Words Without Borders, which fosters international exchange through translation and publication of the world’s finest literature, Aslan has purposefully situated this volume in the twentieth century, beyond the familiar confines of the Ottoman past, believing that the writers who have emerged in the last hundred years have not received their full due. This monumental collection, therefore, of nearly two hundred pieces, including short stories, novels, memoirs, essays and works of drama—many of them presented in English for the first time—features translated works from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish. Organized chronologically, the volume spans a century of literature—from the famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Nobel laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, from the great Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis to the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai—connected by the extraordinarily rich tradition of resplendent cultures that have been all too often ignored by the Western canon.By shifting America’s perception of the Middle Eastern world away from religion and politics, Tablet and Pen evokes the splendors of a region through the voices of its writers and poets, whose literature tells an urgent and liberating story. With a wealth of contextual information that places the writing within the historical, political, and cultural breadth of the region, Tablet Pen is transcendent, a book to be devoured as a single sustained narrative, from the first page to the last. Creating a vital bridge between two estranged cultures, "this is that rare anthology: cohesive, affecting, and informing" (Publishers Weekly).

    This is the DEAD OF WINTER, exclusively available in eBook format.

    Beagle as a 'bandit prince out to steal reader's hearts' he touched on a truth that readers have known for fifty years. Beagle, whose work has touched generations of readers around the world, has spun rich, romantic and very funny tales that have beguiled and enchanted readers of all ages.Undeniably, his most famous work is the much loved classic, The Last Unicorn, which tells of unicorn who sets off on quest to discover whether she is the last of her kind, and of the people she meets on her journey. Never prolific, The Last Unicorn is one of only five novels Beagle has published since A Fine and Private Place appeared in 1960, and was followed by The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper's Song, and Tamsin.During the first forty years of his career Beagle also wrote a small handful, scarcely a dozen, short stories. Classics like 'Come Lady Death,' 'Lila and the Werewolf,' 'Julie's Unicorn,' 'Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros,' and the tales that make up Giant Bones. And then, starting just five years ago, he turned his attention to short fiction in earnest, and produced a stunning array of new stories including the Hugo and Nebula Award winning follow up to The Last Unicorn, 'Two Hearts,' WSFA Small Press Award winner 'El Regalo,' and wonderful stories like the surrealist 'The Last and Only,' the haunting 'The Rabbi s Hobby' and others.Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle collects the very best of these stories, over 200,000 words worth, ranging across 45 years of his career from early stories to freshly minted tales that will surprise and amaze readers. It's a book which shows, more than any other, just how successful this bandit prince from the streets of New York has been at stealing our hearts and underscores how much we hope he ll keep on doing so.

    Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bolano story might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, or a dream of meeting Enrique Lihn: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot—and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolano’s own).Although a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy, most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English, and to Bolano’s many readers will be like catnip to the cats.

    SpaceshipPiper in the Woods

    Called the best fiction writer to appear in the South since Flannery O'Connor (Larry McMurtry), acclaimed author Hannah ("Airships, Bats Out of Hell") returns with an all-new collection of short stories.

    There's Tow-Kaye, getting married at age seventeen to the love of his life, who's pregnant. James writes in his diary about his twin brother's terrible secret, while Tyler explains what it's like to be a player with the ladies. And Eric takes us on a tour of North Philly on the Fourth of July, when the heat could make a guy go crazy. Sharon G. Flake's talent for telling it like it is will leave readers thinking differently, feeling deeply, and definitely wanting more.

    Can he pull it out and help his team win?

    This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

    In this down and dirty debut she draws vivid portraits of bad people in worse places. A woman struggles to survive her boyfriend's terror preparations. A wife finds that the key to her sex life lies in her dog’s electric collar. Two teenagers violently tip the scales of their friendship. A rising star of the new fast fiction, Hunter bares all before you can blink in her bold, beautiful stories. In this collection of slim southern gothics, she offers an exploration not of the human heart but of the spine; mixing sex, violence and love into a harrowing, head-spinning read.

    A tale of loss and healing, set in Kushner's Riverside series.

    In one, a 19th-century minister follows ghostly instructions to build a mechanical messiah. In another, a tyrannical army commander watches his apocalyptic command slip away as the memories of his men begin to fade and fail. Elsewhere, murders are indexed, new worlds are mapped, fairy tales are fractured and retold and then fractured again.Throughout these thirteen stories, Bell's careful prose burrows at the foundations of his characters' lives until they topple over, then painstakingly pores over the wreckage for what rubbled humanity might yet remain to be found.

    For the reader uninitiated in the deadly world of her canon, this collection offers the first serious introduction to her remarkable range and psychological insight.With an introduction provided by Joan Schenkar—author of the acclaimed biography The Talented Miss Highsmith—Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories continues the remarkable renaissance of this literary master. Even with her first novels, Highsmith tore at the very fabric of 1950s middle-class society, revealing the stark emotional brutality that lurked beneath the sunny facade of Eisenhower suburbia.Chosen by Joan Schenkar, the selections in this book—two iconic American novels and a trove of her most representative short stories—char the virtuosic range of Highsmith's voice, as she deftly leaps from suspense to horror, from biting social satire to deeply moving psychological drama. In Strangers on a Train (1950)—Highsmith's debut novel about the inspiration for the classic Hitchcock film—a casual conversation between acquaintances devolves into a tangled web of murder, desperation, and manipulation. This thriller provides as thorough an examination of guilt and obsession as can be found in contemporary literature. Highsmith's second novel, The Price of Salt (1952), is a seductive tale of sexual obsession that demonstrates the astounding versatility of Highsmith's insight into human nature, and has only recently begun to receive commensurate literary recognition. Written during the intensely creative period of her late twenties, The Price of Salt blends Highsmith's richly figured language with the then scandalous subject of lesbian love. The accompanying thirteen short stories demonstrate Highsmith's mastery of the short story form and reveal her to be as fine a craftsman as any American twentieth-century novelist.This volume introduces a new generation to the haunting fiction of one of our most underappreciated literary geniuses.

    I grow my ears, extend cups of near-frozen tissue from the sides of my head, turn like a living antennae in search of the best reception.The Things has been published 28 separate times and translated 3 times.See www dot isfdb dot org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1077522

    Scott Fitzgerald's short fiction, this collection spans his career, from the early stories of the glittering Jazz Age, through the lost hopes of the thirties, to the last, twilight decade of his life. It brings together his most famous stories, including 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz'.

    God Loves Hair is a collection of 20 short stories following a tender, intellectual, and curious child as he navigates complex realms of sexuality, gender, racial politics, religion, and belonging.Told with the poignant insight and honesty that only the voice of a young mind can convey, each story is accompanied by a vivid illustration by Toronto artist Juliana Neufeld.

    A town of spilled peaches fields its own game show. A mosquito fogger finds an unlikely friend. The stories in Mike Young's debut collection Look! Look! Feathers tap into the surreal and sad, the absurd and ragged dreams scratching at the edge of the American heart. Punks drive auctioned police cars, and necklaces of bluebird bones are sold from a roadside van. In these tales of the Pacific Northwest, Young finds magic burrowed under the moss of ordinary life.

    Ghosts dance, butterflies swarm, men crystallize, the sun disappears, and water plays a role in both destruction and repair of the soul. With an unflinching eye, a mythical awareness of the natural world, and poetic, crafted prose, Masih examines the dark recesses of the mind and heart, which often leads to a small or great triumph or illumination that will resonate long after the last page is turned.

    A handful of Messengers brave the night between the increasingly isolated populace behind protective wards. Arlen Bales will search anywhere, dare anything, to save the world. Maybe Abban, a merchant in the Great Bazaar of Krasia who purports to sell anything, has the answer.

    In “Shining Rock,” an older couple encounter a strange and menacing visitor during a camping trip in the North Carolina mountains. Friendly at first, this stranger seems to know them, seems to know their secrets, and as things escalate, they become convinced that they may never leave these mountains alive.*Note: This story is collected with others in the eBook, FOUR LIVE ROUNDS, which also contains a Foreword by J.A. Konrath and introductions to each story by Blake Crouch.

    Taking place in a world of desperate people who cling to hope, but have few expectations, Roberge introduces us to a motley crew of cripples, drug addicts, former child actors, chimpanzee boxers, exterminators, and assorted criminals. These desperate, boldly original stories are distinguished by a stark prose reminiscent of Denis Johnson or Lorrie Moore, but are, ultimately, all their own—powerful, riveting, deeply felt, and darkly funny.

    For over two decades, the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, best-selling and beloved author, discovered and nurtured a grand generation of popular and acclaimed writers including Mercedes Lackey, Jennifer Roberson, and a host of others. Authors who have appeared within the pages of Sword and Sorceress represent the full spectrum of some of the brightest talent working today from C.J. Cherryh, Charles de Lint, and Emma Bull... to Deborah J. Ross, Diana L. Paxson, Steven Brust, and Laurell K. Hamilton. We are proud to continue the classic and vibrant feminist tradition with this twenty-fifth volume of new magical adventures edited by Elisabeth Waters, secretary and co-editor to Mrs. Bradley. Here are twenty original stories of remarkable women of power, swashbuckling and magic, spells and duels, arcane sorcery and fabled heroism, written by familiar word-weavers of excitement and adventure, and bright newcomers who are sure to become favorites. Enter a wondrous universe... Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress Volume 25 includes stories by Dave Smeds, Amy Griswold, Michael H. Payne, Michael Spence, Elisabeth Waters, Deborah J. Ross, Catherine Soto, Pauline J. Alama, L. M. Townsend-Crow, K. D. Wentworth, Helen E. Davis, Robin Wayne Bailey, Steve Chapman, Steven Brust, Kate Coombs, Jonathan Moeller, Lauren K. Moody, Josepha Sherman, Barbara Tarbox, Jonathan Shipley, and Susan Wolven.

    In stories filled with heart and humour, Tim Gautreaux explores the stresses and strains of everyday life as his characters struggle to make amends for their mistakes and hope for different, better days to come.

    The characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York's Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for the title story in "Windeye," Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Department.

    Chapters: Harrison Bergeron, Epicac, 2br02b, Welcome to the Monkey House, Miss Temptation, Report on the Barnhouse Effect, All the King's Horses, Who Am I This Time?, Deer in the Works. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: "Harrison Bergeron" is a satirical, dystopian science fiction short story written by Kurt Vonnegut and first published in October 1961. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the story was re-published in the author's collection, Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968. In the story, social equality has been achieved by handicapping the more intelligent, athletic or beautiful members of society. For example, strength is handicapped by the requirement to carry weight, beauty by the requirement to wear a mask and so on. This is due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the United States Constitution. This process is central to the society, designed so that no one will feel inferior to anyone else. Handicapping is overseen by the United States Handicapper General, Diana Moon-Glampers. Harrison Bergeron, the protagonist of the story, has exceptional intelligence, strength, and beauty, and thus has to bear enormous handicaps. These include headphones that play distracting noises, three hundred pounds of weight strapped to his body, eyeglasses designed to give him headaches, a rubber ball on his nose, black caps on his teeth, and shaven eyebrows. Despite these societal handicaps, he is able to invade a TV station, declare himself Emperor, strip himself of his handicaps, then dance with a ballerina whose handicaps he has also discarded. Both are shot dead by the brutal and relentless Handicapper General. The story is framed by an additional perspective from Bergeron's parents, who are w...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=18941

    Through tight language and searing scenarios, Rohan brings to life a plethora of characters--exposed, vulnerable souls who are achingly human.

    The book costs $8 (with free shipping), for which you'll receive the perfect-bound minibook, plus an audiobook version that you'll be able to download immediately upon completion of your order. As an added bonus, you'll also receive an e-coupon for $3 off my full-length collection How They Were Found when it becomes available for pre-order later this year, sometime before its October release.

    Kiernan's The Ammonite Violin & Others, one of contemporary dark fantasy s most bewitching and distinctive voices is back with another banquet of the weird and unexpected. In his introduction, Jeff VanderMeer (City of Saints and Madmen, Finch) writes, Kiernan creates her own light in this remarkable collection, and shines it on dark places. In doing so, she gives us gritty, lyrical, horrible, beautiful truths. In The Ammonite Violin & Others, the author rises to meet the high expectations she set with such collections as Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated To Charles Fort, With Love. Within these pages, you ll discover a dazzling suite of stories situated on the borderlands between the unspeakbale and the erotic, the grotesque and the sublime. Here are stories of dream and metamorphosis, strange lands and beings existing beyond the veil of death and beyond this earth. Here is a selkie who's lost her sealskin, a woman with a blackhole in her heart, a fairie girl fallen to the Queen of Decay, the descent of a modern-day Orpheus, and a killer who has fashioned the most exquisite musical instrument from the remains of one of his victims. Here are dreams, nightmares, and worse things yet.The Ammonite Violin & Others is comprised of stories first published in the subscription only Sirenia Digest, run by Caitlin for her most devoted readers. This publication marks the stories' first availability to the general public.

    Contents: 'Introduction' by Mark Valentine, 'The Effigies', 'After the Darkness', 'The Paravine Cries', 'Pale Roses', 'In Violet Veils', 'The Lost Moon', 'Café Lucifer', 'The Craft of Arioch', 'The Secret Stars', 'The Hesperian Dragon', 'The Lighting of the Vial', 'The Nephoseum', 'Sea Citadels', 'The Prince of Barlocco', 'The Black Eros', 'Mad Lutanist', 'The Mist on the Mere', 'The White Solander', 'The Last Archipelago', 'The Rite of Trebizond', 'The Serpent, Unfallen', 'The Temple of Time', 'The Descent of the Fire'.Following in the footsteps of M.P. Shiel's exotic savant Prince Zaleski and Arthur Machen's Mr Dyson, Mark Valentine and John Howard's The Connoisseur - aesthetical detective extraordinaire - unravels a cornucopia of arcane mysteries in these twenty-three tantalising tales. Collecting together all the adventures in previous Tartarus volumes In Violet Veils and Masques and Citadels, along with four further tales published elsewhere, this volume provides the lover of esoteric mystery and adventure fiction with the complete Connoisseur casebook.Venturing from his fire-lit study in an English cathedral city, The Connoisseur encounters, among other phenomena, strange masquerades in country houses; a Scottish island whose Prince may not be named; a poignant relic from the Black Sea region, sought after by a ruthless order; a secret account of the first crossing of an Arctic land and an Art Deco cinema which may retain resonances of its mysterious former occupants. From your own fireside, follow The Connoisseur into the delicate shading between this world and other realms of wonder, tragedy and trepidation.

    Set in Detroit during the Depression, Doerr tells the affecting story of Tom, meant to die of a weak heart before he is 18, who is cossetted by his mother, but shown a world of possibilities by the flame-haired Ruby.Fast Fiction: A selection of masterful short stories from 4th Estate short story collections, and the best talent from The Sunday Times authors, available to purchase as single story ebooks.

    Brought together in this book and illustrated with inspired artwork are the very best of these 11 second gems. The powerful messages found in these stories have already kept students from dropping out of school, helped girls with body-image issues, and on more than one occasion brought people back from the verge of suicide. One such visitor to givesmehope.com stayed up for fourteen straight hours reading every story on the website, and then posted that she "could never leave a world that contained such beauty."

    Vera Pavlova has lived long enough to know that when this happens and they begin to howl, it means the approach of hunger, the threat of starvation, and the onset of desperation. The woods loom large as Vera grapples with the truth about, and her justification of, what she did to her own mother. And now—as the men cut and package their drugs in her house once a week—what she has done to her own daughter.Anthony Marra is an M.F.A. candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His piece was chosen, out of hundreds of stories, as the first place winner in The Atlantic’s 2009 Student Writing Contest. His fiction has also appeared in Narrative.

    These stories reveal the hidden dangers in the coyote-infested fields, rusty riverbeds, and abandoned logging trails of Kentucky. There we find tactile, misbegotten characters, desperate for the solace found in love, revenge, or just enough coal to keep an elderly woman's stove burning a few more nights. Echoing Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, Taylor manages fervor as well as humor in these dusky, shotgun plots, where in one story, a man spends seven days in a jon boat with his fiddle and a Polaroid camera, determined to enact vengeance on the water-logged body of a used car salesman; and in another, a demolition derby enthusiast nicknamed "Wife" watches his two wild, burning love interests duke it out, only to determine he would rather be left alone entirely. Together, these stories present a resonant debut collection from an unexpected new voice in Southern fiction. Alex Taylor has worked as a day laborer on tobacco farms, as a car detailer at a used automotive lot, as a sorghum peddler, as a tender of suburban lawns, at various fast food chains, and at a cigarette lighter factory. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and now teaches at Western Kentucky University. He lives in Rosine, Kentucky.

    These are the stories told to warn children, entertain adults and beguile all. Contents:BluebeardThe Living BookThe Jacaranda WifeRed SkeinThe Chrysanthemum BrideFrozenThe Hummingbird HeartWordsThe Little Match GirlThe Juniper TreeSkinThe Bone MotherThe Dead Ones Don’t Hurt YouLight As Mist, Heavy As HopeDresses, ThreeThe Girl With No HandsCover design by Lisa L. Hannett

    The writing straddles the shifting line between pure, unadorned storytelling and satire, exploring the sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking nature of survival in a decidedly cruel world.

    By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find all the Christmas stories written by Lucy Maud Montgomery.- The Red Room- A Christmas Mistake- A Christmas Inspiration- The Josephs' Christmas- Aunt Cyrilla's Christmas Basket- The Osbornes' Christmas- Bertie's New Year- Ida's New Year Cake- The Christmas Surprise at Enderly Road- Clorinda's Gifts- The Falsoms' Christmas Dinner- The Unforgotten One- Christmas at Red Butte- Uncle Richard's New Year's Dinner

    It didn't give you the date and it didn't give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die." Machine of Death tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out. Featuring stories by: * Randall Munroe* Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw* Tom Francis* Camille Alexa* Erin McKean* James L. Sutter* Douglas J. Lane* and many others.Featuring illustrations by: * Kate Beaton* Kazu Kibuishi* Aaron Diaz* Jeffrey Brown* Scott C.* Roger Langridge* Karl Kerschl* Cameron Stewart* and many others

     From Crispus' tender innocence to Ray Mortimer's near pure evil, to Rose's quiet determination, the characters in this book and their journeys showcase a world that is brimming with grace and meaning and showcases the talents of a writer at the top of his game.

    At the scene of the crime, Danny and Ceepak run into something much worse than a burglar: the DePinna family reunion!

    The German theologian Rudolf Otto located the origin of human religiosity in an ancient experience of "daemonic dread." American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft asserted that weird supernatural horror fiction arose from a fundamental human psychological pattern that is "coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it." The American psychologist William James wrote in his classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience that the "real core of the religious problem" lies in an overwhelming experience of cosmic horror born out of abject despair at life's incontrovertible hideousness. In Dark Awakenings, author and scholar Matt Cardin explores this ancient intersection between religion and horror in seven stories and three academic papers that pose a series of disturbing questions: What if the spiritual awakening coveted by so many religious seekers is in fact the ultimate doom? What if the object of religious longing might prove to be the very heart of horror? Could salvation, liberation, enlightenment then be achieved only by identifying with that apotheosis of metaphysical loathing? This volume collects nearly all of Cardin's uncollected fiction, including his 2004 novella "The God of Foulness." It contains extensive revisions and expansions of his popular stories "Teeth" and "The Devil and One Lump," and features one previously unpublished story and two unpublished papers, the first exploring a possible spiritual use of George Romero's Living Dead films and the second offering a horrific reading of the biblical Book of Isaiah. At over 300 pages and nearly 120,000 words, it offers a substantial exploration of the religious implications of horror and the horrific implications of religion. "In Dark Awakenings, Cardin proves himself to be an adept in the fullest sense of the word. To both the morbid and the cosmically minded, who may be one and the same, he delivers his visions and nightmares in a master's prose. In the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, Cardin's accomplishments as a writer are paralleled by his expertise as a literary critic and theorist, as readers can witness in this volume. His analyses of supernatural horror and its practitioners are also dark awakenings in the dual manner of his stories, with one eye on the black abyss and the other on an enlightened transcendence without denomination. Again, this quality of Cardin's work can be seen in the writings of Poe and Lovecraft, two other felicitous freaks who merged the antagonistisms of their imagination into a chimera as awful as it is awe-striking." -Thomas Ligotti, author of Teatro Grottesco and The Nightmare Factory. "Matt Cardin channels visions of dark, maniacal intensity. His otherworldly divinations will have you lying awake in the dark, counting stars in that most pitiless gulf that yawns above us all. A master of terror and dread, he ranks among the foremost authors of contemporary American horror." -Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence & Other Stories. "Dark Awakenings offers the dream imagery of the best weird fiction but goes even further beyond the ordinary thanks to Matt Cardin's fierce intellect. Haunting stories and insightful essays. This is mandatory reading to prepare for the doom to come." -Nick Mamatas, author of Move Under Ground.

    This is short story that takes place ten months before the events of "Hounded", the first book in the Iron Druid Chronicles, coming 2011 from Del Rey.__________Use download button below or click here .

    William Gay is well known for his fiction but he is also widely published with his essays, mostly dealing with music, and his memoirs. This is the first collection that includes his nonfiction prose. The elegant use of language that his readers have come to expect is as evident in his collected prose as it is in his novels.

    Jon Scieszka's Guys Read initiative was founded on a simple premise: that young guys enjoy reading most when they have reading they can enjoy. And out of this comes a series that aims to give them just that. Ten books, arranged by theme, featuring the best of the best where writing for kids is concerned. Each book is a collection of original short stories, but these aren't your typical anthologies—each book is edgy, inventive, visual, and one-of-a-kind, featuring a different theme for guys to get excited about.Funny Business is based around the theme of—what else—humor, and if you're familiar with Jon and Guys Read, you already know what you're in store for: ten hilarious stories from some of the funniest writers around. Before you're through, you'll meet a teenage mummy; a kid desperate to take a dip in the world's largest pool of chocolate milk; a homicidal turkey; parents who hand over their son's room to a biker; the only kid in his middle school who hasn't turned into a vampire, wizard, or superhero; and more. And the contributor list includes bestselling author, award winners, and fresh new talent alike: Mac Barnett, Eoin Colfer, Christopher Paul Curtis, Kate DiCamillo (writing with Jon Scieszka), Paul Feig, Jack Gantos, Jeff Kinney, David Lubar, Adam Rex, and David Yoo.Guys Read is all about turning young readers into lifelong ones—and with this book, and each subsequent installment in the series, we aim to leave no guy unturned.

    Valente’s acclaimed short fiction comes together in a single volume. From Mars to ancient India, from the interstellar deeps to post-war Leningrad, from selkies and gingerbread houses to zombies, noir detectives, and video games that never were, these stories leap from genre to genre, voice to voice, outer reaches to inner hearts. Here you will find strange secret histories, back-alley deals between steampunk and pirate stories, between fairy tales and moon colonies, Antarctic cartographers and interplanetary documentary filmmakers. Here an author throws her voice—and a family of strange dolls speaks, as if by magic.

    Openly discussing his family background for the first time, Keret brings to life the confused experience of growing up as an Israeli child of Holocaust survivors. One of Israel’s leading voices in literature and cinema, Keret mixes wry humor, keen intelligence, and subtle tenderness to create some of the most provocative and entertaining stories of his generation.

    61 pages of summaries and analysis on Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris.This study guide includes the following sections: Plot Summary, Chapter Summaries & Analysis, Characters, Objects/Places, Themes, Style, Quotes, and Topics for Discussion.

    Weaving in and out of the space that connects life and death in mysterious ways, these texts use carefully honed language that suggests a newfound spirituality.

    These fourteen tales map a very particular world—Jews whose lives are anchored in Chicago—in rich, revealing detail even as they brim with universal longings: complex love affairs and unspoken rivalries, family triumphs and private disappointments. Epstein, who “happens to possess a standup comic’s gift for punch lines” (New York Times Book Review), brings his emphatically grown-up characters to witty, rueful, and charming life. The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff is a marvelous collection from a master of the short form and one of the most distinctive writers working in America today.

    Everyone expects him to be a natural on the court. He's an all-star, except for one thing. He's horrible at free throws. When a game comes down to PJ's free throws making the difference between win or lose, he freaks! Can he solve his problem in time to earn back the respect of his coach and teammates and himself?

    A young military couple faces a future shadowed by injury and untold secrets. A dying alcoholic attempts to reconcile with his estranged children. And an elderly woman's nurse weathers life with her irascible charge by making payments on a decrepit houseboat--the Mattaponi Queen. The land is parceled into lots, work opportunities are few, and the remaining inhabitants must choose between desire and necessity as they navigate the murky stream of possession, love, and everything in between.

    As assumed xTx is not a birth name, and no one is really sure if this anonymity is to protect her or us.*Note: Production limited to 50 copies. Also available in digital version.

    With heaping doses of dark humor and magical realism, these ten stories enliven a cast of characters carefully speckled throughout the southern portion of the United States. From West Virginians, to Texans and Latinos, Still Life with Plums circles the paths of a Black-Irish West Virginian, a wise-cracking dog groomer, an emasculated husband, a Guatemalan widow, a Japanese-Latin-American poster child from WWII, and a meticulous predator. Marie Manilla’s accessible prose is deceptively layered, as she births and wrestles this quirky ensemble that unflinchingly probes the human psyche, while affirming a concrete connection to a shared place and identity.

    Edited by the award-winning, best-selling author Richard Russo, this year’s collection boasts a satisfying “chorus of twenty stories that are by turns playful, ironic, somber, and meditative” (Wall Street Journal). With the masterful Russo picking the best of the best, America’s oldest and best-selling story anthology is sure to be of “enduring quality” (Chicago Tribune) this year.

    Valente has been sending stories out into the wild. Every month, for twenty-four months, a new tale has appeared in mailboxes all over the world.Here, for the first time, these stories have been brought together in a single anthology. Two years of detectives, fairy tales, frost giants, lost moon colonies, furies and minotaurs.Two years of magic.Accompanied by fantastical illustrations created by the subscribers of the project, these hitherto unpublished stories paint a landscape of fiction, family, and a new kind of connection between author and reader.Open the book and become part of a secret world.

    ‘They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a stalking thing with a beautiful head made of wax.’From the dark, mind-expanding imagination of H P Lovecraft, Wordsworth presents a third volume of tales penned by the greatest horror writer of the 20th Century. Here are some of Lovecraft’s weirdest flesh-creeping masterpieces, including Pickman's Model, The Shunned House, his famous serial Herbert West – Reanimator, and several classic tales from the Cthulhu Mythos, in which mankind is subjected to the unimaginable terrors known only to those who have read from the forbidden Necronomicon. Also included in this compelling collection are the complete Randolph Carter stories, chronicling his adventures in this world and the realm of his dreams, where he faces perils beyond comprehension.

    A boy scandalously attracted to books comes to terms with his unconventional sexuality. Twin girls, longing to be different, encounter a great white shark. A sheltered country boy runs off to the city and discovers friendship without ever leaving his apartment. Matthew Allard's fiction debut is filled with obsessive teenagers, scorned women,and unreliable men; but throughout, it brims with characters simply trying to lasso a moment of happiness, sometimes under rather curious conditions. Printed alongside the 19 Ian Dingman illustrations which inspired them, the stories in To Slow Down The Time come together to provide a charming snapshot of modern storytelling.

    Through his lonely lens we peer into the mind of an art student grappling with ennui, ethics and empathy as she comes to terms with her own beliefs in a godless world. We telescope out to the story of idiot extraterrestrials struggling to pilot a complicated spaceship. We follow a retired mercenary as he tries to save his marriage and questions his life abroad. Mind-bending and cracklingly new, Somerville’s broadly appealing and uniquely imaginative constructions probe the outer reaches of sympathy, death, and love in a world seen from the inside out.

    In THE REALLY FUNNY THING ABOUT APATHY, Chelsea Martin's charming but merciless prose employs mathematical paradoxes and theories of infinity to examine the inner workings of the bored and culturally over-stimulated while they idly consider the meaning of life. Overwhelmed and assaulted by their own inner monologues, these characters stumble through a series of external events, obsessing over the possible connections and ultimately assigning deep meaning to them.

    Benedict's last short story collection was the critically acclaimed The Wrecking Yard, published in 1992 by Nan A. Talese. That collection was followed by the Steinbeck Award-winning crime novel Dogs of God, also from Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, in 1994, which Marilyn Stasio said was written "in a vein of rare, wild beauty .... with the lyrical exactitude of Henry Thoreau on a metaphysical field trip to hell." Miracle Boy and Other Stories is a collection of fourteen stories. many of which earned appearances in The O.Henry Awards, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, The Pushcart Prize: The Best of Small Presses, The Best of Tin House, and Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Elizabeth Strout, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kittridge, says, "These are amazing stories. They contain the exquisite beauty of poetry and the dense muscularity of a language that takes the reader to breathtaking heights. Never complaining, or flinching, Pinckney Benedict presses us right against the variety of human experience in ways I've never seen before. There is not a story here that is not the real thing."

    The short stories begin simplified, and walks together with the author as he takes a personal journey deep within the universe of his own consciousness, dwelling, prodding, dissecting, and creating... This book is a play on different writing styles uniquely conjured by the writer from random inspiration and experimentation with poetry as prior experience. This is a chronological anthology spanning the imagination and sanity of the writer. This book is a collection of humour, satire, and philosophy, with the most unique writing style and twists. This book evolves as one reads, from basic and simple stories of humor, to deeper and more profound satire best savored twice.

    A legend has to start somewhere... As so many writers have said, it's in the shorter and mid-length work that the storytelling craft is best learned. Hard-Luck Diggings brings together fourteen such pieces from the first twelve years of Grand Master Jack Vance's genre-defining career, from back when he first worked to pay the mortgage, buy the groceries, travel the world, eventually building his own private 'dream castle' and starting a family.Like any writer serious about staying in the game, we see him targeting the markets of the day, doing what was needed to meet the tastes of editors and their readerships while at the same time perfecting his own special way of doing things so that his name, his distinctive voice, stood a chance (in modern marketing parlance) of becoming a viable 'brand.'Hard-Luck Diggings brings that fascinating process to life in fine style. As well as serving up vintage entertainment from one of the field's genuine masters, it provides an illuminating armchair tour of how the Jack Vance enterprise came to be, full of zest and life, the thrill of the upward climb and of so much more to be done. This is a book to be savoured with a twinkle in the eye, a knowing smile, but most of all, with a love of adventure and high romance firmly in place.Contents:Introduction-essay by Jonathan Strahan and Terry Dowling;-afterword-essay following each story, by Jack Vance; Hard-Luck Diggings [Magnus Ridolph] (1948); -- The Temple of Han (1951); -- The Masquerade on Dicantropus (1951); -- Abercrombie Station (1952); -- Three-Legged Joe (1953); -- DP! (1953); -- Shape-Up (1953); -- Sjambak (1953); -- The Absent-Minded Professor (1954); -- When the Five Moons Rise (1954); -- The Devil on Salvation Bluff (1955); -- Where Hesperus Falls (1956); -- The Phantom Milkman (1956); -- Dodkin’s Job (1959).Cover illustration by Tom Kidd.

    Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best American Short Stories of 2000 (selected by E.L.Doctorow.) These are provocative, often shocking, tales of obsession, love, racism, addiction, betrayal, even murder, but told in such sensuous, richly-textured prose each story is rendered magical and timeless. A young girl obsessed with her tattooed, Yakuza uncle wit-nesses his horrific ending. A woman is condemned to death for loving a man outside her culture. Two cousins learn the terrible toll of drug addiction. A boy with amputated legs is introduced to love by an older woman. A girl of mixed-race heritage discovers her white father's racist background, and spends her life trying to 'run her genes off, like fat.' Two beautiful sisters, professional taxi-dancers, abandon their daughters, leaving them with no clues or codes on how to survive. A house of dysfunctional and wounded people are finally redeemed by the strength of love.The stories are set in islands across the Pacific where the author has lived and traveled extensively - Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Fiji, Vanuatu - parts of of the world only barely ex-plored in contemporary literature. Davenport offers her readers not just mesmerizing writing, but also brings them bulletins from an ancient, yet seemingly brave, new world. *****Of Davenport's writing, ALICE WALKER has said, "She ex-hibits the character great writers must have, passionate love of people, dedication to the memory of people who have suffered. You can't read Kiana Davenport without being transformed." ISABEL ALLENDE has said, "Reading Davenport is an over-whelming experience. Her prose is sharp and shining as a sword, yet her sense of poetry and love of nature permeate each line."A Sampling of Reviews of Stories in this Collection:"The story, HOUSE OF SKIN, transcends the very good and achieves the beautiful. It describes what is essentially a love story between the uncle, aunt and niece. After the tattooed uncle finally dies comes an ending as appropriate and mortifying as any I have ever read." - W.P. Osborn, Manoa, Journal of International Writing"THE LIPSTICK TREE had a magical effect on me. The pro-tagonist's dream of a better life, and her determination to go to the furthest extremes to achieve it, is heroic. The price of freedom is mitigated with grievous loss and bittersweet victory." - Thom Jones, author of Pugilist at Rest"DRAGON SEED is a spooky tale of addiction and self-destruction." - Jeff Yang, Reviewer, The Village Voice"The haunting, junkie ecstasy of Davenport's DRAGON SEEDis both abhorrent and beautiful." - Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dog Eaters"Hypnotic and amazing tales. Her writing is astonishing. Along the way, we learn about important and under-represented cultures. BONES OF THE INNER EAR still haunts me, and I believe some of these stories will stand as long as there is written language." - Tillie Olsen, author of Silences, Tell Me a Riddle *****

    The Old Man & The Monkey' is a stunningly beautiful story of a relationship which develops between an old man and a creature which is regarded as a dangerous pest in Japan, a snow monkey, in George Polley's moving allegory of dignity in the face of racism.

    Black-Winged Angels is a collection of 10 incredible contemporary retellings of fairy tales, featuring an introduction by multiple award-winning author Juliet Marillier, and illustrations by multiple World Fantasy Award nominee Kathleen Jennings.