The humble, pixelated games of the ‘70s and ‘80s have evolved into the vivid, realistic, and immersive form of entertainment that now rivals all other forms of media for dominance in the consumer marketplace. For many, video games have become the cultural icons around which pop culture revolves.PRESS START TO PLAY is an anthology of stories inspired by video games: stories that attempt to recreate the feel of a video game in prose form; stories that play with the concepts common (or exclusive) to video games; and stories about the creation of video games and/or about the video games—or the gamers—themselves.These stories will appeal to anyone who has interacted with games, from hardcore teenaged fanatics, to men and women who game after their children have gone to bed, to your well-meaning aunt who won’t stop inviting you to join her farm-based Facebook games.At the helm of this project are Daniel H. Wilson—bestselling novelist and expert in artificial intelligence—and John Joseph Adams—bestselling, Hugo Award-nominated editor of more than a dozen science fiction/fantasy anthologies and series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy (volume one forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin in 2015). Together, they have drawn on their wide-ranging contacts to assemble an incredibly talented group of authors who are eager to attack the topic of video games from startling and fascinating angles.Under the direction of an A.I. specialist and a veteran editor, the anthology will expose readers to a strategically chosen mix of stories that explore novel video game concepts in prose narratives, such as save points, kill screens, gold-farming, respawning, first-person shooters, unlocking achievements, and getting “pwned.” Likewise, each of our authors is an accomplished specialist in areas such as science fiction, fantasy, and techno-thrillers, and many have experience writing for video games professionally.Combining unique viewpoints and exacting realism, this anthology promises to thrill generations of readers, from those who grew up with Atari 2600s to the console and PC gamers of today.

     When her boss sends her on a trip to a foreign planet named Zethrad to help with their research team’s pursuit of the “Fountain of Youth,” Mira ends up being stuck on a planet full of people who hate and distrust her, alone. The planet of Zethrad is barbaric, hostile, and they all bow down to Lord Commander Arzak. He’s cocky, arrogant, temperamental, and he wears a smirk on his lips as though he’s always got something clever to say. Stuck with him as her “chaperone” when accusations of espionage and sabotage begin to run rampant, though… The Lord Commander is all that she has. Meanwhile, he is insistent in that Mira wants him, leading to a game of cat and mouse. She tries to resist, but the more she does, the more she becomes unraveled, and the more she has to question… Is she really a biologist anymore? A diplomat of Earth? Or is she the Lord Commander’s Earth girl, his to play with? Could she really ever give in to a man like him, to someone who seeks control in everything he does? And who really is the man behind the ego and the armor? One thing is for sure, Mira Hawthorne doesn’t know what she wants anymore. Adults Only!

    Dick and Thomas Harris, Etchinson's award-winning fiction is justly known for its creepy ambiance.

    

    Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the moldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meager iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.

    The Last Deep Breath is the latest evidence, a tough yet tender noir that cuts to the heart of what sibling bonds are all about. It ricochets around like a bullet in a cinderblock room - you can never be sure where it's going to go, but you know it's probably going to hurt before it's done." --Brian Hodge, author - WILD HORSES, MAD DOGS."The Last Deep Breath is an absolute gem of a crime novel, with prose so dead-on and moving, you'll be laughing and gasping, often in the same sentence. Tom Piccirilli is already one of the big guns in crime fiction, and proves here that he may be the heir to Elmore Leonard." --Jason Starr, author - PANIC ATTACK, THE CHILL.

    Few know these characters—and their creators—better than Sarah Weinman. One of today’s preeminent authorities on crime fiction, Weinman asks: Where would bestselling authors like Gillian Flynn, Sue Grafton, or Tana French be without the women writers who came before them? In Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, Weinman brings together fourteen hair-raising tales by women who—from the 1940s through the mid-1970s—took a scalpel to contemporary society and sliced away to reveal its dark essence. Lovers of crime fiction from any era will welcome this deliciously dark tribute to a largely forgotten generation of women writers.

    Ranging from laugh-out-loud funny to deliciously dark, these stories are about the ordinary day-to-day challenges facing these extraordinary individuals growing up, growing old, relationships, parenting, coping with that age-old desire to fit in when, let s face it, they don't.“Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut” by Cat Rambo, copyright © 2009 by Cat Rambo, originally published in Strange Horizons (October 26, 2009); “Destroy the City with Me Tonight” by Kate Marshall, copyright © 2017 by Kate Marshall; “Fool” by Keith Frady, copyright © 2017 by Keith Frady; “Pedestal” by Seanan McGuire, copyright © 2017 by Seanan McGuire; “As I Fall Asleep” by Aimee Ogden, copyright © 2017 by Aimee Ogden; “Meeting Someone in the 22nd Century or Until the Gears Quit Turning” by Jennifer Pullen, copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Pullen; “Inheritance” by Michael Milne, copyright © 2017 by Michael Milne; “Heroes” by Lavie Tidhar, copyright © 2016 by Lavie Tidhar, originally published in Strange Horizons (September 19, 2016); “Madjack” by Nathan Crowder, copyright © 2017 by Nathan Crowder; “Quintessential Justice” by Patrick Flanagan, copyright © 2017 by Patrick Flanagan; “The Fall of the Jade Sword” by Stephanie Lai, copyright © 2017 by Stephanie Lai; “Origin Story” by Carrie Vaughn, copyright © 2016 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC, originally published in Lightspeed Magazine (April 2016); “Eggshells” by Ziggy Schutz, copyright © 2017 by Ziggy Schutz; “Salt City Blue” by Chris Large, copyright © 2017 by Chris Large; “Birthright” by Stuart Suffel, copyright © 2017 by Stuart Suffel; “The Smoke Means It’s Working” by Sarah Pinsker, copyright © 2017 by Sarah Pinsker; “Torch Songs” by Keith Rosson, copyright © 2017 by Keith Rosson; “The Beard of Truth” by Matt Mikalatos, copyright © 2017 by Matt Mikalatos; “Over an Embattled City” by Adam R. Shannon, copyright © 2017 by Adam R. Shannon; “Origin Story” by Kelly Link, copyright © 2006 by Kelly Link, originally published in A Public Space (Winter 2006) and reprinted in Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble (Random House; 2015)

    But what happens where the human world touches the domain of races ancient and alien? Museum curators, surveyors, police officers, archaeologists, mathematicians; from derelict buildings to country houses to the London Underground, another world is just a breath away, around the corner, watching and waiting for you to step into its power. The Private Life of Elder Things is a collection of new Lovecraftian fiction about confronting, discovering and living alongside the creatures of the Mythos.

    These stories feature cats, bees, wolves, dogs, and even that most capricious of animals, humans, and have been reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and The Secret History of Fantasy. Kij Johnson's stories have won the Sturgeon and World Fantasy awards. She has taught writing; worked at Tor, Dark Horse, and Microsoft; worked as a radio announcer; run bookstores; and waitressed in a strip bar.Contents:The Man Who Bridged the Mist (2011)Wolf Trapping (1989)The Empress Jingu Fishes (2004)The Bitey Cat (2012)Chenting, in the Land of the Dead (1999)My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire—Exposition on the Flaws in my Spouse's Character—The Nature of the Bird—The Possible Causes—Her Final Disposition (2007)Schrödinger's Cathouse (1993)Names for Water (2010)Fox Magic (1993)Spar (2009)The Horse Raiders (2000)26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss (2008)At the Mouth of the River of Bees (2003)The Evolution of Trickster Stories among the Dogs of North Park after the Change (2007)The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles (2009)Ponies (2010)

    His knife put him behind bars and kept him there for twenty years as a prison gang assassin until he lost his taste for blood. Paroled, he finds himself with no money and no family. And no knife in his hand. He gets a job as a gardener at the luxurious home of a prominent lawyer and makes an unexpected friend--Cindy, the lawyer's six-year-old daughter. When Ishmael discovers that Cindy is being raped by her father he must choose: abandon the girl and walk away, or do what he does best . . . A gut-wrenching novella of violence and redemption from the award-winning author of DUST DEVILS, WAKE UP DEAD and MIXED BLOOD.BONUS CONTENT: FALLING, a previously unpublished short story.

    Exotic beasts and improbable travelers roam restlessly through these darkly diverting and finely honed tales.In “The Situation,” a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta-ray to be used for educational purposes (once described as Dilbert meets Gormenghast). In “Three Days in a Border Town,” a sharpshooter seeks the truth about her husband in an elusive floating city beyond a far-future horizon; “Errata” follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world. Also included are two stories original to this collection, including “The Quickening,” in which a lonely child is torn between familial obligation and loyalty to a maligned talking rabbit.Chimerical and hypnotic, VanderMeer leads readers through the postmodern into a new literature of the imagination.

    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.

    This is a second and expanded edition with additional stories. Women of all ages feature together with their obsessions. There’s tattooed Jess in her prime at 16, dismal Daryl, neurotic Mrs W., multi-mother Pru, Marian fighting middle-age, a loving mattress and a prosthesis, not to mention the lady who cannot admit to her name or her age.

    Searching these sinister stacks you will find:A church picnic at a haunted reservoir where only a twelve year-old boy is aware that something waits in the water…A burnt-out teacher that finds a friend… in his cancer…The secret to surviving the zombie apocalypse…An inoculation for Lycanthropy which may be more horrible than the disease…Young lovers that, on the eve of World War II, partake of a most forbidden fruit…A haunted carnival ride which delivers its passengers into the unexpected…21 tales of night terror, night madness, nightmares, night woe and night wonder…Welcome to The Night LibraryBe warned: The late fees are killer!