Featuring tales from fantasy heavyweights such as Hal Duncan, Catherynne M. Valente, Jay Lake, and Barth Anderson, the collection whisks readers from dizzying rooftop perches down to the underpasses, gutters, and the sinister secrets therein. Mutilated warrior women, dead boys, mechanical dogs, and escape artists are just some of the wonders and horrors explored in this bizarre assembly of works from voices new and old.

    a land of medieval forests, stonewalled cities, and railways reaching into the mountains where the old gods dwell. A country where life is harsh, dreams are gentle, and people feel torn by powerful forces and fight to remain whole. In this enchanting collection, Ursula K. Le Guin brings to mainstream fiction the same compelling mastery of word and deed, of story and character, of violence and love, that has won her the Pushcart Prize, and the Kafka and National Book Awards.

    George Fergusson is one of them. He works as a trek guide for "Take You Higher, Ltd.", leading groups of tourists into the back country and occasionally assisting on serious climbs. George "Freds" Fredericks is another, a tall, easy-going American who converted to Buddhism while in college. He visited Nepal one year and never went home.The adventures started when George and Freds got together over the capture of a Yeti--an abominable snowman--by a scientific expedition. The thought of such a wild and mysterious creature in captivity--in prison--was too much for them to bear. And in freeing the Yeti, a great partnership was born. George and Freds will go on to greater heights as they explore the mysteries of Nepal, from Shangri-La to Kathmandu's governmental bureaucracy.

    Leading humanity was the powerful Remillard family, but somebody--or something--known only as "Fury" wanted them out of the way.Only Rogi Remillard, the chosen tool of the most powerful alien being in the Milieu, and his nephew Marc, the greatest metapsychic yet born on Earth, knew about Fury. But even they were powerless to stop it when it began to kill off Remillards and other metapsychic operants--and all the suspects were Remillards themselves.Meanwhile, a Remillard son was born, a boy who could represent the future of all humanity. His incredible mind was more powerful even than his brother Marc's--but he was destined to be desroyed by his own DNA...unless Fury got to him first!From the Paperback edition.

    Disch's visionary portrait of the underbelly of 21st-century New York City. The residents of the public housing project at 334 East 11th Street live in a world of rationed babies and sanctioned drug addiction. Real food is displayed in museums and hospital attendants moonlight as body-snatchers.Nimbly hopscotching backward and forward in time, Disch charts the shifting relationships between this world's inheritors: an aging matriarch who falls in love with her young social worker; a widow seeking comfort from the spirit of her dead husband; a privileged preteen choreographing the perfectly gratuitous murder. Poisonously funny, piercingly authentic, 334 is a masterpiece of social realism disguised as science fiction.

    How far will you go to save someone you love and trust when they’ve kept a dangerous secret for years? That’s the question facing Lance Kingston, a successful Houston magazine executive whose recent marriage to beautiful, high-powered attorney Tia Jiles seemed to promise a bright future for both of them. But under the surface, a fierce and frightening storm was brewing. That’s because Tia never revealed to Lance what she and her family have known since Tia was seventeen—she has an illness that takes over her mind, transforming her into a raging, violent woman hell-bent on destruction. Bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia. Or crazy, as Lance’s grandmother continually reminds him. “Crazy leaves clues,” she told him point-blank, and perhaps Lance should have listened. Tia’s mother tries to pray the problem away . . . and Tia’s doctors can’t help her if she won’t do what they advise. Now there’s more than their marriage and Tia’s survival at stake: Tia is pregnant, and Lance will stop at nothing to keep his troubled wife and unborn daughter safe. But at what price?

    But something more “global” appears to be at work, and in any case he is distracted from his dreary rounds of diagnosis-seeking when a more urgent tragedy befalls the family. Joseph’s father, a former steelworker, was driving home from his new maintenance job when he swerved to avoid a deer and crashed his car, landing in the hospital. A week later he died of a heart attack.The deer, it turns out, was a stuffed decoy placed there by a high school student as a prank. This enrages Joseph’s older and ailing uncle, Bill (Yusef Bulos), who is even more disgusted when it is learned that the culprit is the star of the local football team, Vin (Jonathan Louis Dent), a town hero who is given a dispensation by a judge to serve his sentence in juvenile detention after the football season has concluded. Joseph and his younger brother, Charles (Chris Perfetti) — who are both gay — are more sympathetic to Vin, an African-American boy who has grown up in a foster home, and whose chance at a professional career may be jeopardized.Gloria (Joanna Gleason), Joseph’s new boss and a book packaging expert, knows a little about career jeopardy herself. She was run out of the publishing business — and Manhattan — when she sold a memoir by a Holocaust survivor that turned out to be fictionalized. (Gloria’s story and Vin’s are inspired by actual events.)Now she latches on to the discovery that Joseph’s family, of Lebanese extraction, is distantly related to Kahlil Gibran, author of the perennial best-selling spiritual book “The Prophet.” In her hilariously addled mind — complaining about her fall from grace, she defensively remarks, “I wasn’t at the Holocaust” — she decides that a memoir by Joseph about his family’s journey will be her ticket back to the big time.Mr. Karam’s play, which runs a little less than two hours and is performed in one seamless act , may sound top-heavy with plot and character. (Did I mention that Gloria’s emotional frailty also stems from the suicide of her husband?) Some of the relationships would benefit from being fleshed out in greater detail: the integration of Gloria into the lives of Joseph and his family, for example. The play’s climax shoehorns all the elements of the story into a farcical scene that seems a little forced, funny though it is.But one of Mr. Karam’s themes is the indiscriminate nature of misfortune — one calamity does not immunize you from the next, worse one — so the multiplication of disasters roiling the characters’ lives is to the point. And he writes with such precision that even the more peripheral characters emerge as sharply drawn, multifaceted individuals.

    Written in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.

    His earliest stories, the ones that made his name a quarter of a century ago, were set in the jungles of South America and filled with creatures dark and fantastical. Stories like “Salvador,” “The Jaguar Hunter,” and the excoriatingly brilliant “R&R” deconstructed war and peace in South America, in both the past and the future, like no other writer of the fantastic.A writer of great talent and equally great scope, Shepard has also written of the seamier side of the United States at home in classic stories like “Life of Buddha” and “Dead Money,” and in “Only Partly Here” has written one of the finest post-9/11 stories yet. Perhaps strangest of all, Shepard created one of the greatest sequences of “dragon” stories we’ve seen in the tales featuring the enormous dragon Griaule.The Best of Lucius Shepard is the first ever career retrospective collection from one of the finest writers of the fantastic to emerge in the United States over the past quarter century. It contains nearly 300,000 words of his best short fiction and is destined to be recognized as a true classic of the field.

    Do not buy this Book Review if you are looking for a full copy of this thrilling novel, which can be found back on the Amazon search page. Instead, we have already read the book and analyzed all of the fascinating characters, events, and action points (Spoiler Alerts near the end!) from this engaging novel to give you a comprehensive literary review and story analysis. It's like discussing the novel with your friends or going to a book club meeting. But you don't need to drive anywhere! Packaged together in a fun and entertaining format, the entire discussion is delivered instantly to your device. If you haven't read The Storyteller yet, we'll let you know what to expect with savvy analysis and an honest review. If you're already reading the novel, then we'll be your tour guide through every section, heightening your enjoyment at every moment of intrigue, suspense, and humor. We’ll make sure you don’t miss any of the story’s hidden gems! THE STORYTELLER -- JODI PICOULT Jodi Picoult is one of those few authors who deserve to be on every reader’s must-buy list. Her books often dip deliciously into multiple genres, blending them in unique narratives full of action, suspense and, most of all, heart. Her characters are always unforgettable. Picoult has a well-known and beloved penchant for writing about sensitive subjects, but her work is never emotionally manipulative. Instead, Picoult is masterful at weaving scientific, historical or legal topics into stories in which one can easily get lost. In The Storyteller, Picoult somehow meshes all of these themes together. After all, racism can be compared to a cancer and (so far, at least) it doesn’t get worse than the Holocaust. Religion and belief intertwine with that historic event. And in this novel, Picoult presents an unlikely friendship between a former SS soldier and a young Jewish woman – one in which he asks her to help him die. Stay on track and see details in The Storyteller that you'd never notice otherwise with this Book Review & Story Analysis. Plot points you might miss, symbols that only become obvious on a second or third read-through, and themes that affect your understanding of the story -- all conveniently laid out for you. Jodi Picoult does not divide The Storyteller into chapters, but instead into stories and the fresh voices of their narrators. We become witnesses to Ania’s, Sage’s, Leo’s, Josef’s and, most joyfully but ultimately heartbreaking, Minka’s stories. YOUR READING TOUR GUIDE! You don't have to read The Storyteller alone! We'll be right there with you through every moment of suspense, every funny line, and every point of intrigue. Whether you're reading for pleasure and want to maximize your enjoyment of Jodi Picoult's novel -- or whether you're reading for serious literary study -- this review and analysis is the perfect companion. It will help you understand and cherish the novel more. Get it now and we'll bring the book club to you!

    An all-star cast of readers bring to life these timeless stories from the darkest places. One man's pursuit of world peace turns deadly in The End of the Whole Mess. Stephen King puts his spin on the familiar duo of Holmes and Watson in The Doctor's Case. In The Moving Finger, menace arrives poking out of the drain of a bathroom sink. And a young, pregnant widow takes on a zombie attack in Home Delivery. Matthew Broderick, Tim Curry, Eve Beglarian and Stephen King lend their voices to this haunting collection of classic stories that no Stephen King fan should be without.

    It was because they were fake, their skins a disguise…”All around us, under most of humanity’s very noses, lurks a dangerous alien race. The Nafikh inhabit human bodies while visiting Earth, and an underground system designed to disguise and protect them from being discovered allows them to indulge their wildest and often violent urges. The circumstances of these brutal visits require the sacrifice of servs.Servs are aliens themselves, created by the Nafikh to attend to their every need. Physically indistinguishable from humans, they are destined to live in pain, their very livelihood regulated by the Source, a powerful force of energy inside each of them that burns like a white-hot fire under the stress of their servitude.Lucy is a serv who arrived a baby, and by chance was adopted by humans. She’s an outcast among outcasts, dwelling in both worlds but belonging to neither. For years she has been walking a tightrope, balancing between the horrors of her serv existence and the ordinary human life she desperately longs to maintain, her family unaware of her darkest secrets.But when the body of a serv child turns up and Lucy is implicated in the gruesome death, the worlds she’s tried so hard to keep separate collide. Hounded by the police, targeted in the dog-eat-dog world of servs, she'll find herself fighting to protect her family and the life she's made for herself. Skinner Luce is Lucy’s story.

    Stine comes Spirit Seeker from four-time Edgar Allen Poe Young Adult Mystery Award winner Joan Lowery Nixon.          Holly Campbell’s life has suddenly become a newspaper-headline nightmare. The parents of her friend Cody Garnett have just been found in their home, brutally murdered, and Cody is the main suspect. Holly’s father is the police detective in charge of the investigation, and even he thinks the evidence points right at Cody.         Holly knows it’s up to her to prove what she believes it the truth: Cody is innocent. Against her father’s wishes, secretly crossing the barrier of police tape and television reporters that surrounds the Garnetts’ house, she begins her own investigation. Computer files, an odd neighbor, and a mysterious psychic—each might have the evidence Holly needs to help Cody. Or they could all be red herrings that will waste Holly’s precious time.         A teenager seeking justice and her interactions with the spirit world make this spine-tingling new novel from the only four-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award a surefire winner for mystery fans.   “Tightly plotted.” – School Library Journal   “Enriched with family troubles, guilty secrets, and a whiff of the supernatural, this page-turner will please.” – Kirkus Reviews   “Readers will enjoy.” – Booklist

     The first time they came for Kevin he woke up in a forest on the edge of town with a sword and only seconds to save his life before a lunatic with a battle axe nearly split his skull. At first he thought it was a dream, then it became a living nightmare as he found himself night after night having to fight in abandoned shopping malls, dark alleys and swamps on the outskirts of civilization. The rules were simple; they could come for him anytime they wanted, and if he resisted, someone close to him would die. A twisted clash of Fight Club and Game of Thrones where the only way to survive is to never stop playing.

    Dick! Here are "The Defenders," in which mankind has taken refuge beneath the Earth's surface, leaving all-out war to robots ... "Beyond Lies the Wub," in which a highly philosophical Martian creature finds itself on the wrong end of the dinner table ... "The Crystal Crypt," in which the last Terran ship from Mars finds terrorists aboard ... and "Beyond the Door," a most unusual story in which an abusive husband ends up with more than he bargains for!