That’s when New York Times best-selling author Terry Brooks offered to donate a short story Shawn could sell toward alleviating those bills—and suggested Shawn ask the same of his other friends.Unfettered is the result, an anthology built to relieve that debt, featuring short stories by some of the best fantasy writers in the genre.Every story in this volume is new and, like the title suggests, the writers were free to write whatever they wished. Authors contributing are -Walker and the Shade of Allanon by Terry Brooks (a Shannara tale)-Imaginary Friends by Terry Brooks (a precursor to the Word/Void trilogy)-How Old Holly Came To Be by Patrick Rothfuss (a Four Corners tale)-River of Souls by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson (a Wheel of Time tale)-The Old Scale Game by Tad Williams-Martyr of the Roses by Jacqueline Carey (a precursor to the Kushiel series)-Dogs by Daniel Abraham-Mudboy by Peter V. Brett (a Demon Cycle tale)-Nocturne by Robert V. S. Redick-The Sound of Broken Absolutes by Peter Orullian (a Vault of Heaven tale)-The Coach with Big Teeth by R.A. Salvatore-Keeper of Memory by Todd Lockwood (a Summer Dragon tale)-Game of Chance by Carrie Vaughn-The Lasting Doubts of Joaquin Lopez by Blake Charlton-The Chapel Perilous by Kevin Hearne (an Iron Druid tale)-Select Mode by Mark Lawrence (a Broken Empire tale)-All the Girls Love Michael Stein by David Anthony Durham-Strange Rain by Jennifer Bosworth (a Struck epilogue tale)-Unbowed by Eldon Thompson (a Legend of Asahiel tale)-In Favour with Their Stars by Naomi Novik (a Temeraire tale)-The Jester by Michael J. Sullivan (a Riyria Chronicles tale)-The Duel by Lev Grossman (a Magicians tale)-The Unfettered Knight by Shawn Speakman (an Annwn Cycle tale)and artist Todd Lockwood, who donated artwork as well as a story.With the help of stalwart friends and these wonderful short stories, Shawn has taken the gravest of life hardships and created something magical. Unfettered is not only a fantastic anthology in its own right but it’s a testament to the generosity found in the science fiction and fantasy community—proof that humanity can give beyond itself when the need arises.After all, isn’t that the driving narrative in fantasy literature?

    Dick has written some of the most intriguing, original and thought-provoking fiction of our time. This collection includes stories that will make you laugh, cringe...and stop and think.The Minority Report: a special unit that employs those with the power of precognition to prevent crimes proves itself less than reliable...We Can Remember It For You Wholesale: an everyguy's yearning for more exciting "memories" places him in a danger he never could have imagined (basis of the feature film Total Recall)...Paycheck: a mechanic who has no memory of the previous two years of his life finds that a bag of seemingly worthless and unrelated objects can actually unlock the secret of his recent past — and insure that he has a future...Second Variety: the UN's technological advances to win a global war veer out of control, threatening to destroy all of humankind (basis of the movie Screamers)...The Eyes Have It: a whimsical, laugh-out-loud play on the words of the title.

    Nesbit, Diana Wynne Jones, Gahan Wilson, and other literary luminaries. Sales of Unnatural Creatures benefit 826DC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students in their creative and expository writing, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.

    Short, sardonic, and dark, these six brief fiction stories and one non-fiction piece are consummate Vonnegut with piercing satire and an eye for life’s obscene inanity. Also available for the first time is an unfinished science-fiction short story, included in the appendix. These stories trace trivial human lives and mundane desires, which is precisely where Vonnegut’s inimitable perspective as a humanist shines, illuminating his alternating hopeful and dismal outlook, although undoubtedly focusing on the latter. Here as in his greatest novels, Vonnegut’s writing takes us to the darkest corners of the human soul and with wit and humor, manages to remind us of our potential to be something greater.

    Now from this brilliant young writer comes a groundbreaking collection of stories, many of them previously unavailable in the United States, and including four never-before-published tales–one set in Miéville’s signature fantasy world of New Crobuzon. Among the fourteen superb fictions are“Jack”–Following the events of his acclaimed novel Perdido Street Station, this tale of twisted attachment and horrific revenge traces the rise and fall of the Remade Robin Hood known as Jack Half-a-Prayer. “Familiar”–Spurned by its creator, a sorceress’s familiar embarks on a strange and unsettling odyssey of self-discovery in a coming-of-age story like no other.

    And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antique store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders' signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov's dictum that art should "prepare us for tenderness."

    He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

    Series editors Scott Conners and Ronald S. Hilger excavated the still-existing manuscripts, letters and various published versions of the stories, creating a definitive "preferred text" for Smith's entire body of work. This first volume of the series, brings together 25 of his fantasy stories, written between 1925 and 1930, including such classics as "The Abominations of Yondo," "The Monster of the Prophecy," "The Last Incantation" and the title story.

    From the battlefields of a Vietnam veteran's memory to an old-time movie hero's search for a serial killer, from Halloween in a special town--where the rules of trick-or-treat are written in blood--to a Texas road where a wrong turn leads to a nest of evil, horror master McCammon is at his terrifying best in this collection of stories.

    This is Koontz's spellbinding collection of takes interconnected by the strange highways of human experience: adventures, terrors, failures and triumphs.

    Peter Hamilton takes us on a journey from a murder mystery in an alternative Oxford in the 1800s to a story featuring Paula Myo, Deputy Director of the Intersolar Commonwealth's Serious Crimes Directorate.

    He was a man on the move, a man who traveled light: and in the end he rode, with all of his possessions, on a rented horse into the Mexican desert to join Pancho Villa -- never to return.Can Such Things Be?Once William Randolph Hearst -- Bierce's employer, who was bragging about his own endless collections of statuary, art, books, tapestries, and, of course real estate like Hearst Castle -- once William Randolph Hearst asked Bierce what he collected. Bierce responded, smugly: "I collect words. And ideas. Like you, I also store them. But in the reservoir of my mind. I can take them out and display them at a moment's notice. Eminently portable, Mr. Hearst. And I don't find it necessary to show them all at the same time." Such things can be. (jacketless library hardcover)

    E. D. KleinThe Detective of Dreams by Gene WolfeVengeance Is. By Theodore SturgeonThe Brood by Ramsey CampbellThe Whistling Well by Clifford D. SimakThe Peculiar Demesne by Russell KirkWhere the Stones Grow by Lisa TuttleThe Night Before Christmas by Robert BlochThe Stupid Joke by Edward GoreyA Touch of Petulance by Ray BradburyLindsay and the Red City Blues by Joe HaldemanA Garden of Blackred Roses by Charles L. GrantOwls Hoot in the Daytime by Manly Wade WellmanWhere There’s a Will by Richard Matheson and Richard Christian MathesonTraps by Gahan WilsonThe Mist by Stephen King

       When Mrs. Sorensen’s husband dies, she rekindles a long-dormant love with an unsuitable mate in “Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch.” In “Open the Door and the Light Pours Through,” a young man wrestles with grief and his sexuality in an exchange of letters with his faraway beloved. “Dreadful Young Ladies” demonstrates the strength and power—known and unknown—of the imagination.  In “Notes on the Untimely Death of Ronia Drake,” a witch is haunted by the deadly repercussions of a spell. “The Insect and the Astronomer” upends expectations about good and bad, knowledge and ignorance, love and longing. The World Fantasy Award–winning novella The Unlicensed Magician introduces the secret magical life of an invisible girl once left for dead—with thematic echoes of Barnhill’s Newbery Medal–winning novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon.

    . . ." The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal. Stories is a groundbreaking anthology that reinvigorates, expands, and redefines the limits of imaginative fiction and affords some of the best writers in the world—from Peter Straub and Chuck Palahniuk to Roddy Doyle and Diana Wynne Jones, Stewart O'Nan and Joyce Carol Oates to Walter Mosley and Jodi Picoult—the opportunity to work together, defend their craft, and realign misconceptions. Gaiman, a literary magician whose acclaimed work defies easy categorization and transcends all boundaries, and "master anthologist" (Booklist) Sarrantonio personally invited, read, and selected all the stories in this collection, and their standard for this "new literature of the imagination" is high. "We wanted to read stories that used a lightning-flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it at all." Joe Hill boldly aligns theme and form in his disturbing tale of a man's descent into evil in "Devil on the Staircase." In "Catch and Release," Lawrence Block tells of a seasoned fisherman with a talent for catching a bite of another sort. Carolyn Parkhurst adds a dark twist to sibling rivalry in "Unwell." Joanne Harris weaves a tale of ancient gods in modern New York in "Wildfire in Manhattan." Vengeance is the heart of Richard Adams's "The Knife." Jeffery Deaver introduces a dedicated psychologist whose mission in life is to save people in "The Therapist." A chilling punishment befitting an unspeakable crime is at the dark heart of Neil Gaiman's novelette "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains." As it transforms your view of the world, this brilliant and visionary volume—sure to become a classic—will ignite a new appreciation for the limitless realm of exceptional fiction.