For Kaycee Jean McCoy, life in Sunshine means dating guys she has no interest in, saying only “yes, ma’am” when the local bigots gossip at her mom’s cosmetics salon, and avoiding certain girls at all costs. Girls like Bren Dawson.Unlike Kaycee, Bren doesn’t really conceal who she is. But as the cool, worldly new girl, nobody at school seems to give her any trouble. Maybe there’s no harm if Kaycee gets closer to her too, as long as she can keep that part of her life a secret, especially from her family and her best friend. But the more serious things get with Bren, the harder it is to hide from everyone else. Kaycee knows Sunshine has a darker side for people like her, and she’s risking everything for the chance to truly be herself.

    But when winter comes, there's nothing to stop them from crossing the ice.Then homebody Peter puts the camp in danger by naively allowing a stranger to come ashore and he's forced to leave the community of Wranglestone. Now he must help rancher Cooper, the boy he's always watched from afar, herd the Dead from their shores before the lake freezes over.But as love blossoms, a dark discovery reveals the sanctuary's secret past. One that forces the pair to question everything they've ever known.An action-packed and thought-provoking debut, for fans of Patrick Ness, Marcus Sedgwick, DREAD NATION and The Walking Dead.

    From the number-one bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry comes TAKE FIVE, a mini collection of true stories that give voice to the thoughts that we all have but dare not mention—stories that shine a flashlight into both dark and hilarious places.  TAKE FIVE includes the following four favorite previously-published essays plus one brand-new, never-been-published essay by Augusten Burroughs:--MINT THRESHOLD--UNCLEAR SAILING--COMMERICAL BREAK--DEBBIE’S REQUIREMENTS--SWAN SONG (new!)

    She has been dubbed “one of our most important writers,” (Junot Diaz), with “an imagination that most of us would kill for” (Los Angeles Times), and her work has been called “stunning,” (New York Times) “rich in voice, humor, and dazzling imagery” (Kirkus), and “simply triumphant” (Dorothy Allison).Falling in Love with Hominids presents over a dozen years of Hopkinson’s new, uncollected fiction, much of which has been unavailable in print. Her singular, vivid tales, which mix the modern with Afro-Caribbean folklore, are occupied by creatures unpredictable and strange: chickens that breathe fire, adults who eat children, and spirits that haunt shopping malls.

    A passive-aggressive couple in the midst of a divorce compete over whose new fling is more exotic. A Russian migrant in Tokyo agonizes over the money her lover accepts from a yakuza. A dead body on a drug dealer's floor leads to the strangest first date ever.In this razor-sharp debut collection, Jen Silverman delivers eleven interconnected stories that take place in expat bars, artist colonies, train platforms, and matchbox apartments in the United States and Japan. Unforgettable characters crisscross through these transient spaces, loving, hurting, and leaving each other as they experience the loneliness and dangerous freedom that comes with being an outsider. In "Maria of the Grapes," a pair of damaged runaways get lost in the seductive underworld beneath Tokyo's clean streets; in "Pretoria," a South African expat longs for the chaos of her homeland as she contemplates a marriage proposal; in "Girl Canadian Shipwreck," a young woman in Brooklyn seeks permission to flee from her boyfriend and his terrible performance art; in "Maureen," an aspiring writer realizes that her beautiful, neurotic boss is lonelier than she lets on.The Island Dwellers ranges near and far in its exploration of solitude and reinvention, identity and sexuality, family and home. Jen Silverman is the rare talent who can evoke the landscape of a whole life in a single subtle phrase--vital, human truths that you may find yourself using as a map to your own heart.

    . . Gene's life resembles a debutante's dream. Yet she hides a secret that would see her shunned by the nobility. Gene is both male and female. Then she displays unwanted magical abilities - last seen in mysterious beings from an almost-forgotten age. Matters escalate further when her parents plan a devastating betrayal, so she flees home, dressed as a boy. The city beyond contains glowing glass relics from a lost civilization. They call to her, but she wants freedom not mysteries. So, reinvented as 'Micah Grey', Gene joins the circus. As an aerialist, she discovers the joy of flight - but the circus has a dark side. She's also plagued by visions foretelling danger. A storm is howling in from the past, but will she heed its roar?

    However, the man behind The Mattie M Show remains a mystery--both to his enormous audience and to those who work alongside him every day. But when the high school students responsible for a mass shooting are found to be devoted fans, Mattie is thrust into the glare of public scrutiny, seen as the wry, detached herald of a culture going downhill and going way too far. Soon, the secrets of Mattie's past as a brilliant young politician in a crime-ridden New York City begin to push their way to the surface.In her most daring and multidimensional novel yet, Jennifer duBois vividly portrays the heyday of gay liberation in the seventies and the grip of the AIDS crisis in the eighties, alongside a backstage view of nineties television in an age of moral panic. DuBois explores an enigmatic man's downfall through the perspectives of two spectators--Cel, Mattie's skeptical publicist, and Semi, the disillusioned lover from his past.With wit, heart, and crackling intelligence, The Spectators examines the human capacity for reinvention--and forces us to ask ourselves what we choose to look at, and why.

    And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.But then we fast forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that.

    Not a hundred thousand "stay here's".'Charlie Regan's life isn't going forward, so she's decided to go back.After a tough few years floundering around the British film industry, experimenting with amateur pornography and watching her father's health rapidly decline, she and her best friend Laura journey to her ancestral home of Clipim, an island off the west coast of Ireland. Knowing this could be the last chance to connect with her dad's history before she loses him, Charlie clings to the idea of her Irish roots offering some kind of solace. But she'll find out her heritage is about more than clichés and clover-foamed Guinness.When the girls arrive at Clipim, Charlie begins to question both her difficult relationship with Laura and her father's childhood stories. Before long, she's embroiled in a devastating conspiracy that's been sixty years in the making . . . and it's up to her to reveal the truth of it.With a sharp eye and sour tongue, Caroline O'Donoghue delivers a delicious contemporary fable of prodigal return. Blisteringly honest, funny and moving, it grapples with love, friendship and the struggle of second-generation immigrants trying to belong.

    One of those people being Jess, her best friend who she'd completely lost contact with. Though she never stopped thinking of her, she could never bring herself to reach out after the shame of what she'd done to her. Gina didn't even want to come back to her hometown in fear of running into Jess, but she had to take care of her mother who is ill with cancer.But fate and a kitten brings them together again, meeting for the first time in years. The connection is clearly still there between them, but will Jess be able to forgive Gina in her time of need? As the change in seasons brings color to the autumn leaves, will it also bring a drastic change in both of their lives? In this heartwarming, steamy novella Edie Bryant takes the reader on an emotional rollercoaster toward happily ever after.

     The city-state Sirapirat once knew only warmth and monsoon. When the Winter Queen conquered it, she remade the land in her image, turning Sirapirat into a country of snow and unending frost. But an empire is not her only goal. In secret, she seeks the fragments of a mirror whose power will grant her deepest desire. At her right hand is General Lussadh, who bears a mirror shard in her heart, as loyal to winter as she is plagued by her past as a traitor to her country. Tasked with locating other glass-bearers, she finds one in Nuawa, an insurgent who’s forged herself into a weapon that will strike down the queen. To earn her place in the queen’s army, Nuawa must enter a deadly tournament where the losers’ souls are given in service to winter. To free Sirapirat, she is prepared to make sacrifices: those she loves, herself, and the complicated bond slowly forming between her and Lussadh. If the splinter of glass in Nuawa's heart doesn't destroy her first. "A fairy tale, beautiful like an ice crystal, and razor sharp." --
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, World Fantasy Award-winning co-editor of She Walks in Shadows
 "Winterglass is rich with diamondine prose, a scintillant retelling of the Ice Queen that challenges Occidental aesthetics, colonial mentality, and personal identity."
 --Cassandra Khaw, author of Hammers on Bone, BFA & Locus Award nominee
 "An exquisite gem of a novella. Politics, relationships, and combat presented as a matryoshka, the beauty of which is there's no easy way of telling which shells are within which. Sriduangkaew’s sensuous metaphors and elegant imagery are never less than a pleasure to read. Thoroughly recommended. " --Jonathan L. Howard, author of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

    With wry abandon and a beguiling heart, Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person is a deadpan, tragicomic exploration of love, desire, and dysfunction in the twenty-first century.Daniel Zomparelli is editor and founder of Poetry Is Dead magazine, and the author of the poetry collections Davie Street Translations and (with Dina Del Bucchia) Rom Com. This is his first work of fiction.

    He's in love with his best friend. He's also dead. Luckily, Hamal can see ghosts, leaving Blue free to haunt him to his heart's content. But something eerie is happening in town, leaving the local afterlife unsettled, and when Blue realizes Hamal's strange ability may be putting him in danger, Blue has to find a way to protect him, even if it means... leaving him.

    As drought plagues the aquatic creatures, a mysterious disease—shaolong, or “burnt lung”—afflicts the city’s human inhabitants.Jaded college student Xiang Kaifei scours Beijing streets for abandoned dragons, distracting himself from his diagnosis. Elijah Ahmed, a biracial American medical researcher, is drawn to Beijing by the memory of his grandmother and her death by shaolong. Interest in Beijing’s dragons leads Kai and Eli into an unlikely partnership. With the resources of Kai’s dragon rescue and Eli’s immunology research, can the pair find a cure for shaolong and safety for the dragons? Eli and Kai must confront old ghosts and hard truths if there is any hope for themselves or the dragons they love.

    . . that’s how the old stories always begin.Once upon a time there was a king of a fallen kingdom. He was just and he was beloved. Or so the numbers said. One day, he gathered together the greatest, wisest minds in all the land—not sorcerers, but scientists—and he bade them fashion him a son. A prince. A perfect prince to embody his father’s legacy.The scientists each brought the prince a gift: beauty, strength, ambition, intellect, pride. But they must have forgotten something because when he saw the mermaids dance at the Cirque de la Mer, he ran away to join them.For a year, he trained them, performed with them, thought he was happy. For a year he thought he was free. But then Nerites came: A merman who refused to be tamed. A captive from another kingdom. A beast in a glass cage.The old stories always end with happy ever after. But this isn’t one of the old stories. This is a story of princes and monsters. Author note: This is available as a freebie for new subscribers to my newsletter.