Now, for the first time, editors Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner are collecting the award winning and nominated stories, those chosen by readers as Story of the Year, and their own personal favorites into one anthology. A Veil that wipes the experiences of war from soldiers’ memories. A witch who faces down both God and the devil to save a soul. A swaying dance that crosses the galaxy to transmit a message. A vampire caught in a web of politics and law by his responsibility to his family. Within this collection, you will find 21 stories that explore what it means to love, to regret, to be human. With stories by Ursula Vernon, Ken Liu, Rachel Swirsky, Sarah Pinsker, Rich Larson, and more, Best of Apex Magazine: Volume 1 brings readers some of the best stories Apex Magazine has published so far.Cover art by Adrian Borda.TABLE OF CONTENTSJackalope Wives by Ursula VernonGoing Endo by Rich LarsonCandy Girl by Chikodili EmelumaduIf You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel SwirskyAdvertising at the End of the World Keffy R.M. KehrliThe Performance Artist by Lettie PrellA Matter of Shapespace by Brian TrentFalling Leaves by Liz ArgallBlood from Stone by Alethea KontisSexagesimal by Katharine E.K. DuckettKeep Talking by Marie VibbertRemembery Day by Sarah PinskerBlood on Beacon Hill by Russell NicholsThe Green Book by Amal El-MohtarL’esprit de L’escalier by Peter M. BallStill Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale) by Ian TregillisBuild a Dolly by Ken LiuMulto by Samuel MarzioliArmless Maidens of the American West by Genevieve ValentinePocosin by Ursula VernonShe Gave Her Heart, He Took Her Marrow by Sam Fleming

    Enroling herself at the Sorbonne, she meets the suave Patrick Dudoigt, but he’s the one temptation she MUST resist. Annabelle’s belief system is challenged on all fronts, and her naïveté is seen as gauche in the City of Love. Guilt and confusion make for dangerous bedfellows, and when her fellow university students enthusiastically combine reading and rioting, Annabelle can’t help but wonder if everyone’s gone mad—or is it just her? Annabelle Thong takes a hilarious look at the sparks that fly when East meets West, and the passions these ignite.

    With unsentimental clarity and heartbreaking honesty, Alfian Sa'at writes about HDB dwellers — students, housewives and factory workers, whose lives begin to unravel once they discover that happiness is a fragile thing in a country obsessed with progress and success.The characters in each story find themselves in situations that offer them a ticket to hope and change: A video camera transforms the way a resentful daughter sees her widowed mother. A married couple receives free holiday tickets just when their luck seems to have run out. A girl encounters a transvestite on an MRT train ride who tells her that she looks like a famous singer. And a man enters a discotheque after a bitter divorce and re-learns the terror of falling in love all over again.Rich in authentic detail, with a sensitive ear for the vernacular, Corridor paints an elegiac, revealing portrait of contemporary Singaporeans who exist along the city's corridors — haunted by lost loves, irrevocable childhoods, and a deep longing to be free.Corridor won the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998.

    Although her absence is brief, she returns as a different person.Over two decades, as Singapore’s political, social and cultural landscapes change, the family’s attempts to cope with the shifts—those coming from outside and from within—lead to some disastrous consequences. With the traditional expectations of their country on the one hand, and their own volition on the other, Amrit’s family must avoid imploding. How do we confront our legacies, and, when necessary, how do we accept change? Inheritance is a universal story of family, identity and belonging.

    A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn’t match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl.In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.

    Set in future Manila, a gleaming metropolis where one's paranoia may not be exactly unfounded and whose lashing sings tribute to Philip K. Dick. "Stations" takes on the ethical trappings of high technology adoption. "August Moon" relies on a succession of flashbacks to uncover, as well as obscure, the eventual doom of a woman who deems herself a "good wife," while "Eyes as Wide as the Sky" depicts a post-war world—scorched yet not wholly devoid of hope. These stories insist on the unreal becoming the real, the rational melding with the irrational, familiarity breeding strangeness.

    The absurdity of both life and death are on full display; in "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In "Knock, Knock," a son hopes to tell one last off-color joke to a father in his final moments, while in "Tunnel of Love," a massage therapist runs the curious practice of providing 'relief' to dying clients. And in "Expedition," fans will be thrilled to find to see a side of Tyler Durden never seen before in a precursor story to Fight Club.Funny, caustic, bizarre, poignant; these stories represent everything readers have come to love and expect from Chuck Palahniuk. They have all the impact of a sharp blow to the solar plexus, with considerable collateral damage to the funny bone.

    These are but some of the men and women who fill this searingly imaginative and emotionally taut collection of short stories by Mark Haddon, that weaves through time and space to showcase the author's incredible versatility.     Yet the collection achieves a sum that is greater than its parts, proving itself a meditation not only on isolation and loneliness but also on the tenuous and unseen connections that link individuals to each other, often despite themselves. In its titular story, the narrator describes with fluid precision a catastrophe that will collectively define its victims as much as it will disperse them—and brilliantly lays bare the reader's appetite for spectacle alongside its characters'. Cut with lean prose and drawing inventively from history, myth, fairy tales, and, above all, the deep well of empathy that made his three novels so compelling, The Pier Falls reveals a previously unseen side of the celebrated author.

    These stories explore the domestic and professional adventures of people in over their heads, while leavening their struggles with humor.Jacob M. Appel is the author of more than two hundred published short stories and is a past winner of the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition.

    Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.A father’s life is upended by his son’s night terrors—and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of “empty-nest syndrome”; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes—on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there’s something off, something sinister, in his late parents’ house.Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.

    Elegantly structured, these stories span the globe and beyond, from small-town America and sunny Caribbean islands to the Arctic Ocean and the very gates of Heaven itself. And though some of the stories are steeped in mythology, they remain grounded in universal experiences: loss of identity, leaving home, parenthood, joy, and longing.Crisscrossing the pages of Awayland are travelers and expats, shadows and ghosts. A girl watches as her homesick mother slowly dissolves into literal mist. The mayor of a small Midwestern town offers a strange prize, for stranger reasons, to the parents of any baby born on Lenin's birthday. A chef bound for Mars begins an even more treacherous journey much closer to home. And a lonely heart searches for love online--never mind that he's a Cyclops. With her signature tenderness, Ramona Ausubel applies a mapmaker's eye to landscapes both real and imagined, all the while providing a keen guide to the wild, uncharted terrain of the human heart.

    R. Martin classic science fiction tales.On a voyage toward the boundaries of the known universe, nine misfit academics seek out first contact with a shadowy alien race.But another enigma is the Nightflyer itself, a cybernetic wonder with an elusive captain no one has ever seen in the flesh. Soon, however, the crew discovers that their greatest mystery – and most dangerous threat – is an unexpected force wielding a thirst for blood and terror….Also included are five additional classic George R. R. Martin tales of science fiction that explore the breadth of technology and the dark corners of the human mind.“Long live George Martin....A literary dervish, enthralled by complicated characters and vivid language, and bursting with the wild vision of the very best tale tellers.” ----- The New York Times

    . . and trust as essential to survival as it is hard-earned.Trust was rare and precious in the wide-open towns that sprung up like weeds on America's frontier—with hustlers and hucksters arriving in droves by horse, coach, wagon, and rail, and gunmen working both sides of the law, all too eager to end a man's life with a well-placed bullet. In these classic tales that span more than five decades—including the first story he ever published, “The Trail of the Apache”—Elmore Leonard once again demonstrates the superb talent for language and gripping narrative that have made him one of the most acclaimed and influential writers of our time.

    Too far away to be governed under Earth law, the Collective was formed. Several hundred years later, the Collective has expanded to a system of six worlds. Power struggles and unequal rights have made interplanetary war all but inevitable. With rebellions arising across the Collective, three captains launch near-suicidal missions to free the oppressed fringe and reset equality across the stars. A galactic war is coming, and only an old mail runner, a space pirate, and their ragtag crews can prevent it.

    At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I've Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be.Cities I've Never Lived In is the second book in Graywolf's collaboration with the literary magazine A Public Space.