Collected in a mini-book format, here--for the first time in print--are six of her quirky, wry, engaging best:In -The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model, - aliens reveal the terrible truth about how humans were created--and why we'll never discover aliens.-As Good as New- is a brilliant twist on the tale of three wishes, set after the end of the world. -Intestate- is about a family reunion in which some attendees aren't quite human anymore--but they're still family.-The Cartography of Sudden Death- demonstrates that when you try to solve a problem with time travel, you now have two problems.-Six Months, Three Days- is the story of the love affair between a man who can see the one true foreordained future, and a woman who can see all the possible futures. They're both right, and the story won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.And -Clover, - exclusively written for this collection, is a coda to All the Birds in the Sky, answering the burning question of what happened to Patricia's cat.

    Cold Comfort is his temperamental tribute to the city of Duluth, Minnesota, where bears wander the streets and canoe racks are standard equipment.

    One is the main course of dinner, another the porn star contracted to copulate in space for a reality TV show. They become futuristic ant farms, get knocked up by the star high school quarterback and have secret abortions, use parakeets to reverse amputations, make love to garden gnomes, go into air conditioning ducts to confront their mother’s ghost, and do so in settings that range from Hell to the local white-supremacist bowling alley.

    An artificial intelligence, The Genesis, began creating a world without flaws—killing off humanity’s leaders and growing children in labs. A perfect world.  A perfect society.  A perfect human race… But one man, Caesar Wells, sees beyond the utopian canvas The Genesis painted.  Refusing to bow to The Genesis, he tries to prove the world must be restored to its former state.  But The Genesis will not be stopped or thwarted. Now it's up to Caesar to rescue humanity from itself. Grab your battle gear and suit up for the fight of your life as Caesar attacks the greatest threat humanity has ever known.  Willing to die if needed, watch as one man sets out to teach everyone that a perfect world cannot exist. Unless The Genesis decides it already does...

    A sparkling short story from the bestselling author of The Oyster Catcher, available exclusively in ebook.

    It was first published in the Easter supplement of Prager Tagblatt on 20 April 1924. During his final illness Kafka corrected the proofs of the story for the inclusion into collection A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler) published by Verlag Die Schmiede after his death.

    Lavery comes a collection of darkly mischievous stories based on classic fairy tales. Adapted from his beloved "Children's Stories Made Horrific" series, The Merry Spinster takes up the trademark wit that endeared Lavery to readers of both The Toast and his best-selling debut Texts from Jane Eyre. The feature become among the most popular on the site, with each entry bringing in tens of thousands of views, as the stories proved a perfect vehicle for Lavery’s eye for deconstruction and destabilization. Sinister and inviting, familiar and alien all at the same time, The Merry Spinster updates traditional children's stories and fairy tales with elements of psychological horror, emotional clarity, and a keen sense of feminist mischief.Readers of The Toast will instantly recognize Lavery's boisterous good humor and uber-nerd swagger: those new to Lavery's oeuvre will delight in his unique spin on fiction, where something a bit mischievous and unsettling is always at work just beneath the surface.Unfalteringly faithful to its beloved source material, The Merry Spinster also illuminates the unsuspected, and frequently, alarming emotional complexities at play in the stories we tell ourselves, and each other, as we tuck ourselves in for the night.Bedtime will never be the same.The daughter cells --The thankless child --Fear not: an incident log --The six boy-coffins --The rabbit --The merry spinster --The wedding party --Some of us had been threatening our friend Mr.Toad --Cast your bread upon the waters --The frog's princess --Good fences make good neighbors

    By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, Adjei-Brenyah reveals the violence, injustice, and painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day. These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world.

    These are some of the inhabitants of People From My Neighborhood. In their lives, details of the local and everyday—the lunch menu at a tiny drinking place called the Love, the color and shape of the roof of the tax office—slip into accounts of duels, prophetic dreams, revolutions, and visitations from ghosts and gods. In twenty-six “palm of the hand” stories—fictions small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand—Hiromi Kawakami creates a universe ruled by mystery and transformation.

    Well, I tell you this: 'Prickly race, who know nothing except how to eat out your hearts with envy, you don't eat cunt'... Edited by Sylvere Lotringer and published in 1991, this handy, pocket-sized collection of some early and not-so-early work by the mistress of gut-level fiction-making, Hannibal Lecter, My Father gathers together Acker's raw, brilliant, emotional and cerebral texts from 1970s, including the self-published 'zines written under the nom-de-plume, The Black Tarantula. This volume features, among others, the full text of Acker's opera, The Birth of the Poet, produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1985, Algeria, 1979 and fragments of Politics, written at the age of 21. Also included is the longest and definitive interview Acker ever gave over two years: a chatty, intriguing and delightfully self-deprecating conversation with Semiotext(e) editor Sylvere Lotringer--which is trippy enough in itself as Lotringer, besides being a real person, has appeared as a character in Acker's fiction. And last, but not least, is the full transcript of the decision reached by West Germany's Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in which Acker's work was judged to be not only youth-threatening but also dangerous to adults, and subsequently banned. Acker is the sort of the writer that should be read first at 16, so that you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure her out; she confuses, infuriates, perplexes and then all of a sudden the writing seems to be in your bloodstream, like some kind of benign virus. She's definitely not for the easily offended--but then, there are worse things in life than being offended. Such as the things that Acker writes about...

    Sure to appeal to fans of the hit musical Dreamboats and Petticoats.When Rhonda Fleming runs away from home the last place she expects to end up is at a Jolly's holiday camp. But a chance encounter with a chalet maid at the train station leads Rhonnie to Mablethorpe on a cold winter's day and her life changes for ever.Thrown in at the deep end working for the boss's wife, Rhonnie discovers there's never a dull moment at Jolly's - particularly with staff like Dan around. From the beauty contest by the pool to jiving in the Paradise dance hall and from the rollercoaster at the fair to sitting on a moonlit beach, the holidaymakers are guaranteed to have the time of their lives. But when the boss's son reappears nothing can prepare Rhonnie for what lies ahead...

    Join the O'Reilly family once again as they meet around the Jack O'Lantern on Halloween night and share ghost stories that will make you shiver and have you looking over your shoulder to see if there is "a little something extra" wandering through your home tonight.

    Showing us the war as we have never seen it before, here is a world not only of soldiers and assassins, hostages and car bombers, refugees and terrorists, but also of madmen and prophets, angels and djinni, sorcerers and spirits. Blending shocking realism with flights of fantasy, The Corpse Exhibition offers us a pageant of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib and as difficult to look away from, but shot through with a gallows humor that yields an unflinching comedy of the macabre. Gripping and hallucinatory, this is a new kind of storytelling forged in the crucible of war.

    In "Dream of a Clean Slate," Jackson Pollock the man struggles with the separation he feels from Jackson Pollock the artist; "The Judgement of Psycho," probes the sexual dynamic of Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in Psycho, and then delves into the relationship between Hector and Paris in the Iliad; and Orson Welles presides over "Crimes at Midnight," a tense evocation of desire and its consequences. A series of myths for modern times, this is an astonishing debut.

    But dreaming is as close as she has ever come to the happiness she longs for. Devastated by childlessness and divorce, she is isolated and deeply depressed. Then a package arrives on that fateful birthday. Inside is a picture straight out of her dream, a package of... tea? And a letter signed with her name: Emma Rae Wright. Add to that a phone call from a lawyer in California, and Emma is catapulted into a journey across country and across decades. How does a confirmed recluse juggle attractive men, priceless Russian jewels, ageless relatives, angry fathers, and tea that has rather... curious properties? From her grungy Michigan apartment to sun-dappled redwood forests, from a dead-end job to a partnership in an exotic and unusual company, Emma's life gets tangled beyond recognition. Desperate to make sense of ever more baffling circumstances, Emma is forced to face her own inner demons as well as the extraordinary legacy left behind by a woman who disappeared without a trace over ninety years ago.