With its vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, and tall tales, this absurdist, unreal exploration of modern society brings us a chorus of unique and unforgettable voices. All are welcome at this twilit, visionary carnival: the man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the black bear with a dark secret; the woman who oversees giant snowballs in the freezer. "My girlfriend won me in a sealed auction but wouldn't / tell me how much she bid," begins one speaker; "I hadn't meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins / but he can be very persuasive," another tells us. The storyteller behind this human tapestry has about him a sly undercover idealism: he shares with many of his characters a stargazing capacity for belief, or for being, at the very least, entirely "genuine in his disbelief." In these startling poems, with their unique cartoon-strip energy and air of misrule, Armitage creates world after world, peculiar and always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.

    She captures the beguiling transformation from child to adult with humor, heartache, and desperation. From grieving mothers to fathers adrift, old flames to restless teens, the isolated characters in Doll Palace are united by conflicting desires, quiet rebellions, and the private struggles of the heart.

    A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray’s curio cabinet expands in Gutshot, where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. These singular stories live and breathe on their own, pulsating with energy and humanness and a glorious sense of humor. Hers are stories that you will read and reread—raw gems that burrow into your brain, reminders of just how strange and beautiful our world is. These collected stories come to us like a vivisected body, the whole that is all the more elegant and breathtaking for exploring its most grotesque and intimate lightless viscera.

    Told in monologues, speeches, soliloquies, sermons, letters, cards, and lists, FUN CAMP is a freewheelin summer camp novel smashed to bits. Spend a week with the young inhabitants of a camp bent on molding campers into fun and interesting people via pranks, food fights, greased watermelon relays. Along the way, you'll meet Dave and Holly, totalitarian head counselors who may be getting too old for this shit, Bernadette, a Luddite chaplain with some kids to convert, Billy, a first-timer tasting freedom, and Tad, a shaggy dude with a Jesus complex. Prank hard, joke loud, break a bone or two: Half a forest got burned down for you to live it up. FUN CAMP was a semi-finalist for the Lake Forest/&Now 2011-2012 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize.

    This is the life of Charlotte Anne Byers, told by Elizabeth Crane, whose debut, When the Messenger Is Hot, has been praised across the country for its humor and grace. From the time she moved to New York as a young girl, desperate to tame her ridiculed southern accent, Charlotte Anne Byers has struggled to fit in-even while her strong will makes her clash with everything and everyone around her. With her mother pursuing a career as an opera singer and her father returning to Iowa, Charlotte is caught in the divide between her parents' dreams. She finds a touchstone in Jenna, a friend who will be by Charlotte's side through the death of her mother, several failed career moves, even more failed romances, a detour into alcoholism, and finding true love. In her lifetime Charlotte finds hope and disappointment mingled with faith and desperation, laughter on the heels of weeping, and success assuaging the pain of the most embarrassing failures-her path both all her own and instantly familiar. All This Heavenly Glory confirms Elizabeth Crane's talents as the writer the San Francisco Chronicle called "hilariously off kilter and utterly refreshing." With whimsy, skepticism, and undaunted emotional frankness, she paints a dazzling portrait of one woman's unique desires and heartbreaks.

    Now updated for Pro Tools 10 software, this new edition from the definitive authority on Pro Tools covers everything you need to know to complete a Pro Tools project. Learn to build sessions that include multitrack recordings of live instruments, MIDI sequences, and virtual instruments. Through hands-on tutorials, develop essential techniques for recording, editing, and mixing. The included DVD-ROM offers tutorial files and videos, additional documentation, and Pro Tools sessions to accompany the projects in the text.

    A man discovers he has testicular cancer on the day that a Godzilla-like monster attacks the city he lives in; a kitchen-hand is put under terrible peer pressure in a restaurant for zombies; a husband and wife discover they are pregnant with 37 babies; and a man travels into the engine room of his own body to discover Busta Rhymes at the controls. The 14 stories are grotesque, hilarious, unnerving, and moving. No matter how outrageous the subject matter of the stories, they have at their heart genuine human experiences that are common to us all. Bonus BackLit materials will include two new stories and an interview with the author.

    

    While most are perfectly harmless, it's the magnificent exceptions that populate The Book of Deadly Animals. Award-winning writer Gordon Grice takes readers on a tour of the animal kingdom--from grizzly bears to great white sharks, big cats to crocodiles. Every page overflows with astonishing facts about Earth's great predators and unforgettable stories of their encounters with humans, all delivered in Grice's signature dark comic style. Illustrated with awe-inspiring photographs of beasts and bugs, this wondrous work will horrify, delight, and amaze.

    And hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the pyramids...The Summer People is a bite-sized sample of Link's incomparable writing, telling the story of Fran, her friend Ophelia, and their adventures at the house belonging to the mysterious and rarely glimpsed 'summer people'. As the tales Fran tells about the house and its inhabitants become ever stranger and more magical, it gets harder and harder to tell what is real and what exists only in her imagination, and the lines between truth and fantasy become deliciously blurred.

    The freedom to tell each other the stories of ourselves, to retell the stories of our culture and beliefs, is profoundly connected to the larger subject of freedom itself.”—Salman Rushdie, editorIntroduction / by Salman Rushdie --Admiral / T.C. Boyle --The year of silence / Kevin Brockmeier --Galatea / Karen Brown --Man and wife / Katie Chase --Virgins / Danielle Evans --Closely held / Allegra Goodman --May we be forgiven / A.M. Homes --From the desk of Daniel Varsky / Nicole Krauss --The king of sentences / Jonathan Lethem --The worst you ever feel / Rebecca Makkai --The wizard of West Orange / Steven Millhauser --Nawabdin Electrician / Daniyal Mueenuddin --Child's play / Alice Munro --Buying Lenin / Miroslav Penkov --Vampires in the lemon grove / Karen Russell --Puppy / George Saunders --Quality of life / Christine Sneed --Missionaries / Bradford Tice --Straightaway / Mark Wisniewski --Bible / Tobias Wolff

    A couple suspects their friends think them boring; a woman resolves to see herself as nothing but then concludes she's set too high a goal; and a funeral home receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors. Lydia Davis once again proves in the words of the Los Angeles Times "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction."

    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.

    A short critical essay which considers the significance of the title.

    Set in New Orleans at the turn of the 21st century, this continuation of the highly acclaimed Night People provides a stark, eccentric, and wholly original plunge into the dark and grimy world of just revenge, as it vividly tracks the lives of individuals intent on making a profound difference in the world before they are willingly or forcibly removed from it.