Neil Gaiman, “Orange”   Aimee Bender, “The Color Master”   Joyce Carol Oates, “Blue-bearded Lover”   Michael Cunningham, “The Wild Swans”   These and more than thirty other stories by Francine Prose, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, and many other extraordinary writers make up this thrilling celebration of fairy tales—the ultimate literary costume party.   Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” and “The Little Match Girl” to Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and “Cinderella” to the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin” to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico.   Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon.

    

     These are some of the stories you will encounter in Chimerascope, the first full collection of short fiction from multi-award-winning Canadian author, Douglas Smith. Sixteen engaging stories of fantasy and science fiction that take you from love in fourteenth-century Japan to humanity's last stand, from virtual reality to the end of reality, from alien drug addictions to a dinner where a man loses everything.

    Chill your bones with two hundred horror stories, two sentences at a time.Do you have the courage to face the natural and supernatural scares that lay within these cursed pages? Pull up the blankets, close the blinds, take a deep breath and find out.A series of brief, horrible moments await.

    Showcasing this cutting-edge talent, Poe’s Children now brings the best of the genre’s stories to a wider audience. Featuring tales from such writers as Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll, Poe’s Children is Peter Straub’s tribute to the imaginative power of storytelling. Each previously published story has been selected by Straub to represent what he thinks is the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades.Selections range from the early Stephen King psychological thriller “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” in which an editor confronts an author’s belief that his typewriter is inhabited by supernatural creatures, to “The Man on the Ceiling,” Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem’s award-winning surreal tale of night terrors, woven with daylight fears that haunt a family. Other selections include National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon’s “The Bees”; Peter Straub’s “Little Red’s Tango,” the legend of a music aficionado whose past is as mysterious as the ghostly visitors to his Manhattan apartment; Elizabeth Hand’s visionary and shocking “Cleopatra Brimstone”; Thomas Ligotti’s brilliant, mind-stretching “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”; and “Body,” Brian Evenson’s disturbing twist on correctional facilities.Crossing boundaries and packed with imaginative chills, Poe’s Children bears all the telltale signs of fearless, addictive fiction.

    The eighteen stories of Manuel Gonzales’s exhilarating first book render the fantastic commonplace and the ordinary extraordinary, in prose that thrums with energy and shimmers with beauty. In “The Artist’s Voice” we meet one of the world’s foremost composers, a man who speaks through his ears. A hijacked plane circles a city for twenty years in “Pilot, Copilot, Writer.” Sound can kill in “The Sounds of Early Morning.” And, in the title story, a man is at war with the wife he accidentally shrank. For these characters, the phenomenal isn’t necessarily special—but it’s often dangerous. In slightly fantastical settings, Gonzales illustrates very real guilt over small and large marital missteps, the intense desire for the reinvention of self, and the powerful urges we feel to defend and provide for the people we love. With wit and insight, these stories subvert our expectations and challenge us to look at our surroundings with fresh eyes. Brilliantly conceived, strikingly original, and told with the narrative instinct of a born storyteller, The Miniature Wife is an unforgettable debut.

    The highly anticipated new collection of macabre delights, that explores dark realms of the fevered, fecund mind, and visits strange landscapes and vistas. These are grim and grotesque tales of terror -- modern Mysterium Tremendums -- that open new doors of perception and reality.“Gavin’s writing serves as a testament that great masters once crafted great stories .. .and as evidence that they shall do so again.”— Thomas Ligotti

    In eight tragi-comic stories, Einstein's Beach House: Stories features ordinary men and women rising to life's extraordinary challenges.

    American Supernatural Tales celebrates the richness of this tradition with chilling contributions from some of the nation’s brightest literary lights, including Poe himself, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and—of course— Stephen King. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good addition to Penguin Classics.

    WHAT IF YOU'RE A SENTIENT SPACECRAFT who wants to be more than an intelligent weapon to implement government policy? Do you partner with another by-the-book sentinel like the one you just lost to your enemies or gamble on someone different, even if they are a middle-aged dad from a primitive world called Earth? And can you learn to work with him before your enemies kill billions? In Saabrina, book one of the Saabrina series, Saabrina, a small sentient spacecraft called a Saab (not the car from Sweden, but she can become one to blend in on Earth and anywhere else you’re expected to keep four wheels on the ground), gets a new partner, Bob Foxen, and maybe a start to something more.

    Henry James was arguably the greatest practitioner of what has been called the psychological ghost story. His stories explore the region which lies between the supernatural or straightforwardly marvellous and the darker areas of the human psyche. This edition includes all ten of his ghost stories, and as such is the fullest collection currently available. The stories range widely in tone and type. They include 'The Jolly Corner', a compelling story of psychological doubling; 'Owen Wingrave', which is also a subtle parable of military tradition; 'The Friends of the Friends', a strange story of uncanny love; and 'The Private Life', which finds a shrewd, high comedy in its ghostly theme. The volume also includes James's great novella The Turn of the Screw , perhaps the most ambiguous and disturbing ghost story ever written.

    This eclectic volume takes the readers through places as varied as Laos, Greenland, Peru, and the Congo, and from antiquity until the 20th century, pushing the envelope of Lovecraftian lore. William Meikle's inquisitor tries to unravel the truth during a very hostile questioning. Jesse Bullington narrates the saga of a young Viking woman facing danger and destruction. E. Catherine Tobler stops in Ancient Egypt, where Pharaoh Hatshepsut receives an exquisite and deadly gift. Albert Tucher discovers that the dead do not remain silent in 10th century Rome. These are tales that reimagine history and look into the past through a darker glass. Tales that show evil has many faces and reaches through the centuries. Tales that will chill your heart. Join us in our journey through horror and time, if you dare. Stories by: Regina Allen, Jesse Bullington, Nathalie Boisard-Beudin, Mason Ian Bundschuh, Andrew G. Dombalagian, Mae Empson, Nelly Geraldine Garcia-Rosas, Orrin Grey, Sarah Hans, Travis Heermann, Martha Hubbard, Nathaniel Katz, Leigh Kimmel, Meddy Ligner, William Meikle, Daniel Mills, Aaron Polson, Y. Wahyu Purnomosidhi, Alter S. Reiss, Josh Reynolds, Julio Toro San Martin, Bradley H. Sinor, Molly Tanzer, Albert Tucher, E. Catherine Tobler, Bryan Thao Worra.

    To accomplish this, the most primal element of storytelling--a single human voice describing events exactly as it experienced them--is adhered to without embellishment or exception. Within these pages lie taut, unadorned first person narratives from agonized souls, minus all the stylish techniques which dilute, stretch, and burden tales of terror with unnecessary detail. Here you will find no entry into the thoughts of any characters other than the narrator's, no standard passages of dialogue, no humor, no extraneous gore, no romance. The twenty untitled stories inside this book spill forward without page or even paragraph breaks, taking the form of uninterrupted confessions, creating an effect of pure campfire terror. Knifepoint strips away all the tired conventions which water down traditional horror fiction, leaving nothing but the story's riveting spine to compel and chill you to the core.If this collection is expanded in the future, those possessing a copy of any particular edition need only send a page from it to the author to receive a free copy of the new one.

    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?

    Lafferty, the highly acclaimed author of Past Masters and Fourth Mansions. His people are heroic, foolish, demonic or mischievous, but always unpredictable, and his stories soar with imagination even while they chuckle at themselves.Here at last are the finest of Lafferty's shorter works, stories about:A man who found one day that he knew everyone in the world.A race who kept their most ancient ancestors on shelves in the basements.A speeded-up world where a man could earn and lose a dozen fortunes a night.A friendly bearlike creature named Snuffles who said he was God....in all, twenty-one immensely enjoyable stories that will continue to delight you long after you've read them.