In these stories, our bodies become strange and unfamiliar terrain, a medium for transformation. In “Fundamental Laws of Nature,” a doctor considers her legacy, both good and bad, when she discovers that her mother has been reincarnated as a thoroughbred mare. In the title story, a mischievous angel chronicles the remarkable life of a girl just beyond death’s reach.In Scheer’s hands, empathy and attachment are illuminated by the absurdity of life. When our bodies betray us, when we begin to feel our minds slip, how much can we embrace without going insane? How much can we detach ourselves before losing our humanity? Scheer’s stories grapple with these questions in each throbbing, choking, heartbreaking moment.

    A city without a name is cursed by a plague of birds they probably deserve. But when an angry beggar child and his father learn they have the power to lift the curse they "control" birds they cannot agree on how to use their gift, and end up using it on each other, taking out everyone around them, especially those they love. This is BOOK I of a two-volume novel."

    Music. DEATH TO THE BULLSHIT ARTISTS OF SOUTH TEXAS is a psychedelic romp through the Rio Grande Valley music scene. This collection of 10 punk rock fairy-tales offers a prismatic view of a subculture so rich that if it knew its own worth, it just might revolt against itself. This is the book you wish you had as a teenager, headphones on, waiting at a bus stop for a ride to the record store.

    Jillian Sayles saw the concept one random night where insomnia was present while strolling Pinterest. She asked her friends to fly in for dinner and surprisingly, everyone obliged. This short story by National Best-Selling Author, Nako is pleasantly sweet and to the point. NAKO sheds light and emphasis on the importance of friendship centered around black women. If reading short stories are not your thing, please pass over this story. Happy Thanksgiving!

    A town of spilled peaches fields its own game show. A mosquito fogger finds an unlikely friend. The stories in Mike Young's debut collection Look! Look! Feathers tap into the surreal and sad, the absurd and ragged dreams scratching at the edge of the American heart. Punks drive auctioned police cars, and necklaces of bluebird bones are sold from a roadside van. In these tales of the Pacific Northwest, Young finds magic burrowed under the moss of ordinary life.

    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."

    Now, the award-winning writer, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of The Best American Short Stories, returns with a highly anticipated collection bearing her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart. A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, even as her own relationship falls apart. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young boy has a revelation about his father’s past when a renowned Romanian violinist plays a concert in their home. When the prized elephant of a traveling circus keels over dead, the small-town minister tasked with burying its remains comes to question his own faith. In an unnamed country, a composer records the folk songs of two women from a village on the brink of destruction. These transporting, deeply moving stories—some inspired by her own family history—amply demonstrate Makkai’s extraordinary range as a storyteller, and confirm her as a master of the short story form. “Richly imagined.” —Chicago Tribune   “Impressive.” —O, The Oprah Magazine   “Engrossing.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune   “Inventive.” —W Magazine

    How? We don't know. But it changes everything: war, crime, daily life.Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher - a licensed, bonded professional whose job is to humanely dispatch those whose circumstances put them in death's crosshairs, so they can have a second chance to avoid the reaper. But when a fellow Dispatcher and former friend is apparently kidnapped, Tony learns that there are some things that are worse than death and that some people are ready to do almost anything to avenge a supposed wrong.It's a race against time for Valdez to find his friend before it's too late...before not even a Dispatcher can save him.___Zachary Quinto - best known for his role as the Nimoy-approved Spock in the recent Star Trek reboot and the menacing, power-stealing serial killer, Sylar, in Heroes - brings his well-earned sci-fi credentials and simmering intensity to this audio-exclusive novella from master storyteller John Scalzi.

    These lively stories span two decades and a great deal of ups and downs in the lives of Grijpstra and de Gier.

    He solves cases with the able assistance of his close friend and confidant. And, one day, he will become the arch enemy of Sherlock Holmes.Meet Professor James Moriarty - consulting criminal.In these three original tales - collected for the first time - Andy Weir brings to life a Moriarty worthy of the Great Detective himself.1. The Adventure of the Dishonor Among Thieves2. The Adventure of the Unscrupulous Assassin3. The Adventure of the Sealed Room

    But when another card arrives he can no longer put off the urgent meeting, and so Theodore treks to Cleveland to track his mother down. In this strange, thoughtful novel by Jim Krusoe, Theodore travels through the worlds of Uleene, a member of the all-girl biker club Satan’s Samaritans; art; rodent extermination; and sport fishing, all the while realizing that the line between life and death is remarkably fluid.

    Judy can see every possible future, branching out from each moment like infinite trees. Doug can also see the future, but for him, it's a single, locked-in, inexorable sequence of foreordained events. They can't both be right, but over and over again, they are. Obviously these are the last two people in the world who should date. So, naturally, they doSix Months, Three Days is the winner of the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    Hempel, fiercely admired by writers and reviewers, has a sterling reputation that is based on four very short collections of stories, roughly fifteen thousand stunning sentences, written over a period of nearly three decades. These are stories about people who make choices that seem inevitable, whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. With compassion, wit, and the acutest eye, Hempel observes the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America. When "Reasons to Live, " Hempel's first collection, was published in 1985, readers encountered a pitch-perfect voice in fiction and an unsettling assessment of the culture. That collection includes "San Francisco," which Alan Cheuse in "The Chicago Tribune" called "arguably the finest short story composed by any living writer." In "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, " her second collection, frequently compared to the work of Raymond Carver, Hempel refined and developed her unique grace and style and her unerring instinct for the moment that defines a character. Also included here, in their entirety, are the collections "Tumble Home" and "The Dog of the Marriage." As Rick Moody says of the title novella in Tumble Home, "the leap in mastery, in seriousness, and sheer literary purpose was inspiring to behold.... And yet," he continues, ""The Dog of the Marriage, " the fourth collection, is even better than the other three...a triumph, in fact." "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel" is the perfect opportunity for readers of contemporary American fiction to catch up to one of its masters. Moody's passionate and illuminating introduction celebrates both the appeal and the importance of Hempel's work.

    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.

    In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being.This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass—a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.