Is it a ghost, or something much worse? PC Peter Grant really isn't looking forward to finding out....

    The stories have been selected and introduced by Haruki Murakami.

    Bender's prose is glorious, musical, and colloquial, an anthology of the bizarre. In 'The Rememberer', a man undergoes reverse evolution -- from man to ape to salamander -- at which point a friend releases him into the sea, while in another story a woman gives birth to her mother. A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?Contents:The rememberer --Call my name --What you left in the ditch --The bowl --Marzipan --Quiet please --Skinless --Fugue --Drunken Mimi --Fell this girl --The healer --Loser --Legacy --Dreaming in Polish --The ring --The girl in the flamable skirt.

    . . A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape . . . A company outsources grief for profit, their tagline: "Don't feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you."

    A grieving missionary becomes obsessed with a creature rumoured to live in the forests of the Congo. And, in the title story, a young woman travelling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning sexuality and her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer.

    'It is the kingdom of the frozen will,' comes the reply. 'There is no going back.'Sylvia Plath's strange, dark tale of independence over infanticide, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

    Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud's intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible.These are love stories. And also monster stories. Sometimes these are monsters in their traditional guises, sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The often working-class people in these stories are driven to extremes by love. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to find an escape.Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life in the South. He worked as a bartender in New Orleans and New York City and a cook on offshore oil rigs. His story "The Monsters of Heaven" won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.

    

    His evocations of small-town Pennsylvania life, and of his own religious, artistic, and sexual awakening, transfixed readers of The New Yorker and of the early collections Pigeon Feathers (1962) and The Music School (1966). In these and the works that followed—the formal experiments and wickedly tart tales of suburban adultery in Museums and Women (1972) and Problems (1979), the portraits of middle-aged couples in love and at war with aging parents and rebellious children in Trust Me (1987) and The Afterlife (1994), and the fugue-like stories of memory, desire, travel, and unquenched thirst for life in Licks of Love (2000) and My Father’s Tears (2009)—Updike displayed the virtuosic command of character, dialogue, and sensual description that was his signature.   Here, in two career-spanning volumes, are 186 unforgettable stories, from "Ace in the Hole” (1953), a sketch of a Rabbit-like ex-basketball player written when Updike was a Harvard senior, to "The Full Glass” (2008), the author’s toast to the visible world, his own impending disappearance from it be damned.” Based on new archival research, each story is presented in its final definitive form and in order of composition, established here for the first time. This unprecedented collection of American masterpieces is not just the publishing event of the season, it is a national literary treasure.

    With razor wit and compassionate insight, Egerton has a crafted a work that brilliantly explores the pain and wonder of life, knowing that with the turn of any corner death could be panhandling for your soul.

    

    With all the heartbreaking earnestness of a Wilco song, these eighteen stories by Chad Simpson roam the small-town playgrounds, blue-collar neighborhoods, and rural highways of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky to find people who’ve lost someone or something they love and have not yet found ways to move forward. Simpson’s remarkable voice masterfully moves between male and female and adolescent and adult characters. He embraces their helplessness and shares their sad, strange, and sometimes creepy slices of life with grace, humor, and mounds of empathy. In “Peloma,” a steelworker grapples with his preteen daughter’s feeble suicide attempts while the aftermath of his wife’s death and the politics of factory life vie to hem him in.  The narrator of “Fostering” struggles to determine the ramifications of his foster child’s past now that he and his wife are expecting their first biological child. In just two pages, “Let x” negotiates the yearnings and regrets of childhood through mathematical variables and the summertime interactions of two fifth-graders. Poignant, fresh, and convincing, these are stories of women who smell of hairspray and beer and of landscapers who worry about their livers, of flooded basements and loud trucks, of bad exes and horrible jobs, of people who remain loyal to sports teams that always lose. Displaced by circumstances both in and out of their control, the characters who populate Tell Everyone I Said Hi are lost in their own surroundings, thwarted by misguided aspirations and long-buried disappointments, but fully open to the possibility that they will again find their way.

    Few know these characters—and their creators—better than Sarah Weinman. One of today’s preeminent authorities on crime fiction, Weinman asks: Where would bestselling authors like Gillian Flynn, Sue Grafton, or Tana French be without the women writers who came before them? In Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, Weinman brings together fourteen hair-raising tales by women who—from the 1940s through the mid-1970s—took a scalpel to contemporary society and sliced away to reveal its dark essence. Lovers of crime fiction from any era will welcome this deliciously dark tribute to a largely forgotten generation of women writers.

    Here, wolf-like girls are reformed by nuns; a family makes its living wrestling alligators in a theme park; and little girls sail away on crab shells. Filled with stunning inventiveness and heart, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves introduces a radiant new writer.

    An alien invasion comes to one man’s doorstep in the form of a story-creature, followed by death and rebirth in a transformed Earth.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.