When Lassie and Murdock's game of "What Won't Murdock eat?" goes wrong, a trip to the emergency vet is in order. And when a crazed snake owner takes the vet hostage, it is up to Henry, Lassie, and Murdock to save the day. But they only have one hour. And the clock is ticking... *Disclaimer: THIS IS ONLY 40 PAGES LONG *Disclaimer about the disclaimer: 40 HILARIOUS PAGES :)

    In between, Moore’s stories have been shortlisted for more than a dozen different awards including the Bridport Prize, the Fish Prize, the Lightship Flash Fiction Prize, the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Nottingham Short Story Competition. The title story won first prize in the novella category of The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes.

    An absurdist short story collection about the woes of 21st-century living--from an author whose writing is "moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious" (Miranda July)College students, recent graduates, and their parents work at Denny's, volunteer at a public library in suburban Florida, attend satanic ska/punk concerts, eat Chinese food with the homeless of New York City, and go to the same Japanese restaurant in Manhattan three times in two sleepless days, all while yearning constantly for love, a better kind of love, or something better than love, things which--much like the Loch Ness Monster--they know probably do not exist, but are rumored to exist and therefore "good enough."

    Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, strange in the dark; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: the stories focus in on crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists. A girl accepts a lift in a car with some older boys, or a young woman reads the diaries she comes across when she’s housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, and some of them reverberate across decades; things fantasised in private can reach out to affect other people, for better and worse. An older woman recovering from serious illness speaks to a lonely young man on a train; an old friend brings bad news to a dinner party; a schoolteacher in the throes of a painful affair in 1914 has mixed feelings about her pupils’ suffragette craze. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams.Bad Dreams shows yet again that Tessa Hadley is a master of her art, one of the very finest writers at work in Britain today.

    A high school football rivalry turns absurd—and deadly. A much-loved cat seems to have been a different animal all along. A pair of identical twins aren’t identical at all—or even related. A man finds his own yellowed birth announcement inside a bureau bought at auction. Set in a small upstate New York town, told in a conversational style, Pieces for the Left Hand is a stream of a hundred anecdotes, none much longer than a page. At once funny, bizarre, familiar, and disturbing, these deceptively straightforward tales nevertheless shock and amaze through uncanny coincidence, tragic misunderstanding, strange occurrence, or sudden insight. Unposted letters, unexpected visitors, false memories—in J. Robert Lennon’s vision of America, these are the things that decide our fate. Wry and deadpan, powerful and philosophical, these addictive little tales reveal the everyday world as a strange and eerie place.

    In her new collection, gifted poet and novelist Kim Addonizio uses her literary powers to bring to life a variety of settings, all connected through the suggestion that things in the known world are not what they seem.In “Beautiful Lady of the Snow,” young Annabelle turns to a host of family pets to combat the alienation she feels caught between her distracted mother and ailing grandfather; in “Night Owls,” a young college student’s crush on her acting partner is complicated by the bloodlust of being half-vampire; in “Cancer Poems,” a dying woman turns to a poetry workshop to make sense of her terminal diagnosis and final days; in “Intuition,” a young girl’s sexual forays bring her closer to her best friend’s father; and in the collection’s title story, a photographer looks back to his youth spent as a young illusionist under the big tent and his obsessive affair with the carnival owner’s wife.The stories in this collection have appeared in journals ranging from Narrative Magazine to The Fairy Tale Review, and include the much loved "Ever After," which was featured on NPR's "Selected Shorts."Distracted parents, first love, the twin forces of alienation and isolation: the characters in The Palace of Illusions all must contend with these challenges, trafficking in the fault lines between the real and the imaginary, often in a world not of their making.

    

    Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Donald's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.

    The humble, pixelated games of the ‘70s and ‘80s have evolved into the vivid, realistic, and immersive form of entertainment that now rivals all other forms of media for dominance in the consumer marketplace. For many, video games have become the cultural icons around which pop culture revolves.PRESS START TO PLAY is an anthology of stories inspired by video games: stories that attempt to recreate the feel of a video game in prose form; stories that play with the concepts common (or exclusive) to video games; and stories about the creation of video games and/or about the video games—or the gamers—themselves.These stories will appeal to anyone who has interacted with games, from hardcore teenaged fanatics, to men and women who game after their children have gone to bed, to your well-meaning aunt who won’t stop inviting you to join her farm-based Facebook games.At the helm of this project are Daniel H. Wilson—bestselling novelist and expert in artificial intelligence—and John Joseph Adams—bestselling, Hugo Award-nominated editor of more than a dozen science fiction/fantasy anthologies and series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy (volume one forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin in 2015). Together, they have drawn on their wide-ranging contacts to assemble an incredibly talented group of authors who are eager to attack the topic of video games from startling and fascinating angles.Under the direction of an A.I. specialist and a veteran editor, the anthology will expose readers to a strategically chosen mix of stories that explore novel video game concepts in prose narratives, such as save points, kill screens, gold-farming, respawning, first-person shooters, unlocking achievements, and getting “pwned.” Likewise, each of our authors is an accomplished specialist in areas such as science fiction, fantasy, and techno-thrillers, and many have experience writing for video games professionally.Combining unique viewpoints and exacting realism, this anthology promises to thrill generations of readers, from those who grew up with Atari 2600s to the console and PC gamers of today.

    But when Grayson Park's bride leaves him at the altar, a solo trip to paradise seems like just the thing to take him far from his troubles. Then he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Hi'iaka, and his troubles just begin--because when she's abducted by the sinister Kamapua'a, a savage creature bent on draining her life by the light of the full moon, she calls on Grayson to rescue her. With his loyal, new-found Hawaiian friend Polunu as his steadfast guide, Grayson sets out on an incredible adventure that pits him against the very gods of Hawaiian mythology and leads him to the heart of Pele's volcano, into the ocean to find the mythical Hook of Maui, and through the strange and brutal upcountry fleeing from demonic mo'o sent to destroy him. But there are only two nights left before the moon becomes full, and Grayson is running out of time to save Hi'iaka...and himself.

    

    Introducing two eccentric ladies who form an unlikely friendship.Meet Mavis and Dot - two colourful, retired ladies who live in Worthington-on-Sea, where there are charity shops galore. Apart from bargain hunting, they manage to tangle themselves in escapades involving illegal immigrants, night clubs, nude modelling, errant toupees and more. And then there’s Mal, the lovable dog who nobody else wants. A gently humorous, often side-splitting, heart-warming snapshot of two memorable characters with past secrets and passions. Escape for a couple of hours into this snapshot of a faded, British seaside town. You'll laugh and cry but probably laugh more."This book is quirky and individual, and has great pathos...[it] will resonate with a lot of readers." Gill Kaye - Editor of Ingenu(e). Written with a light touch in memory of a dear friend who passed away from ovarian cancer, Angela Petch’s seaside tale is a departure from her successful Tuscan novels. All profits from the sale of the books will go towards research into the cure for cancer.

    Anderson, Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, John Green, Tracy Lynn, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith, David Levithan, Kelly Link, Barry Lyga, Wendy Mass, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfield, Lisa Yee, and Sara Zarr.With illustrated interstitials from comic book artists Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O'Malley, Geektastic covers all things geeky, from Klingons and Jedi Knights to fan fiction, theater geeks, and cosplayers. Whether you're a former, current, or future geek, or if you just want to get in touch with your inner geek, Geektastic will help you get your geek on!

    endings. The heroes and antiheroes of these tales find themselves, sometimes unexpectedly, arriving at major turning points in their lives – turning points that are quite often catastrophic, surreal, tragic. These stories are alternately triumphant and terribly sad, but they are always human.This collection includes the following previously published stories:Wolf SkinThe CaretakerThe Winter LandsNebulaeOnyxThe Last Rail-RiderThe Dark AgeDeep Breath Hold Tight will be published in the spring.

    Camry is a woman who knows too much. Down on her luck, she asks for Knighthorse’s protection from her biker ex-boyfriend, Steel Eye, whom she says has murdered someone. She’s a witness on the run and she also has problems of her own making. She wants to leave the biker gang, but no one ever leaves this one alive. The investigation turns dangerous as Jim digs for the truth about what really happened that night. There is action and danger as the witness spills her secrets and Jim spills some blood. And not necessarily his own.