But even her fevered imagination cannot anticipate the horror they have been hiding from her. In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.With wicked insight, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates why the females of the species—be they six-year-old girls, seemingly devoted wives, or aging mothers—are by nature more deadly than the males.

    Here are characters faced with dangerous decisions, children slick with oil from the river, a woman in love with another despite the penalties. Here is a world marked by electricity outages, lush landscapes, folktales, buses that break down and never start up again. Here is a portrait of Nigerians that is surprising, shocking, heartrending, loving, and across social strata, dealing in every kind of change. Here are stories filled with language to make your eyes pause and your throat catch. Happiness, Like Water introduces a true talent, a young writer with a beautiful heart and a capacious imagination.

    Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters straddle both worlds but belong to none.From a Hong Kong movie idol fleeing a sex scandal, to an obedient daughter turned Stanford imposter, to a Chinatown elder summoned to his village, to a Korean-American pastor with a secret agenda, the characters in these ten stories vividly illustrate the conflict between self and society, tradition and change. In “What We Have is What We Need,” winner of The Atlantic student fiction prize, a boy from Mexico reunites with his parents in San Francisco. When he suspects his mother has found love elsewhere, he fights to keep his family together.With insight and wit, she writes about what wounds us and what we must survive. Her searing stories explore the clash of cultures and the complex, always shifting allegiances that we carry in ourselves, our family, and our community. Deceit and Other Possibilities marks the emergence of a remarkable new writer.

    No man could resist her charms—not even the hardboiled NYPD detective sent to find out who turned her into a faceless corpse. As this tough cop probes the mystery of Laura's death, he becomes obsessed with her strange power. Soon he realizes he's been seduced by a dead woman—or has he? Laura won lasting renown as an Academy Award-nominated 1944 film, the greatest noir romance of all time. Vera Caspary's equally haunting novel is remarkable for its stylish, hardboiled writing, its electrifying plot twists, and its darkly complex characters—including a woman who stands as the ultimate femme fatale.

    King, author of the New York Times-bestselling Mary Russell series (in which Holmes plays a co-starring role), and Leslie S. Klinger, editor of the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, have assembled a stellar group of contemporary authors from a variety of genres and asked them to create new stories inspired by that canon. Inside you ll find Holmes in times and places previously unimagined, as well as characters who have themselves been affected by the tales of Sherlock Holmes. The game is afoot again!

    "How in Tartarus," cried Flambeau, "did you ever hear of the spiked bracelet?" -- "Oh, one's little flock, you know!" said Father Brown, arching his eyebrows rather blankly. "When I was a curate in Hartlepool, there were three of them with spiked bracelets." Not long after he published Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton moved from London to Beaconsfield, and met Father O'Connor. O'Connor had a shrewd insight to the darker side of man's nature and a mild appearance to go with it--and together those came together to become Chesterton's unassuming Father Brown. Chesterton loved the character, and the magazines he wrote for loved the stories. The Innocence of Father Brown was the first collection of them, and it's a great lot of fun.

    Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love.With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt, and the limits of compassion.

    A student plagiarizes a paper and holds fast to her alibi until she finds herself complicit in the resurrection of one professor's shadowy past. A dinner party becomes the occasion for the dissolution of more than one marriage. A woman is hired to find a wife for the one true soulmate she's ever found. In all, Rebecca Lee traverses the terrain of infidelity, obligation, sacrifice, jealousy, and yet finally, optimism. Showing people at their most vulnerable, Lee creates characters so wonderfully flawed, so driven by their desire, so compelled to make sense of their human condition, that it's impossible not to feel for them when their fragile belief in romantic love, domestic bliss, or academic seclusion fails to provide them with the sort of force field they'd expected.

    In the forest there is not a big gap between the two."A Datin recalls her romance with an orang bunian. A teenage pontianak struggles to balance homework, bossy aunties, first love, and eating people. An earth spirit gets entangled in protracted negotiations with an annoying landlord, and Chang E spins off into outer space, the ultimate metaphor for the Chinese diaspora.Straddling the worlds of the mundane and the magical, Spirits Abroad collects ten science fiction and fantasy stories with a distinctively Malaysian sensibility.

    Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption--the most satisfying tale of unjust imprisonment and offbeat escape since The Count of Monte Cristo.Apt Pupil--a golden California schoolboy and an old man whose hideous past he uncovers enter into a fateful and chilling mutual parasitism.The Body--four rambunctious young boys venture into the Maine woods and in sunlight and thunder find life, death, and intimations of their own mortality.The Breathing Method--a tale told in a strange club about a woman determined to give birth no matter what.source: stephenking.com

    His characters, almost all of who are first-generation Indian Americans, subvert our expectations that they will sit quietly by. We meet two brothers caught in an elaborate web of envy and loathing; a young gay man who becomes involved with an older man whose secret he could never guess; three women who almost gleefully throw off the pleasant agreeability society asks of them; and, in the final pair of linked stories, a young couple struggling against the devastating force of community gossip. If You See Me, Don't Say Hi examines the collisions of old world and new world, small town and big city, traditional beliefs (like arranged marriage) and modern rituals (like Facebook stalking). The men and women in these stories are full of passion, regret, envy, anger, and yearning. They fall in love with the wrong people and betray one another and deal with the accumulation of years of subtle racism. They are utterly compelling. Ranging across the country, Patel’s stories -- empathetic, provocative, twisting, and wryly funny -- introduce a bold new literary voice, one that feels more timely than ever.

    Daneel Olivaw] • (1972) • short story by Isaac Asimov 231 • The Tercentenary Incident • (1976) • short story by Isaac Asimov 253 • First Law • [Mike Donovan] • (1956) • short story by Isaac Asimov 257 • Runaround • [Mike Donovan] • (1942) • novelette by Isaac Asimov 280 • Reason • [Mike Donovan] • (1941) • short story by Isaac Asimov 302 • Catch That Rabbit • [Mike Donovan] • (1944) • short story by Isaac Asimov 329 • Liar! • [Susan Calvin] • (1941) • short story by Isaac Asimov 350 • Satisfaction Guaranteed • [Susan Calvin] • (1951) • short story by Isaac Asimov 368 • Lenny • [Susan Calvin] • (1958) • short story by Isaac Asimov 385 • Galley Slave • [Susan Calvin] • (1957) • novelette by Isaac Asimov 427 • Little Lost Robot • [Susan Calvin] • (1947) • novelette by Isaac Asimov 459 • Risk • [Susan Calvin] • (1955) • novelette by Isaac Asimov 490 • Escape! • [Susan Calvin] • (1945) • short story by Isaac Asimov 518 • Evidence • [Susan Calvin] • (1946) • novelette by Isaac Asimov 546 • The Evitable Conflict • [Susan Calvin] • (1950) • novelette by Isaac Asimov 575 • Feminine Intuition • [Susan Calvin] • (1969) • novelette by Isaac Asimov 605 • ... That Thou Art Mindful of Him • (1974) • novelette by Isaac Asimov (variant of —That Thou Art Mindful of Him!) 635 • The Bicentennial Man • (1976) • novelette by Isaac Asimov 683 • A Last Word • (1982) • essay by Isaac Asimov THE COMPLETE ROBOT is the ultimate collection of timeless, amazing and amusing robot stories from the greatest science fiction writer of all time, offering golden insights into robot thought processes. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were programmed into real computers thirty years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - with surprising results. Readers of today still have many surprises in store...

    Still, I never tried to hide or suppress my mind as some girls do, and thank God, because that would have been the beginning of the end.From childhood, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But in becoming a mathematician, she must face the most human of problems—who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition? On her quest to conquer the Riemann Hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity, and to secrets long buried during World War II in Germany. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her—their love of the language of numbers connecting them across generations.In The Tenth Muse, Catherine Chung offers a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.

    With Asian society changing around him, like many he remains trapped in a world of poorly paid jobs that just about allow him to keep his head above water but ultimately lead him to murder a migrant worker from Bangladesh.In the tradition of Camus and Houellebecq, Ah Hock’s vivid and compelling description of the years building up to this appalling act of violence – told over several days to a local journalist whose life has taken a different course – is a portrait of an outsider like no other, an anti-nostalgic view of human life and the ravages of hope. It is the work of a writer at the peak of his powers.

    At its heart is Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and her struggle with her decision to leave her two-year-old son, Jay. As an adult, Jay sets out to find his mother and confront her abandonment.