As Christmas comes around, Joe only wishes for one thing. Will his Christmas wish come true?

    With a foreword by Robert Shapard and an afterword by Christopher Merrill, this book brings you fresh approaches to an exacting form that demands precision, a species of brevity that is surprisingly expansive. Writers say the pieces are hard to compose, but readers say they are easy to appreciate, a pleasure to envision, a wonder to watch life spun out and painted in small places. Real and surreal, lyrical and prosaic, here are 135 stories by 89 authors, certain to make you think.

    If you enjoy small 'bite-size' stories, or are a fan of micro-fiction and flash fiction, you'll appreciate these sharply written, miniature creations from a "masterful wordsmith."

     These 12 all new and original stories from Rusty Wilson, the World’s Greatest Bigfoot Storyteller, will keep you intrigued, hanging onto the edge of your seat, or wishing you could travel up north and see what all the excitement’s about for yourself. Come read about a young man who finally gets his wish to visit one of the world’s wildest places, where he quickly realizes that maybe his parents were right after all—then read about the strange case where a Sasquatch discovers a rare fossilized dinosaur skeleton—and then, if you dare, read about a woman who stops for a break on a remote Canadian backroad and ends up taking something home with her that she really doesn’t want—and there’s the Sasquatch that ends up saving peoples’ lives by stealing all their food in the dead of winter—and a Sasquatch that brings a couple together through its death—one who decides it wants to be in a painting—another who likes the taste of loons—and a man who discovers a secret Bigfoot food source—all these and more great campfire tales are guaranteed to make you happy you’re safe and sound in your house instead of listening to a Sasquatch screaming in the darkness from inside your thin nylon tent, deep in the Canadian wilds. Or, if you’re truly the adventurous type, maybe you’ll want to buy a thin nylon tent and head to British Columbia or Alberta. Fly-fishing guide Rusty Wilson spent years collecting these stories from his clients around the campfire, stories guaranteed to scare the pants off you—or make you want to meet the Big Guy! “I suspect that Canada has more wild things than we could imagine in our wildest dreams. If you take a look at a map, you’ll see just how immense and rugged many parts of this country are, especially those regions in the north and around the Canadian Rockies and Coastal Mountains. I’m sure there are things out there we could only imagine, one of them being Bigfoot—or Sasquatch, as our northern friends call him.” —Rusty Wilson

    A Louisiana farmer sees the image of Christ appear on the freezer door and questions the meaning of faith. In a Maine resort town, Miss Langevin, a spinster who could write a book on disappointment, now gets a chance to help another woman escape it. And in the title story, a science teacher's modest dreams and painful memories erode his existence like water entering stone.

    The four chapbooks collected in A PECULIAR FEELING OF RESTLESSNESS, three of them finalists and one of them the winner of the Rose Metal Press first annual short short chapbook contest, all revel in the succinctness of their form, the underlying tension anchored beneath each story of 1,000 words or less. These stories are peculiar; they resonate with restlessness. They are deft, they are gritty, and they are lyrical. Laughter, Applause. Laughter, Music, Applause by Kathy Fish, Wanting by Amy L. Clark, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix by Elizabeth Ellen, and The Sky Is a Well by Claudia Smith combine four multi-layered portrayals of beautiful uneasiness into a collection rich with wit, grace, and originality.

    A lonely teenage girl falls in love with an older, married neighbor. A woman attends a party at the home of her boyfriend’s ex-wife. A schoolteacher gets fired for teaching time incorrectly to grade-school students. And a young woman recovering from a breakup receives guidance from a drunk therapist. Poignant and sharply rendered, Otis’s stories seek answers to the questions of whom we love and why, how we search for love, lose it, or find it—sometimes at the last moment and in the most unlikely places. Quirky and hilarious, these stories display a knowing affection for human strangeness.

    Ranging from the 19th to the 20th centuries, writers include James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, Richard Edward Connell, Henri Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Jack London, Henri Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe.

    The wind tries first, but however hard it blows it fails to make any progress because the traveller simply buttons his coat even tighter than before. Only when the sun shines brightly does he finally remove it, and the wind roars away in a bad temper.

    There is something very familiar about Simon that brings Eleanor great peace, and Simon feels the same way. But when Eleanor's boyfriend, Abe, sees her talking to Simon, his jealousy is unleashed, and he warns her to stay away from Simon. Eleanor refuses, planning to break up with Abe - until an emergency changes her plan. But Eleanor cannot stop thinking about Simon and is shocked when he reveals a secret about their childhood years. Torn between Abe and Simon, Eleanor prays to Gott for an answer. Should she leave the possessive Abe and run to Simon?

    

    

    There's Walter, newly abandoned by his wife; there's Edith, a fiftyish virgin; there's Bunny, taking care of her mother and her mother's boyfriend; and there's Belle, whose married lover dies in the hallway wearing her dead husband Herb's pajama top. Blindly, they encounter one another in ways the reader recognizes are profound even as the characters themselves are unaware. The genius and the art in this collection derives from the possibility that these ships might actually find each other by daylight. If only these four could get together--they'd be so good for each other. "Written with an expert touch, and a wise and tender sensibility. The effect is subtle, strong, and comic."--Charles Baxter, author of BELIEVERS and BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE; "It's hard to think she is capable of writing anything that isn't immediately engaging and a joy to read. Probably someone should publish her shopping lists."--Elizabeth Berg, author of TALK BEFORE SLEEP. A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB SELECTION

    The Horrors is presented abecedarian-style, despoiling a beloved children's book tradition in order to explore personal hangups that range from the slightly awkward to the down-right terrible.Beginning with ‘A’ for ‘Adolescence,’ Demers recalls his sexless teenage years spent in a Trotskyist sect, and ‘B’ for‘Bombing’ offers a first-person account of the agonies of stand- up comedy gone wrong. ‘E’ for ‘End of the World’ exploresthe wacky world of Preppers (YouTube how-to-prepare-for- the-apocalypse experts), while ‘F’ for ‘Fat’ explains what life is like for those with both testicles and breasts. Other essays creep toward the pain side of the hilarity/agony line: ‘D’ for‘Depression’ and ‘M’ for ‘Motherlessness’ traverse topics that more balanced minds might hesitate to make light of.Fortunately, Demers does not let tact or sensibility deter him from pushing humour to its hysterical limit in orderto examine our deepest fears. With artful insight, he never minimizes the very real pain inherent in some topics and uses comedy as a catharsis rather than a numbing agent. Dark, smart and funny, in the sunny world of The Book of Awesome and The Happiness Project, The Horrors will be a shadow...or at least a shadow puppet.

    Estep follows her first novel, "Diary of An Emotional Idiot, " with a set of linked stories that glimpses two women through the eyes of the men in their lives.