The stories range from both urban and rural settings. All the stories included in the book are different from each other with a range of diverse characters. Some of the stories in this selection are Mukti, Kuch Yun hona Uska, Cigarette Ka Aakhri Kash, and Bisesar Bo Ki Premika. This book will make for a riveting and engaging read for those who enjoy Hindi short stories.

    A young PR man working at General Electric sold his first magazine piece. By the time he'd sold his third, he decided to quit his job and join the likes of Salinger, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and make a living as a full-time writer. That young man was Kurt Vonnegut.Bagombo Snuff Box collects Vonnegut’s favourite stories from the postwar years that sharpened his dark, vaudevillian and quietly subversive voice. Here we see the mind-bending wit and central themes of his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. A must-read for Vonnegut aficionados new and old.

    A chocoholic grizzly bear, a talking Christmas tree, mince pie overdoses and a very bloody murder. Will poor old Saint Nick make it out alive? Sad, strange, funny and gruesome, this overlapping, multi-genre collection of tales has a little something for every reader. Curl up with a mulled wine and some fictional festive misery, and discover what Father Christmas really likes to drink when he wriggles down your chimney. Spoiler: it isn’t milk.

    Standard procedure. You pick it up the first time a white friend leads you across a room just to stand you up by another Indian, arrange you like furniture, like you should have something to say to each other. As one character after another tells it in these stories, much that happens to them does so because "I'm an Indian." And, as Stephen Graham Jones tells it in one remarkable story after another, the life of an Indian in modern America is as rich in irony as it is in tradition. A noted Blackfeet writer, Jones offers a nuanced and often biting look at the lives of Native peoples from the inside. A young Indian mans journey to discover America results in an unsettling understanding of relations between whites and Natives in the twenty-first century, a relationship still fueled by mistrust, stereotypes, and almost casual violence. A character waterproofs his boots with transmission fluid; another steals into Glacier National Park to hunt. One man uses watermelon to draw flies off poached deer; another, in a modern twist on the captivity narrative, kidnaps a white girl in a pickup truck; and a son bleeds into the father carrying him home. Rife with arresting and poignant images, fleeting and daring in presentation, weighty and provocative in their messages, these stories demonstrate the power of one of the most compelling writers in Native North America today.

    "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in "Blowing Up On the Spot," a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.

    Other outlandish tales include John Wayne battling cancer using a highly alternative therapy, a gene for integrity being harvested from the brain of an unwilling donor, and the landing of Christopher Columbus in modern-day Manhattan. Included are the Locus and Nebula Award-nominated novelette Auspicious Eggs and several previously unpublished pieces.ContentsIntroduction by Michael Swanwick“Auspicious Eggs”“Come Back, Dr. Sarcophagus”“Director’s Cut”“Fucking Justice”“Isabella of Castile Answers Her Mail”“Martyrs of the Upshot Knothole”“The Cat’s Pajamas”“The Eye That Never Blinks”“The Fate of Nations”“The War of the Worldviews”“The Wisdom of the Skin”“The Zombies of Montrose”

    It has a strong female lead, and though it is aimed at adults, it can also be read by a YA audience.Fans of Ted Chiang will like this one, as well as readers who want a book they can read in one sitting.So wake up with Capsel and see what the future holds for us―you will be quite surprised indeed.-J. Shaw, Editor, Cynical Optimist PressFor fans of Ted Chiang, Blake Crouch, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Yuval Noah HarariFor fans of Science Fiction, SciFi, Strong Female Leads, Environmental Fiction, Future Worlds, Young Adult, YA, Humanity and Time Travel

    He is excited and afraid; he wants to recapture the love he knew with his parents before they died and become a doctor like his father. But in his new home of celebrities, crooks, untrustworthiness, and excessively wealthy deviants, lust and want thwart his search for selfless caring love, and in his quest to become a doctor, he discovers the altruism of health care and scientific discovery riddled with profit motivation and deficient moral standards. A finalist in the 2012 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

    Hollywood Boulevard, with its bars and used-book stores and the legendary Chinese Theater, is the psychic killing ground where Sydney must learn the rules of an old supernatural rivalry -- and choose to save either the woman he loves, or his soul.

    A Galactic dark elf. A woman who has given up her humanity to become something more. These stories and more are available in the first short story anthology for the System Apocalypse, covering year one on Earth. When the world ends, humanity steps up, finding new ways to survive in a world with Classes, magic and monsters. The anthology features exciting, new stories by five new writers and a new, never publicly released short story by Tao Wong. The System Apocalypse world was first introduced in 'Life in the North' and is a LitRPG science fiction and fantasy post-apocalyptic work that features monsters, science fiction technology, character sheets, supernatural races and ancient myths in one heady, LitRPG brew. Stories and writers featured in this anthology include: Craig Hamilton - "Hunting Monsters" has our protagonist doing what he does best. Finding those who would exploit the System and the people within. Except this time, there are even more complications than normal. Alexis Keane - "Tooth and Claw" is a heart-warming tale of friendship that knows no bounds of race or distance. Ix Phoen - "Rebel Within" tells a tale of hardship in South America, where the monsters are not always the ones outside the walls. Tao Wong – “Debts & Dances” covers the arrival of the System from the perspective of our favorite Truinnar Lord. R.K. Billiau – “Phoenix Rising” covers an unconventional hero, one whose mind is slipping from him before the apocalypse. Will the apocalypse be his salvation? Or doom? L.A. Batt - “Overture to Obliteration” brings us to far-off New Zealand to glimpse the wreckage the System has wrought.

    The character sketches in this collection are not only tales in the old mould, but also have the magical quality that touches upon the very essence of Life. The characters are genuinely Marathi in nature, and they have been drawn with the ease with which dawn turns into day or a bud blossoms into a flower. With innocence, Vyankatesh Madgulkar tells us about the poverty-stricken lives of the people of Mandesh and their saga of never-ending sorrows. Their tragedy is moving. The mind is filled with the thought that while men seek some happiness, their lives were never scripted to find it. This essential tragic fact is told by Madgulkar with the detachment of an artist. This renders his characters unforgettable. Our mind is disturbed every time we think of them.

    But Commonwealth operative Simon Kovalic knows nothing ever goes to plan. So, when a duplicitous bounty hunter lives up to his reputation, Kovalic’s ready—just maybe not ready enough.Now he and his team must get offworld, before their enemies catch up with them…

    Oscar Milke and other settlers are rejoicing in the land they’ve claimed and have plans for its future. However, they soon discover that it’s occupied by two outlaw brothers who declare the land theirs. The dispute sets in motion a violent series of events that will end in a deadly clash.

    Understanding that history is nothing but a fable purged of grit and grime, Ruland transforms historical fiction into something slick, brutal and weird. Whether he's spinning a lurid yarn about the previous adventures of Popeye, imagining Dick Tracy as a San Fernando Valley police detective, or retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood in Nazi Germany, Ruland's tales are full of crime and punishment. He isn't afraid to set a teenage mob story in St. Petersburg, Florida, or tell the story of an unlucky pair of pants in the style of a catechism--and every line resonates with the truth of lessons learned the hard way.

     After first contact, which had not ended as the Earthlings expected, all traces of the visitors were lost in space, seemingly forever. But soon after, scientists noticed a mysterious gravitational anomaly not far from the Solar System as it journeyed around the centre of the Milky Way. To find out more, and perhaps discover the aliens’ secret, a research expedition fitted out with state-of-the-art scientific and military equipment sets out...