And in places what poetry! . . . I still haven't recovered."More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him "the Russian Dickens" to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know.These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories.Contains:-St. John's Eve-The Night Before Christmas-The Terrible Vengeance-Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt-Old World Landowners-Viy-The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich-Nevsky Prospect-The Diary of a Madman-The Nose-The Carriage-The Portrait-The Overcoat

    Often whimsical and sometimes sad, they all shine with poetry and magic.

    Among its pages are a couple who becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex…until they can’t have sex without him; a ten-year-old whose birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for “something mean”; a woman who finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart’s desire: a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed “biter” who dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker.Spanning a range of genres and topics—from the mundane to the murderous and supernatural—these are stories about sex and punishment, guilt and anger, the pleasure and terror of inflicting and experiencing pain. These stories fascinate and repel, revolt and arouse, scare and delight in equal measure. And, as a collection, they point a finger at you, daring you to feel uncomfortable—or worse, understood—as if to say, “You want this, right? You know you want this.”Bad boy --Look at your game, girl --Sardines --The night runner --The mirror, the bucket, and the old thigh bone --Cat person --The good guy --The boy in the pool --Scarred --The matchbox sign --Death wish --Biter --Acknowledgments

    In the cathedral-city of Lodellan and its uneasy hinterland, babies are fashioned from bread, dolls are given souls and wishes granted may be soon regretted. There are ghosts who dream, men whose wings have been clipped and trolls who long for something other. Love, loss and life are elegantly dissected in Slatter's earthy yet poetic prose. As Rob Shearman says in his Introduction: 'Sourdough and Other Stories manages to be grand and ambitious and worldbuilding-but also as intimate and focused as all good short fiction should be . . . The joy of Angela Slatter's book is that she's given us a set of fairy tales that are at once both new and fresh, and yet feel as old as storytelling itself.'

    For this superbly disquieting collection, he selected fourteen of his favorite tales by such authors as E.F. Benson, Rosemary Timperley, and Edith WhartonIncludes:"W.S." L.P. Hartley"Harry" Rosemary Timperley"The Corner Shop" Cynthia Asquith"In the Tube" E.F. Benson"Christmas Meeting" Rosemary Timperley"Elias and the Draug" Jonas Lie"Playmates" A.M. Burrage"Ringing the Changes" Robert Aickman"The Telephone" Mary Treadgold"The Ghost of a Hand" J. Sheridan Le Fanu"The Sweeper" A.M. Burrage"Afterward" Edith Wharton"On the Brighton Road" Richard Middleton"The Upper Berth" F. Marion Crawford

    A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away, the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation. Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed: the years after a spell is broken, the rapturous instant of a miracle unexpectedly realized, or the fate of a prince only half cured of a curse. The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother's basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans. Re-imagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.

    G. Wells, and Jules Verne to Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and William Gibson. In The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy award-winning editor John Joseph Adams delivers a diverse and vibrant collection of stories published in the previous year. Featuring writers with deep science fiction and fantasy backgrounds, along with those who are infusing traditional fiction with speculative elements, these stories uphold a longstanding tradition in both genres—looking at the world and asking, What if . . . ?  The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 includes  Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman, Karen Russell T. C. Boyle, Sofia Samatar, Jo Walton, Cat Rambo Daniel H. Wilson, Seanan McGuire, Jess Rowand others  JOE HILL, guest editor, is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2 and the short story collection 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the writer of the comic book series Locke & Key.   JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS, series editor, is the best-selling editor of more than two dozen anthologies, including Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. He is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare and is a producer of Wired’s podcast The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy.

    The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God gathers his daring and provocative short stories for the first time in English. Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Keret's stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best comic authors, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain-from a father's first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens. Bus Driver includes stories from Keret's bestselling collections in Israel, Pipelines and Missing Kissinger, as well as Keret's major new novella, "Kneller's Happy Campers," a bitingly satirical yet wistful road trip set in the afterlife for suicides.

     The Hugo Award-winning author of such groundbreaking and innovative novels as "Accelerando, Halting State," and "Saturn's Children" delivers a rich selection of speculative fiction- including a novella original to this volume- brought together for the first time in one collection, showcasing the limitless imagination of one of the twenty-first century's most daring visionaries.

    Ranging from the gothic South to the chic East Coast, from rural children to aging urban sophisticates, all the unforgettable places and people of Capote’s oeuvre are here, in stories as elegant as they are heartfelt, as haunting as they are compassionate. Reading them reminds us of the miraculous gifts of a beloved American original.

    Martin and award-winning editor Gardner Dozois is filled with subtle shades of gray. Twenty-one all-original stories, by an all-star list of contributors, will delight and astonish you in equal measure with their cunning twists and dazzling reversals. And George R.R. Martin himself offers a brand-new A Game of Thrones tale chronicling one of the biggest rogues in the entire history of Ice and Fire.Follow along with the likes of Gillian Flynn, Joe Abercrombie, Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Lynch, Cherie Priest, Garth Nix, and Connie Willis, as well as other masters of literary sleight-of-hand, in this rogues gallery of stories that will plunder your heart — and yet leave you all the richer for it.Contents:- Tough Times All Over by Joe Abercrombie (a Red Country story)- What Do You Do? (aka The Grownup) by Gillian Flynn- The Inn of the Seven Blessings by Matthew Hughes- Bent Twig by Joe R. Lansdale (a Hap and Leonard story)- Tawny Petticoats by Michael Swanwick- Provenance by David Ball- The Roaring Twenties by Carrie Vaughn- A Year and a Day in Old Theradane by Scott Lynch- Bad Brass by Bradley Denton- Heavy Metal by Cherie Priest- The Meaning of Love by Daniel Abraham- A Better Way to Die by Paul Cornell (a Jonathan Hamilton story)- Ill Seen in Tyre by Steven Saylor- A Cargo of Ivories by Garth Nix (a Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz story)- Diamonds From Tequila by Walter Jon Williams (a Dagmar story)- The Caravan to Nowhere by Phyllis Eisenstein (a Tales of Alaric the Minstrel story)- The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives by Lisa Tuttle- How the Marquis Got His Coat Back by Neil Gaiman (a Neverwhere story)- Now Showing by Connie Willis- The Lightning Tree by Patrick Rothfuss (a Kingkiller Chronicle story)- The Rogue Prince, or, A King’s Brother by George R.R. Martin (a Song of Ice and Fire story)

    LovecraftActor, journalist, devotee of Celtic Christianity and the Holy Grail legend, Welshman Arthur Machen is considered one of the fathers of weird fiction, a master of mayhem whose work has drawn comparisons to H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Readers will find the perfect introduction to his style in this new collection. With the title story, an exercise in the bizarre that leaves the reader disoriented virtually from the first page, Machen turns even fundamental truths upside down. "There have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin," explains the character Ambrose, "who all their lives have never done an 'ill deed.'"

    Acclaimed editors Simon Strantzas and Michael Kelly bring their keen editorial sensibilities to the third volume of the Year's Best Weird Fiction. The best weird stories of 2015 features work from Robert Aickman, Matthew M. Bartlett, Sadie Bruce, Nadia Bulkin, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Conn, Brian Evenson, L.S. Johnson, Rebecca Kuder, Tim Lebbon, Reggie Oliver, Lynda E. Rucker, Robert Shearman, Christopher Slatsky, D.P. Watt, Michael Wehunt, Marian Womack, Genevieve Valentine No longer the purview of esoteric readers, weird fiction is enjoying wide popularity. Chiefly derived from early 20th-century pulp fiction, its remit includes ghost stories, the strange and macabre, the supernatural, fantasy, myth, philosophical ontology, ambiguity, and a healthy helping of the outre. At its best, weird fiction is an intersecting of themes and ideas that explore and subvert the Laws of Nature. It is not confined to one genre, but is the most diverse and welcoming of all genres.

    No fairy tale will ever seem quite the same again!Featuring writing from . . .Authors: Renée Ahdieh, Ameriie, Soman Chainani, Susan Dennard, Sarah Enni, Marissa Meyer, Cindy Pon, Victoria Schwab, Samantha Shannon, Adam Silvera, Andrew Smith, April Genevieve Tucholke, and Nicola YoonBookTubers: Benjamin Alderson (Benjaminoftomes), Sasha Alsberg (abookutopia), Whitney Atkinson (WhittyNovels), Tina Burke (ChristinaReadsYA blog and TheLushables), Catriona Feeney (LittleBookOwl), Jesse George (JessetheReader), Zoë Herdt (readbyzoe), Samantha Lane (Thoughts on Tomes), Sophia Lee (thebookbasement), Raeleen Lemay (padfootandprongs07), Regan Perusse (PeruseProject), Christine Riccio (polandbananasBOOKS), and Steph Sinclair & Kat Kennedy (Cuddlebuggery blog and channel).

    . . Bradbury?You might see rockets to Mars. Or bizarre circuses where otherworldly acts whirl in the center ring. Perhaps you travel to a dystopian future, where books are set ablaze . . . or to an out-of-the-way sideshow, where animated illustrations crawl across human skin. Or maybe, suddenly, you're returned to a simpler time in small-town America, where summer perfumes the air and life is almost perfect . . . "almost."Ray Bradbury--peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors--is a literary giant whose remarkable career has spanned seven decades. Now twenty-six of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.TABLE OF CONTENTSSam Weller and Mort Castle - IntroductionRay Bradbury - Second HomecomingNeil Gaiman - The Man Who Forgot Ray BradburyMargaret Atwood - HeadlifeJay Bonansinga - HeavySam Weller - The Girl In The Funeral ParlorDavid Morrell - The CompanionsThomas F. Monteleone - The ExchangeLee Martin - Cat on a Bad CouchJoe Hill - By The Silver Water Of Lake ChamplainDan Chaon - Little AmericaJohn McNally - The Phone CallJoe Meno - Young PilgrimsRobert McCammon - Children Of The Bedtime MachineRamsey Campbell - The Page Mort Castle - LightAlice Hoffman - ConjureJohn Maclay - MaxJacqueline Mitchard - Two Of A KindGary Braunbeck - Fat Man And Little BoyBonnie Jo Campbell - The TattooAudrey Niffenegger - Backwards In SevilleCharles Yu - Earth: (A Gift Shop)Julia Keller - Hayleigh's DadDave Eggers - Who Knocks?Bayo Ojikutu - Reservation 2020Kelly Link - Two HousesHarlan Ellison - Weariness