Through the lens of Link's vivid imagination, nothing is what it seems, and everything deserves a second look. From the multiple award-winning The Faery Handbag, in which a teenager's grandmother carries an entire village (or is it a man-eating dog?) in her handbag, to the near-future of The Surfer, whose narrator (a soccer-playing skeptic) waits with a planeload of refugees for the aliens to arrive, Link's stories are funny and full of unexpected insights and skewed perspectives on the world. Her fans range from Michael Chabon to Peter Buck of R.E.M. to Holly Black of Spiderwick Chronicles fame. Now teens can have their world rocked, too!

     Over the past few thousand years, Fabio has come to hate his job. As Fate, he's in charge of assigning the fortunes and misfortunes that befall most of the human race-the 83% who keep screwing things up. Frustrated with his endless parade of drug addicts and career politicians, Fate has to watch Destiny guide her people to Nobel Peace Prizes and Super Bowl MVPs. To make matters worse, he has a five- hundred-year-old feud with Death, and his best friends are Sloth and Gluttony. And worst of all? He's fallen in love with a human. Getting involved with a human breaks Rule #1, and about ten others, setting off some cosmic-sized repercussions that could strip him of his immortality-or lead to a fate worse than death.

    The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man's dominance over the natural world. The mountain paradise of 'Monte Verità' promises immortality, but at a terrible price; a neglected wife haunts her husband in the form of an apple tree; a professional photographer steps out from behind the camera and into his subject's life; a date with a cinema usherette leads to a walk in the cemetery; and a jealous father finds a remedy when three's a crowd . . .

     Suspenseful, surprising, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous-these all-new stories will ensure that readers never think of vampires (or birthdays) in quite the same way again. In New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris's "Dracula Night," Sookie Stackhouse is the only human at the annual commemoration of Dracula's birth. But this year, the Prince of Darkness actually shows up-and finds Sookie to be a tasty-looking present. New York Times bestselling author Jim Butcher's crime-solving wizard Harry Dresden, of the Dresden Files novels, heads to a role-playing party to give his vampire brother a birthday present in "It's My Birthday Too," only to discover there are some bloodthirsty party crashers who don't share their brotherly love. In "Twilight," Cassandra DuCharme, who appeared in New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong's Dime Store Magic, knows she has to kill to live as a vampire another year-but finds herself disturbingly disinterested in the hunt. Plus ten more bloody good birthday stories that take the cake.Contents xi • Preface: A Few Words (Many Bloody Returns) • (2007) • essay by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner1 • Dracula Night • [Sookie Stackhouse 4.3] • shortstory by Charlaine Harris21 • The Mournful Cry of Owls • novelette by Christopher Golden50 • I Was a Teenage Vampire • novelette by Bill Crider73 • Twilight • [Women of the Otherworld Short Fiction 7.2] • novelette by Kelley Armstrong100 • It's My Birthday, Too • [The Dresden Files 9.2] • novella by Jim Butcher146 • Grave-Robbed • [Vampire Files] • novelette by P. N. Elrod176 • The First Day of the Rest of Your Life • [The Morganville Vampires: Extras 2.5] • novelette by Rachel Caine201 • The Witch and the Wicked • novelette by Jeanne C. Stein230 • Blood Wrapped • [Henry Fitzroy] • novelette by Tanya Huff254 • The Wish • shortstory by Carolyn Haines265 • Fire Ice and Linguini for Two • [Garnet Lacey 2.5] • novelette by Lyda Morehouse [as by Tate Hallaway ]290 • Vampire Hours • novelette by Elaine Viets318 • How Stella Got Her Grave Back • novelette by Toni L. P. Kelner

    She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945.... Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town.... Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot-tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing....John Finney is locked in a basement that's stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead....The past isn't dead. It isn't even past...

    Exploring natural phenomena and the origins of the universe, these beloved tales relate complex scientific concepts to our common sensory, emotional, human world.Now, The Complete Cosmicomics brings together all of the cosmicomic stories for the first time. Containing works previously published in Cosmicomics, t zero, and Numbers in the Dark, this single volume also includes seven previously uncollected stories, four of which have never been published in translation in the United States. This “complete and definitive collection” (Evening Standard) reconfirms the cosmicomics as a crowning literary achievement and makes them available to new generations of readers.

    Elrod, Caitlin Kittredge, Marjorie M. Liu, Katie MacAlister, Lilith Saintcrow & Ronda Thompson.What newly married couple doesn't dream of a romantic retreat where they can escape the world for a while — but what happens when supernatural forces intrude on their wedded bliss? Nine of today’s hottest paranormal authors answer that question in this all-star collection of supernatural stories. Can a vampire-hunter enjoy her honeymoon after learning that her new hubby is a werewolf? How can newlyweds focus on their wedding night when their honeymoon suite is haunted by feuding ghosts? And what’s a wizard to do when a gruesome monster kidnaps the bride on her way home from the wedding? With so much otherworldly mayhem awaiting our newlyweds, will they ever get around to the honeymoon itself? Find out in...My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon.Contents:Stalked / Kelley Armstrong --Heorot / Jim Butcher --Roman holiday, or SPQ-arrrrrr / Rachel Caine --Her mother's daughter / P.N. Elrod --Newlydeads / Caitlin Kittredge --Where the heart lives / Marjorie M. Liu --Cat got your tongue? / Katie MacAlister --Half of being married / Lilith Saintcrow --A wulf in groom's clothing / Ronda Thompson.

    In his singular universe, televisions talk (and sometimes sing), animals live in small apartments where their nephews visit from the sea, and men and women and boys and girls fall down wells and fly through space and find love on Ferris wheels. In a voice full of fable, myth, and dream, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day draws us into a world of delightfully wicked recognitions, and introduces us to a writer of uncommon talent and imagination.Contains 40 stories, including "The Duck," "The Man and the Moose," and "Death and the Fruits of the Tree," as heard on NPR's This American Life, "The Book," as heard on Selected Shorts, and "The TV," as found in The New Yorker.A selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and the Starbucks Coffee Bookish Reading Club.Winner of the 2011 Nobbie Award for Best Book of the Year."This guy can write!" –Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451

    He believes it is every gull's right to fly, to reach the ultimate freedom of challenge and discovery, finding his greatest reward in teaching younger gulls the joy of flight and the power of dreams. The special 20th anniversary release of this spiritual classic!

    Offered by her noble family to the Church at the age of eight, she lived for years in forced silence. But through the study of books and herbs, through music and the kinship of her church sisters, Hildegard found her way from a life of submission to a calling that celebrated the divine mother and the glories all around us. In this brilliantly researched and insightful novel, Mary Sharratt offers a deeply moving portrait of a woman willing to risk everything for what she believed, a triumphant exploration of the life she might well have lived.

    Anderson, and Rob Thurman—nothing is as simple as black and white, light and dark, good and evil..Unfortunately, that’s exactly what makes it so easy to cross the line.In #1 New York Times bestselling author Jim Butcher’s Cold Case, Molly Carpenter—Harry Dresden’s apprentice-turned-Winter Lady—must collect a tribute from a remote Fae colony and discovers that even if you’re a good girl, sometimes you have to be bad...New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire’s Sleepover finds half-succubus Elsie Harrington kidnapped by a group of desperate teenage boys. Not for anything “weird.” They just need her to rescue a little girl from the boogeyman. No biggie.In New York Times bestselling Kevin J. Anderson’s Eye of Newt, Zombie P.I. Dan Shamble’s latest client is a panicky lizard missing an eye who thinks someone wants him dead. But the truth is that someone only wants him for a very special dinner...And New York Times bestselling author Rob Thurman’s infernally heroic Caliban Leandros takes a trip down memory lane as he deals wih some overdue—and nightmarish—vengeance involving some quite nasty Impossible Monsters .ALSO INCLUDES STORIES BYTanya Huff * Kat Richardson * Jim C. Hines * Anton Strout * Lucy A. Snyder * Kristine Kathryn Rusch * Erik Scott de Bie *From the Trade Paperback edition.

    So when the bishop calls her to be homemaking counselor, she knows that it's either a joke- or inspiration. Welcome to the Paradise Vue Ward, with stained glass windows so blindingly bright, the congregation has to wear shades. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll keep wondering how the author found out about all the wackiest people in your ward. Surely the funniest Mormon novel ever published. By the end you may discover it's also the best.

    It begins with the Day the Battle of Waterloo was fought and ends at the closing of the 19th Century. Its cast includes Actors, Kings, Sailors, Artists, etc. It is filled with romance.

    Since the police aren’t too worried about dogs they assume have run away, Oberon knows it’s up to him to track down those hounds and reunite them with their humans. For justice! And gravy!Engaging the services of his faithful Druid, Oberon must travel throughout Oregon and Washington to question a man with a huge salami, thwart the plans of diabolical squirrels, and avoid, at all costs, a fight with a great big bear.But if he’s going to solve the case of the Purloined Poodle, Oberon will have to recruit the help of a Boston terrier named Starbuck, survive the vegetables in a hipster pot pie, and firmly refuse to be distracted by fire hydrants and rabbits hiding in the rose bushes.At the end of the day, will it be a sad bowl of dry kibble for the world’s finest hound detective, or will everything be coming up sirloins?

    As the drive-time radio host for seventeen years and also the voice of his sports commentator, Jim Shorts, and other characters, Matthews entertained ten million listeners weekly, sold out every appearance in the Midwest, and performed in front of 65,000 fans at Grant Park. He traveled around the world, met the famous, had babies named after him, and helped countless charities. He entertained hundreds of thousands of people inside prisons, army bases, and backyards. His promotions included comedy jams, a band, barbeque throw downs, and golf outings.Broken Mary is Matthews' story of his early years in radio and stand-up comedy, his successful career, his struggle with MS, his awakening to the dignity of women, and, importantly, his chance encounter with a broken statue of Mary left next to a dumpster and all that happened as a result. Told with Matthews' signature good humor, this confession of the brokenness of mankind is touchingly honest, personally inspiring, and full of hope.