P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's model" - was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, while "Proboscis" was nominated for an International Horror Guild award and reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 19. In addition to his previously published work, this collection contains an original story.

    Victor D. LaValle's astonishing, violent, and funny debut offers harrowing glimpses at the vulnerable lives of young people who struggle not only to come of age, but to survive the city streets.In "ancient history," two best friends graduating from high school fight to be the one to leave first for a better world; each one wants to be the fortunate son. In "pops," an African-American boy meets his father, a white cop from Connecticut, and tries not to care. And in "kids on colden street," a boy is momentarily uplifted by the arrival of a younger sister only to discover that brutality leads only to brutality in the natural order of things.Written with raw candor, grit, and a cautious heart, slapboxing with jesus introduces an exciting and bold new craftsman of contemporary fiction. LaValle's voices echo long after their stories are told.

    A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. In the ice and snows of Siberia an office employee from Birmingham witnesses a scene that will change her life. At a jubilee celebration in a northern English town a middle-aged alderman opens his heart to Queen Victoria. A teenage daughter leaves home in search of adventure. High in the Cumbrian fells a woman seeks help from her father’s enemy.Spare, precise, charged with a prickly wit, the stories in Carys Davies's sparkling second collection remind us how little we know of the lives of others.

    Her stories are revered by some of the best American writers of our day, but until now there has been no stand-alone collection of her short fiction.Wait Till You See Me Dance consists of several extraordinary longer stories as well as a selection of intoxicating very short stories. In the chilling “The First Full Thought of Her Life,” a shooter gets in position while a young girl climbs a sand dune. In “Voltaire Night,” students compete to tell a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. In “Stay Where You Are,” two oblivious travelers in Central America are kidnapped by a gunman they assume to be an insurgent—but the gunman has his own problems.An Unferth story lures you in with a voice that seems amiable and lighthearted, but it swerves in sudden and surprising ways that reveal, in terrifying clarity, the rage, despair, and profound mournfulness that have taken up residence at the heart of the American dream. These stories often take place in an exaggerated or heightened reality, a quality that is reminiscent of the work of Donald Barthelme, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders, but in Unferth’s unforgettable collection she carves out territory that is entirely her own.

    Dick has written some of the most intriguing, original and thought-provoking fiction of our time. This collection includes stories that will make you laugh, cringe...and stop and think.The Minority Report: a special unit that employs those with the power of precognition to prevent crimes proves itself less than reliable...We Can Remember It For You Wholesale: an everyguy's yearning for more exciting "memories" places him in a danger he never could have imagined (basis of the feature film Total Recall)...Paycheck: a mechanic who has no memory of the previous two years of his life finds that a bag of seemingly worthless and unrelated objects can actually unlock the secret of his recent past — and insure that he has a future...Second Variety: the UN's technological advances to win a global war veer out of control, threatening to destroy all of humankind (basis of the movie Screamers)...The Eyes Have It: a whimsical, laugh-out-loud play on the words of the title.

    In the extraordinary "Why China?" a man drags his family to the Xi'an province in a desperate attempt to reclaim his lost integrity, only to find himself more remote and mysterious than the place where his journey led. In settings as exotic as Kenya and Bora Bora, as glamorous as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois, Egan's characters—models, housewives, schoolgirls—seek transformation of the body and spirit, and transcendence of the borders of desire.

    Gillett, Ph.D.• The Efficiency Expert by W. R. Thompson• Second Helpings by George R. R. Martin• Random Sample by Heidi Heyer• On Gaming by Dana Lombardy• Siblings by Larry Powell• Diabetes and Rockets by G. Harry Stine• Béisbol by Ben Bova• The Darkling Plain by P. M. Fergusson• Biolog: P. M. Fergusson by Jay Kay Klein• The Reference Library by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Artifact by Gregory Benford by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Cuckoo's Egg by C. J. Cherryh by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Skinner by Richard S. McEnroe by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Blood Music by Greg Bear by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: A Coming of Age by Timothy Zahn by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Trumps of Doom by Roger Zelazny by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: The Fall of Winter by Jack C. Haldeman, II by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: The Time Travelers; A Science Fiction Quartet by Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: The Hugo Winners, 1976-1979 by Isaac Asimov by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Young Extraterrestrials by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Second Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: The Future of Flight by Dean Ing and Leik Myrabo by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Out of the Cradle: Exploring the Frontiers Beyond Earth by William K. Hartmann and Pamela Lee and Ron Miller by Thomas A. Easton • Brass Tacks by Stanley Schmidt• Analog: A Calendar of Upcoming Events by Anthony R. Lewis

    People who are perhaps ourselves, searching, often in the wrong places, for something meaningful, or real, or at least, for a moment, right. Here are couples like Vincent and Laurie, who after beginning an ill-timed relationship, escape for a weekend at the beach, where they confront their inevitable separation. There is also Olive, a recovering drug addict, sent on a mission to help her nephew, who finds herself in an illicit relationship with both him and his problems. And a young boy nicknamed Flipper, sequestered for a summer at a “fat” camp, who finds unexpected comfort in the company and forbidden gifts of a pregnant teenager. In these stories, Canty demonstrates both deep understanding and a powerful grasp of language and continues to set himself apart as a master of the short story.

    Showing us the war as we have never seen it before, here is a world not only of soldiers and assassins, hostages and car bombers, refugees and terrorists, but also of madmen and prophets, angels and djinni, sorcerers and spirits. Blending shocking realism with flights of fantasy, The Corpse Exhibition offers us a pageant of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib and as difficult to look away from, but shot through with a gallows humor that yields an unflinching comedy of the macabre. Gripping and hallucinatory, this is a new kind of storytelling forged in the crucible of war.

    It was praised by the New York Times as "a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation."In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning to end: the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and confusing period of "living" where we understand what is expected of us and struggle to do it; and the death-y period toward the end where we sense it is ending and will end only partially understood, at best.The title is taken from one of the stories ("Intimation"), but is also a play on Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality"—only in this case it’s not clear exactly what is being intimated, but it’s nothing so gleaming and good as Immortality. The middle, "Living" section of the book, is fleshed out with a set of stories that borrow more from traditional realist fiction to illustrate the inner lives of the characters.At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance as its characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving a house-party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real blood.Elegant, surprising, wondrous, and haunting, Intimations is an utterly transporting collection from one of our most ingenious and brilliant young writers.

    From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beams’s landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her characters’ desires stretch the limits of reality. Ing énues at a boarding school bind themselves to their headmaster’s vision of perfection ; a nineteenth-century landscape architect embarks on his first major project, but finds the terrain of class and power intractable ; a bride glimpses her husband’s past when she wears his World War II parachute as a gown ; and a teacher comes undone in front of her astonished fifth graders.As they capture the strangeness of being human, the stories in We Show What We Have Learned reveal Clare Beams’s rare and capacious imagination—and yet they are grounded in emotional complexity, illuminating the ways we attempt to transform ourselves, our surroundings, and each other.

    Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Donald's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.

    A female sheriff in a flooded town attempts to cover up a murder. When a farmer harvesting a field accidentally runs over his son, his grief sets him off walking, mile after mile. A band of teens bent on destruction runs amok in a deserted town at night. As these men and women lash out at the inscrutable churn of the world around them, they find a grim measure of peace in their solitude.Throughout Volt, Alan Heathcock's stark realism is leavened by a lyric energy that matches the brutality of the surface. And as you move through the wind-lashed landscape of these stories, faint signs of hope appear underfoot. In Volt, the work of a writer who's hell-bent on wrenching out whatever beauty this savage world has to offer, Heathcock's tales of lives set afire light up the sky like signal flares touched off in a moment of desperation.

    Revisions from the author's notes are included, allowing a deeper view into her world and a better understanding of her work. The Nebula Award–winning short story Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death, the Hugo Award–winning novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In, and the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novella Houston, Houston, Do You Read? are included.The stories of Alice Sheldon, who wrote as James Tiptree Jr. ( Up the Walls of the World ) until her death in 1987, have been heretofore available mostly in out-of-print collections. Thus the 18 accomplished stories here will be welcomed by new readers and old fans. ''The Screwfly Solution'' describes a chilling, elegant answer to the population problem. In ''Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death,'' the title tells the tale--species survival insured by imprinted drives--but the story's force is in its exquisite, lyrical prose and its suggestion that personal uniqueness is possible even within biological imperatives. ''The Girl Who Was Plugged In'' is a future boy-meets-girl story with a twist unexpected by the players. ''The Women Men Don't See '' displays Tiptree's keen insight and ability to depict singularity within the ordinary. In Hugo and Nebula award-winning ''Houston, Houston, Do You Read?'' astronauts flying by the sun slip forward 500 years and encounter a culture that successfully questions gender roles in ours.ContentsIntroduction by Michael SwanwickThe Last Flight of Doctor Ain (1969)The Screwfly Solution (1977)And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side (1972)The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1973)The Man Who Walked Home (1972)And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways (1972)The Women Men Don’t See (1973)Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light! (1976)Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976)With Delicate Mad Hands (1981)A Momentary Taste of Being (1975)We Who Stole the Dream (1978)Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974)Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death (1973)On the Last Afternoon (1972)She Waits for All Men Born (1976)Slow Music (1980)And So On, and So On (1971)

    These are some of the inhabitants of People From My Neighborhood. In their lives, details of the local and everyday—the lunch menu at a tiny drinking place called the Love, the color and shape of the roof of the tax office—slip into accounts of duels, prophetic dreams, revolutions, and visitations from ghosts and gods. In twenty-six “palm of the hand” stories—fictions small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand—Hiromi Kawakami creates a universe ruled by mystery and transformation.