The Failure Six


Shane Jones - 2010
    A young woman named Foe has lost her memory and six messengers who attempt to recite her past back to her inevitably - and creatively - fail. Parts Kafka, Lewis Carroll, and Aesop, the imagistic allegory warns that in a culture of texting, email, and Twitter, we can't forsake real conversation - or we could lose its art forever. - Interview Magazine, Dec/Jan 2010.An exquisite memento of wildly imagined scenes, odd characters, and nightmares confused with waking life, a slipstream loop where bureaucracy and hallucination are so intertwined that you’re often confused which is the most absurd. - The Brooklyn Rail, April 2010.

Coyote


Colin Winnette - 2014
    A daughter disappears in the middle of the night. What happens in the aftermath of this tragedy—after the search is abandoned, after the TV crews move on to cover the latest horrific incident—is the story of Coyote. There is a marriage and a detective. There is a storm, a talk show host, and a roasted boar. People are murdered and things are hidden. Coyotes skulk in the woods, a man stands by the fence, and a tale emerges within this familiar landscape of the violent unknown."Like a modern-day Poe, [Winnette] has fashioned a narrator whose pull on the reader’s sympathy gradually fades as she recounts the aftermath of her daughter’s mysterious disappearance….Winnette’s deeply affecting story is hard to put down and even harder to forget.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Coyote has a strong and inviting voice and that voice wraps around a dark story, a contemporary story, and one that has its own velocity and fragmentation built in. I found myself swept along in it and impacted by its delicate/bleak movement.”—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, and Willful Creatures"While there’s a contemporary urgency to Winnette’s novel, it’s the small details (and how they’re revealed) that give this story its considerable sting."—Kirkus Reviews

The Sensualist


Daniel Torday - 2012
    Jewish Studies. Winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for Outstanding Debut Fiction. Raised in Baltimore in the '90s, 17-year-old Samuel Gerson is ready to be rid of his high school baseball team, his protective upbringing, and the tight-knit Jewish community in which he's spent his whole life. But when he befriends enigmatic Dmitri Zilber, a recent Russian Jewish immigrant who is obsessed with the works of Dostoevsky, Samuel's world begins to shift. In the wake of his grandfather's suicide, as his life increasingly entangles with that of Dmitri and his beautiful sister Yelizaveta, it sets in motion a series of events that culminates in a disturbing act of violence. A quietly devastating portrait of late adolescence, THE SENSUALIST examines the culture we inherit as it collides with the one we create.I throw at you, without reservation, this adjective: masterful. This book is fast and warm, fraught and intimate--and no slouch in the funny department, either. Daniel Torday's voice is entirely his own. Baltimore is his. Dmitri Zilber is a brilliant character, and I am in love with his sister. I am constantly happy to be in their presence.--Adam Levin

A Plague of Zombies


Diana Gabaldon - 2011
    This novella, originally published as “Lord John and the Plague of Zombies,” is now available as a standalone eBook.   Lord John Grey, a lieutenant-colonel in His Majesty’s army, arrives in Jamaica with orders to quash a slave rebellion brewing in the mountains. But a much deadlier threat lies close at hand. The governor of the island is being menaced by zombies, according to a servant. Lord John has no idea what a zombie is, but it doesn’t sound good. It sounds even worse when hands smelling of grave dirt come out of the darkness to take him by the throat. Between murder in the governor’s mansion and plantations burning in the mountains, Lord John will need the wisdom of serpents and the luck of the devil to keep the island from exploding.

Little Lies


Heather Gudenkauf - 2014
    Positioned beneath a statue of Leto, the goddess of motherhood, the crime is weighted with meaning and, Ellen discovers, remarkably similar to one from a decade past.Ellen's professional duty is to protect the child, but she's not equipped to contend with a killer. As she races to connect the dots, she knows her time is running out. And the stakes are high: if she fails, another mother is sure to make the ultimate sacrifice.

What Moves the Dead


T. Kingfisher
    Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

McGlue


Ottessa Moshfegh - 2014
    That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . . : the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.Ottessa Moshfegh was awarded the 2013 Plimpton Discovery Prize for her stories in the Paris Review and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, and lives in Oakland, California.

A Bone Dead Sadness


Joe R. Lansdale - 2014
    Time was he worked homicide in Houston’s Fifth Ward, but that was years ago. Nowadays he’s living a quieter life, running a little one-man operation in LaBorde, Texas. You might think a sleepy East Texas town wouldn’t rate its own PI, but there’s just about enough to keep Hanson going. Lawyers need things looked into; suspicious wives need their husbands tailed, and vice versa; ordinary folks get interested in things the cops don’t care to pursue. Today, it’s a missing persons case. Mildred “Babe” Craver’s not long for this earth, but she wants Hanson to find her son Tom, or find out what happened to him. He was a good-for-nothing jailbird, but he was her son after all. Problem is, Tom’s been missing for twenty-five years, so it’s a stone cold trail. Whatever Hanson finds out, it’s not likely to make anyone happy. Still, there’s something to be said for knowing.This 2012 novella revisits Marvin Hanson, decades after the events of Act of Love; fans of Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series have also encountered him as the boys’ sometime-employer. At its core, A Bone Dead Sadness is a good old-fashioned locked room mystery, wrapped up in noir and tied with a Dixie-scented bow. It’s Lansdale.

We Need to Do Something


Max Booth III - 2020
    An alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM IFC MIDNIGHT, STARRING SIERRA MCCORMICK, VINESSA SHAW, AND PAT HEALY.A family on the verge of self-destruction finds themselves isolated in their bathroom during a tornado warning.Includes an introduction from Sean King O'Grady (director of the film adaptation) and a brand-new afterword from Max Booth III.

Finna


Nino Cipri - 2020
    Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but our two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago.Can friendship blossom from the ashes of a relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible.

Darkness Under the Sun


Dean Koontz - 2010
    There once was a killer who knew the night, its secrets and rhythms. How to hide within its shadows. When to hunt. He roamed from town to town, city to city, choosing his prey for their beauty and innocence. His cruelties were infinite, his humanity long since forfeit. But still . . . he had not yet discovered how to make his special mark among monsters, how to come fully alive as Death. This is the story of how he learned those things, and of what we might do to ensure that he does not visit us.

Six Earlier Days


David Levithan - 2012
    A must never get too attached, must never be noticed, must never interfere.  The novel Every Day starts on Day 5994 of A’s life. In this digital-only collection Six Earlier Days, Levithan gives readers a glimpse at a handful of the other 5993 stories yet to be told that inform how A navigates the complexities of a life lived anew each day.  In Every Day, readers discover if you can truly love someone who is destined to change every day. In Six Earlier Days, readers will discover a little bit more about how A became that someone. Fans of Levithan’s books such as Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, co-written with Rachel Cohn, and Will Grayson, Will Grayson, co-written with John Green, will not want to miss A’s adventures in Every Day and Six Earlier Days.

The Rapist


Les Edgerton - 2013
    Master storyteller Les Edgerton guides us on a haunting journey inside the criminal mind to show that no matter how depraved a person appears to be, there might still exist a spark of humanity.

The Tiny Wife


Andrew Kaufman - 2010
    The thief then leaves, and the patrons all survive, but strange things soon begin to happen to them: One survivor’s tattoo jumps off her ankle and chases her around; another wakes up to find that she’s made of candy; and Stacey Hinterland discovers that she’s shrinking, incrementally, a little every day, and nothing that her husband or son do can reverse the process. The Tiny Wife is a fable about losing yourself in circumstances and finding yourself in the the love of another.

Weird Fucks


Lynne Tillman - 2015
    Women's Studies. Art by Amy Sillman. The long out-of-print 1978 novella by the brilliant Lynne Tillman catalogs a series of encounters and relationships spanning the 60s and the 70s. Fucking is involved. So is weird, but in a way that means more than just weird. Think wyrd, like the witch sisters of Macbeth, or already feeling like a ghost, or waiting in a Victorian nightgown on Valium for two months, or knowing more about the cock of the baby alien in your bed than about his face. It's an early work, but already the sentences are classic Lynne Tillman, brutal, funny, concrete, and haunted. This is how WEIRD FUCKS should have always been, alone and beautiful and shiny in the world. The 8 full color artworks by Amy Sillman rub up against the words, and the fine detail and construction make it a pleasurably Weird Fuck to read and hold.