2011 Whiting Writers' Award WinnerThe debut collection of ten short stories from Ryan Call, including stories originally published in Keyhole, The Lifted Brow, Lo-Ball, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, Hobart and Web Conjunctions.

    Whether through the falsified historical record of the uniquely weird Swedish creature known as the “Pyret” or the title story, “Jagannath,” about a biological ark in the far future, Tidbeck’s unique imagination will enthrall, amuse, and unsettle you. How else to describe a collection that includes “Cloudberry Jam,” a story that opens with the line “I made you in a tin can”? Marvels, quirky character studies, and outright surreal monstrosities await you in what is likely to be one of the most talked-about short story collections of the year.Tidbeck is a rising star in her native country, having published a collection there in Swedish, won a prestigious literary grant, and just sold her first novel to Sweden’s largest publisher. A graduate of the iconic Clarion Writer’s Workshop at the University of California, San Diego, in 2010, her publication history includes Weird Tales, Shimmer Magazine, Unstuck Annual and the anthology Odd.

    When light destroys shadows, darkness does not gain in density elsewhere. When shadows steal over earth and across the sky, darkness is not diluted. Featuring an Introduction by Aliette De Bodard, Conservation of Shadows features a selection of short stories from Yoon Ha Lee.Content"Ghostweight" (2011)"The Shadow Postulates" (2007)"The Bones of Giants" (2009)"Between Two Dragons" (2010)"Swanwatch" (2009)"Effigy Nights" (2013)"Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" (2010)"Iseul's Lexicon" (2013)"Counting the Shapes" (2001)"Blue Ink" (2008)"The Battle of Candle Arc" (2012) "A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" (2011)"The Unstrung Zither" (2009) "The Black Abacus" (2002)"The Book of Locked Doors" (2012)"Conservation of Shadows" (2012)

    So they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn't happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker's brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection Why Visit America.The book opens with a seemingly traditional story in which the speculative element is extremely minimal--the narrator has a job that doesn't actually exist--a story that wouldn't seem much out of place in a collection of literary realism. From there the stories get progressively stranger: a young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition--from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child--her own--from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory--his entire life--is wiped clean.As the book moves from universe to universe, the stories cross between different American genres: from bildungsroman to rom com, western to dystopian, including fantasy, horror, erotica, and a noir detective mystery. Read together, these parallel-universe stories create a composite portrait of the true nature of the United States and a Through the Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.

    Cassidy, the best-selling author of Spilt Milk: A Collection of Stories, continues the story of some of the characters that first appeared in Spilt Milk. Everyone believes in their own version of reality. Will the past deeds of Caleb, Joy, and George come back to haunt them? Discover realities on the spectrum between normal and fantasy. Earlier experiences shape the present and future. Choices change lives. • Can a murderer decide to stop killing? • Can a woman regain the confidence she had in her twenties? • Can a lonely man find the perfect companion? Welcome to the world of Curious Reality. Are any of your realities curious?

    A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions with their religious neighbors quickly escalate. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband. Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope, each one drilling toward its characters’ darkest emotional centers. In muscularly robust prose, with an unfailing eye for human drives and frailties, Chris Dennis captures the raw need, desire, cruelty, and promise that animate our lives.

    “Never go in, miss. Never say a prayer at its door. If you are angry, do not seek revenge by the Laughing Maiden stone or at the threshold of the Tombs. There be those who listen for oaths and vows….What may be said in innocence becomes flesh and blood in such places.”She was born Iris Catherine Villiers. She became Isis.From childhood until her sixteenth year, Iris Villiers wandered the stone-hedged gardens and the steep cliffs along the coast of Cornwall near her ancestral home. Surrounded by the stern judgments of her grandfather—the Gray Minister—and the taunts of her cruel governess, Iris finds solace in her beloved older brother who has always protected her. But when a tragic accident occurs from the ledge of an open window, Iris discovers that she possesses the ability to speak to the dead...Be careful what you wish for…it just may find you.

    But now jealousies and betrayals threaten to destroy them both.

    Delaney, Barbara Gowdy, and others. 15,000 first printing.

    . . . Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty. . . . his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart” (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World).From the eBook edition.

    A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon--until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won't come out of the fitting room--and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband's features are beginning to slide around his face--to match her own.In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien--and, through it, find a way to liberation. The English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearlessly inventive young writers.

    The titular story revolves around an aging English professor who, mourning the loss of his wife, robs other people's homes of their sentimental knick-knacks. In "Free Ham," a young dropout wins a ham after her house burns down and refuses to accept it. “Has my ham done anything wrong?” she asks when the grocery store manager demands that she claim it. In "Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph," a failed commercial writer moves into the basement of a convent and inadvertently discovers the secrets of the Sisters of Saint Joseph. A girl, hoping to talk her brother out of enlisting in the army, brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner in the quiet, dreamy "North Of." In “The Idea of Marcel,” Emily, a conservative, elegant girl, has dinner with the idea of her ex-boyfriend, Marcel. In a night filled with baffling coincidences, including Marcel having dinner with his idea of Emily, she wonders why we tend to be more in love with ideas than with reality. In and out of the rooms of these gritty, whimsical stories roam troubled, funny people struggling to reconcile their circumstances to some kind of American Ideal and failing, over and over.  The stories of Safe as Houses are magical and original and help answer such universal and existential questions as: How far will we go to stay loyal to our friends? Can we love a man even though he is inches shorter than our ideal? Why doesn’t Bob Dylan ever have his own smokes? And are there patron saints for everything, even lost socks and bad movies? All homes are not shelters. But then again, some are. Welcome to the home of Marie-Helene Bertino.

    Here are the pitch-perfect prose, indelible characterizations, and deep empathy for which he has been highly acclaimed. Here also is a satirical streak that depicts individuals at uncanny and all-too-familiar turning points in their lives. The alienated find sanctuary in "The Safehouse," their histories and diagnoses written like endless ads on their T-shirts. In "Andy Comes Back," a man awakens after a five-year coma, only to flee his home. In "The Eyes of the Soul," perpetual televised beauty replaces the derelict view from a suburban picture window. In "Finesse," a dictator holds his surgeon’s family hostage to the outcome of a risky operation. These sixteen stories move from unspeakable sadness through moments of exquisitely distilled happiness.

    In one, a 19th-century minister follows ghostly instructions to build a mechanical messiah. In another, a tyrannical army commander watches his apocalyptic command slip away as the memories of his men begin to fade and fail. Elsewhere, murders are indexed, new worlds are mapped, fairy tales are fractured and retold and then fractured again.Throughout these thirteen stories, Bell's careful prose burrows at the foundations of his characters' lives until they topple over, then painstakingly pores over the wreckage for what rubbled humanity might yet remain to be found.

    In this collection he explores the dark depths of the human condition, offering tales of death, disaster and - just occasionally - redemption.