He couldn’t help himself; he was going for a ride with aliens from outer space! The aliens wouldn’t tell him where he was going, how long he would be gone, or if he was ever coming back, but a space trip sounded like more fun than beer and burgers at Benny’s Been There and Done That Bar and Grill. He had to go. “A BRILLIANT NOVEL!” says Melanie Tighe, reviewer for The CitySunTimes, Phoenix, Arizona Larry’s ride into deep space wasn’t just a Sunday jaunt. This space-faring species was in danger of being wiped off the galactic map. They offered Larry a ride because his assistance was vital to their survival, but they were xenophobic to the point of barely tolerating Larry in the same room. He was willing to help, but what could he do? Could he live long enough to save himself? What skills did Larry have to save an alien species threatened with annihilation? Every time he asked them for information, they stonewalled him.

    There were now four distinct variations of humanity roaming the earth - six, if you counted the undead.It had been suggested that there really should have been a new word to describe "the end of everything forever," but most people had stopped noticing, much less caring, after the tally hit double digits. Not to mention the failure of "forever" in living up to its potential.The last apocalypse wasn't even considered a cataclysm by most major governments.It was just a Thursday.Exponential Apocalypse is the tender, heart-stirring tale of crappy jobs, a slacker cult, an alcoholic Aztec god, reconstituted world leaders, werewolves, robots, and the shenanigans of multiple persons living after the twentieth-aught end of the world. Fast-paced, frenetic, funny, and frequently fond of other f-words, Exponential Apocalypse is the only book that will have you looking forward to the end of the world.

    Stop that espresso! Annie Talbot's coffeepot has been turned upside down when her cafe is declared a front for a money laundering scheme and the FBI suspects she is the mastermind. So now her sexy new tenant, Special Agent Fisher McCoy, is sifting through her coffee grounds looking for the real culprit while trying to keep his hands off the delightful Annie. Marriage-phobic Annie is doing her best to ignore FBI hottie Fisher, but he is so distracting, her lattes are steaming over and she's thinking crazy thoughts like marriage and happily ever after.

    and Mrs. Fang called it art.Their children called it mischief.Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist’s work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents’ madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents’ strange world.When the lives they’ve built come crashing down, brother and sister have nowhere to go but home, where they discover that Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance -– their magnum opus -– whether the kids agree to participate or not. Soon, ambition breeds conflict, bringing the Fangs to face the difficult decision about what’s ultimately more important: their family or their art.

    In “Girl on Girl,” a high school freshman goes to disturbing lengths to help an old friend. An insatiable temptress pursues the one man she can’t have in “Meteorologist Dave Santana.” And in the title story, a long fraught friendship comes undone when three buddies get impossibly lost on a lake it is impossible to get lost on. In Diane Cook’s perilous worlds, the quotidian surface conceals an unexpected surreality that illuminates different facets of our curious, troubling, and bewildering behavior.Other stories explore situations pulled directly from the wild, imposing on human lives the danger, tension, and precariousness of the natural world: a pack of not-needed boys take refuge in a murky forest and compete against each other for their next meal; an alpha male is pursued through city streets by murderous rivals and desirous women; helpless newborns are snatched by a man who stalks them from their suburban yards. Through these characters Cook asks: What is at the root of our most heartless, selfish impulses? Why are people drawn together in such messy, complicated, needful ways? When the unexpected intrudes upon the routine, what do we discover about ourselves? As entertaining as it is dangerous, this accomplished collection explores the boundary between the wild and the civilized, where nature acts as a catalyst for human drama and lays bare our vulnerabilities, fears, and desires.

    Two childhood friends from Scotland and two illegitimate half-brothers from the American South suffer and enjoy all manner of bizarre experiences which, as it turns out, are somehow interconnected and, surprisingly enough, meaningful. An eclectic cast of characters includes Carl Jung, Fatty Arbuckle, Virgil, Marat, Socrates, and Tony Randall. Love, greed, hope, revenge, organized religion, and Hollywood are alternately tickled and throttled. Impossible to summarize and impossible to stop reading, this is a romantic comic odyssey that actually delivers and rewards.

    Lavery comes a collection of darkly mischievous stories based on classic fairy tales. Adapted from his beloved "Children's Stories Made Horrific" series, The Merry Spinster takes up the trademark wit that endeared Lavery to readers of both The Toast and his best-selling debut Texts from Jane Eyre. The feature become among the most popular on the site, with each entry bringing in tens of thousands of views, as the stories proved a perfect vehicle for Lavery’s eye for deconstruction and destabilization. Sinister and inviting, familiar and alien all at the same time, The Merry Spinster updates traditional children's stories and fairy tales with elements of psychological horror, emotional clarity, and a keen sense of feminist mischief.Readers of The Toast will instantly recognize Lavery's boisterous good humor and uber-nerd swagger: those new to Lavery's oeuvre will delight in his unique spin on fiction, where something a bit mischievous and unsettling is always at work just beneath the surface.Unfalteringly faithful to its beloved source material, The Merry Spinster also illuminates the unsuspected, and frequently, alarming emotional complexities at play in the stories we tell ourselves, and each other, as we tuck ourselves in for the night.Bedtime will never be the same.The daughter cells --The thankless child --Fear not: an incident log --The six boy-coffins --The rabbit --The merry spinster --The wedding party --Some of us had been threatening our friend Mr.Toad --Cast your bread upon the waters --The frog's princess --Good fences make good neighbors

    There, a bore is "a person who talks when you wish him to listen," and happiness is "an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another." This is the most comprehensive, authoritative edition ever of Ambrose Bierce’s satiric masterpiece. It renders obsolete all other versions that have appeared in the book’s ninety-year history.A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth.This new edition is based on David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi’s exhaustive investigation into the book’s writing and publishing history. All of Bierce’s known satiric definitions are here, including previously uncollected, unpublished, and alternative entries. Definitions dropped from previous editions have been restored while nearly two hundred wrongly attributed to Bierce have been excised. For dedicated Bierce readers, an introduction and notes are also included.Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a classic that stands alongside the best work of satirists such as Twain, Mencken, and Thurber. This unabridged edition will be celebrated by humor fans and word lovers everywhere.

    But when his ex-partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker embarks on an odyssey that leads him to the heart of organized crime; to an old black woman who dwells by a Louisiana swamp and hears the voices of the dead; to cellars of torture and murder; and to a serial killer unlike any other, an artist who uses the human body as his canvas and takes faces as his prize, the killer known only as the Traveling Man.DARK HOLLOWHaunted by the murder of his wife and daughter, former New York police detective Charlie Parker retreats home to Scarborough, Maine, to rebuild his shattered life. But his return awakens old ghosts, drawing him into the manhunt for the killer of yet another mother and child. The obvious suspect is the young woman's violent ex-husband. But there is another possibility—a mythical figure who lurks deep in the dark hollow of Parker's own past, a figure that has haunted his family for generations: the monster known as Caleb Kyle.... THE KILLING KINDWhen the discovery of a mass grave in northern Maine reveals the grim truth behind the disappearance of a religious community, Charlie Parker is drawn into vicious conflict with a group of zealots intent on tracking down a relic that could link them to the slaughter. Haunted by the ghost of a small boy and tormented by the demonic killer known as Mr. Pudd, Parker is forced to fight for his lover, his friends...and his very soul.

    But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces--which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades. Where'd You Go Bernadette is an ingenious and unabashedly entertaining novel about a family coming to terms with who they are and the power of a daughter's love for her mother.

    A man not above faking his own death to sell more records, this is his not quite true story of romance, recidivism, country music, and an unshakeable belief in Marriage at First Sight.

     But when Wilson takes an intense interest in Oliver's writing and his genre stories of dragons, aliens, and spies, things get weird. Oliver’s stories don’t just need to be finished: they insist on it. With the help of Minerva, Wilson’s girlfriend, Oliver has to find the connection between reality, fiction, the mythical Cydonian Kingdom, and the non-mythical nightclub called M Pallas. That is, if he can survive the alien invasion, the ghosts, and the fact that he thinks he might be in love with Minerva. Unfiction is a wild ride through the collision of science fiction, fantasy, thriller, horror and romance. It's what happens when one writer's fiction interferes with everyone's reality. Unfiction is the latest novel from Gene Doucette, the bestselling author of The Spaceship Next Door.

    She's not put off by his pedantic corrections of her writing, despite the slow reveal that he is less than perfect himself.'The Unsuspecting Gold-digger' -- a woman gradually poisons her husband so that she doesn't have to break his heart.

    In the week before Jack plans to marry, the pair heads out from Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez wine country. For Jack, the tasting tour is Seven Days to D-Day, his final stretch of freedom. For Miles--who has divorced his wife, is facing an uncertain career and has lost his passion for living--the trip is a weeklong opportunity to evaluate his past, his future and himself. A raucous and surprising novel filled with wonderful details about wine, Sideways is also a thought-provoking and funny book about men, women, and human relationships.

    Is there really room for something as unpredictable as love? Oliver Clock has everything arranged just so. A steady job running the family funeral parlour. A fridge stocked with ready meals. A drawer full of colour-coded socks. A plan (of sorts) to stay trim enough for a standard-sized coffin. And in florist Marie, he’s even found the love of his life—not that she’s aware of it.When a terrible tragedy takes Marie out of his life but leaves him with her private journal, he discovers too late that she secretly loved him back. Faced now with an empty love life, a family funeral business in trouble, a fast-approaching fortieth birthday and a notebook of resolutions he’s never achieved, Oliver resolves to open himself up to love—and all the mess that comes along with it.But, with a habit of burying his feelings, can he learn to embrace his lovability and find the woman who will make him feel whole?