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 . . .

    A twenty-something New Yorker transplanted to a small Virginia community who boldly befriends the town pariah. A New England widow in search of alcohol and excitement while babysitting her grandson. A Maryland socialite who has built a secret bomb shelter that becomes the center of her imaginative life. These are some of the characters who inhabit Nancy Hale’s lush fiction. Haunting, vivid, and wonderfully subversive, Hale’s stories typically concern women recognizable to all of us—sometimes fragile, possibly wicked, deceptively ordinary, navigating their way uncertainly through life. Nancy Hale was one of the most accomplished short story artists of her era, winner of ten O. Henry Awards and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker from the 1930s to the 1960s. But by the time of her death in 1988, this remarkable writer, so far ahead of her time in her depiction of complex women, was largely forgotten. Now Lauren Groff reintroduces this modern master with a selection of twenty-five of her best stories— brilliant short fiction that encompasses childhood and adolescence, marriage and motherhood, desire and infidelity, madness and memory. Where the Light Falls reveals Hale as a gifted stylist—a painter in light and shadow—and an acute observer of modern American life.

    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.

    Following the fractured origins and destines of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son.By turns heartbreaking and fiercely inventive, Half Gods reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.

    The story Pages from a Young Girl's Journal won Aickman the World Fantasy Award in 1975. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1973 before appearing in this collection.Cold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full, being more ambiguous than standard ghost stories. Throughout the stories the reader is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story (Pages from a Young Girl's Journal) but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing.• The Swords • The Real Road to the Church • Niemandswasser • Pages from a Young Girl's Journal• The Hospice • The Same Dog • Meeting Mr. Millar • The Clock Watcher

    From tales of The Shaper/Mechanist to Leggy Starlitz to his Chattanooga Stories, this anthology spans the gamut of Sterlings works from 1976 to 2007.Swarm --Spider Rose --Cicada queen --Sunken gardens --Twenty evocations --Green days in Brunei --Dinner in Audoghast --The compassionate, the digital --Flowers of Edo --The little magic shop --Our neural Chernobyl --We see things differently --Dori Bangs --Hollywood Kremlin --Are you for 86? --The littlest jackal --Deep eddy --Bicycle repairman --Taklamakan --The sword of Damocles --Maneki Neko --In paradise --The blemmye's strategem --Kiosk

    Collected in a mini-book format, here--for the first time in print--are six of her quirky, wry, engaging best:In -The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model, - aliens reveal the terrible truth about how humans were created--and why we'll never discover aliens.-As Good as New- is a brilliant twist on the tale of three wishes, set after the end of the world. -Intestate- is about a family reunion in which some attendees aren't quite human anymore--but they're still family.-The Cartography of Sudden Death- demonstrates that when you try to solve a problem with time travel, you now have two problems.-Six Months, Three Days- is the story of the love affair between a man who can see the one true foreordained future, and a woman who can see all the possible futures. They're both right, and the story won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.And -Clover, - exclusively written for this collection, is a coda to All the Birds in the Sky, answering the burning question of what happened to Patricia's cat.

    "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is just one of many classic horror stories by Richard Matheson that have insinuated themselves into our collective imagination.Here are more than twenty of Matheson's most memorable tales of fear and paranoia, including:"Duel," the nail-biting tale of man versus machines that inspired Steven Spielberg's first film;"Prey," in which a terrified woman is stalked by a malevolent Tiki doll, as chillingly captured in yet another legendary TV moment;"Blood Son," a disturbing portrait of a strange little boy who dreams of being a vampire;"Dress of White Silk," a seductively sinister tale of evil and innocence.Personally selected by Richard Matheson, the bestselling author of I Am Legend and What Dreams May Come, these and many other stories, more than demonstrate why he is rightfully regarded as one of the finest and most influential horror writers of our generation.

    A year later, she makes a fateful wish on a game cartridge to be a great mother for a family of her own -- only to be swept through a portal into another world! She finds she's been summoned as the "priestess from another world" ...whose role is to become mother to the children of the demon king himself?!

    It is a dark and brooding modern fairy tale from one of our most gifted writers.

    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.

    But meanwhile, in far-off corners, the Wasp Empire has been devouring city after city with its highly trained armies, its machines, its killing Art...And now its hunger for conquest and war has become insatiable. Only the ageing Stenwold Maker, spymaster, artificer and statesman, can see that the long days of peace are over. It falls upon his shoulders to open the eyes of his people, before a black-and-gold tide sweeps down over the Lowlands and burns away everything in its path.But first he must stop himself becoming the Empire's latest victim.

    These are the stuff of fairy tale, myth, and folklore that have drawn us in for centuries. Fifteen bestselling and acclaimed authors reimagine the folklore and mythology of East and South Asia in short stories that are by turns enchanting, heartbreaking, romantic, and passionate. Compiled by We Need Diverse Books’s Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman, the authors included in this exquisite collection are: Renee Ahdieh, Sona Charaipotra, Preeti Chhibber, Roshani Chokshi, Aliette de Bodard, Melissa de la Cruz, Julie Kagawa, Rahul Kanakia, Lori M. Lee, E. C. Myers, Cindy Pon, Aisha Saeed, Shveta Thakrar, and Alyssa Wong. A mountain loses her heart. Two sisters transform into birds to escape captivity. A young man learns the true meaning of sacrifice. A young woman takes up her mother’s mantle and leads the dead to their final resting place. From fantasy to science fiction to contemporary, from romance to tales of revenge, these stories will beguile readers from start to finish. For fans of Neil Gaiman’s Unnatural Creatures and Ameriie’s New York Times–bestselling Because You Love to Hate Me.

    Link has won an ardent following for her ability to take readers deep into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe with each new story. In “The Summer People,” a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In “I Can See Right Through You,” a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In “The New Boyfriend,” a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-size animated doll. Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids...These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded in sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty--and the hidden strengths--of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.

    Even though your worker bots have staged a mutiny, and your tour guide speaks only in memes, you can always sell your native language if you need some extra cash.The avant-garde of science fiction have arrived in this space-age sequel to the 2018 award-winning anthology, The New Voices of Fantasy. In The New Voices of Science Fiction you'll find the rising stars of the last five years: Rebecca Roanhorse, Amal El-Mohtar, Sam J. Miller, E. Lily Yu, Rich Larson, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Sarah Pinsker, Alice Sola Kim, Darcie Little Badger, Nino Cipri, S. Qiouyi Lu, Kelly Robson, Suzanne Palmer, and more. Their extraordinary stories have been hand-selected by cutting-edge author Hannu Rajaniemi (The Quantum Thief) and genre expert Jacob Weisman (Invaders).So go ahead, join the starship revolution. The new kids have already hacked the AI.--back coverContents:- Introduction by Jacob Weisman- Foreword by Hannu Rajaniemi- Openness (2016) by Alexander Weinstein- The Shape of My Name (2015) by Nino Cipri- Utopia, LOL? (2017) by Jamie Wahls- Mother Tongues (2018) by S. Qiouyi Lu- In the Sharing Place (2018) by David Erik Nelson- A Series of Steaks (2017) by Vina Jie-Min Prasad- The Secret Life of Bots (2017) by Suzanne Palmer- Ice (2015) by Rich Larson- One Hour, Every Seven Years (2017) by Alice Sola Kim- Toppers (2016) by Jason Sanford- Tender Loving Plastics (2018) by Amman Sabet- Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ (2017) by Rebecca Roanhorse- Strange Waters (2018) by Samantha Mills- Calved (2015) by Sam J. Miller- The Need for Air (2018) by Lettie Prell- Robo-Liopleurodon! (2018) by Darcie Little Badger- The Doing and Undoing of Jacob E. Mwangi (2019) by E. Lily Yu- Madeleine (2015) by Amal El-Mohtar- Our Lady of the Open Road (2015) by Sarah Pinsker- A Study in Oils (2018) by Kelly Robson