Families, homes, lovers, marriages -- the safe havens they have been taught to depend on no longer guarantee shelter or stability.ONE WAY OR ANOTHER introduces Peter Cameron as an extraordinary writer, one distinguished not only by his prose, which is always abundantly witty and pitch-perfect, but also by a rare generosity of heart.Included in this book are two stories that were selected for the O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES: "Homework," first published in The New Yorker, and "Excerpts from Swan Lake," first published in The Kenyon Review.

    Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount, and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for the best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle. In the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ?This collection includes some of Dick's earliest short and medium-length fiction, including "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale" (the story that inspired the motion picture Total Recall), "Second Variety" (which inspired the motion picture Screamers), "Paychecks", "The Minority Report", and 21 more.Content: "Fair Game" (1959) "The Hanging Stranger" (1953) ""The Eyes Have It"" (1953) "The Golden Man" (1954) "The Turning Wheel" (1954) "The Last of the Masters" (1954) "The Father-Thing" (1954) "Strange Eden" (1954) "Tony and the Beetles" (1954) "Null-O" (1958) "To Serve the Master" (1956) "Exhibit Piece" (1954) "The Crawlers" (1954) "Sales Pitch" (1954) "Shell Game" (1954) "Upon the Dull Earth" (1954) "Foster, You're Dead!" (1955) "Pay for the Printer" (1956) "War Veteran" (1955) "The Chromium Fence" (1955) "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966) "The Minority Report" (1956) "Paycheck" (1953) "Second Variety" (1953)

    I love the soft blue veins on your wrist. I love your lopsided smile. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you. The six recipients - a data analyst, a photojour­nalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor - inhabit an acutely observed, beauti­fully familiar yet particularly strange universe, as only Kevin Brockmeier could imagine it: a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that one's wounds glitter, fluoresce, and blaze with light. As we follow the journey of the book from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human in­jury and experience.

    Universal Love welcomes readers to a near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally altered the possibilities and limits of how we love one another. In these gripping stories, a young boy tries to understand what keeps his father tethered to the drowned city they call home. A daughter gets to know her dead mother's hologram better than she ever knew her living mother. And, at a time when unpleasant memories can be erased, a man undergoes electronic surgery to have his depression, and his past, forever removed.In an age when technology offers the easiest cures for loneliness, the characters within these stories must wrestle with what it means to stay human in an increasingly cybernetic future, and how love can endure even the most alluring upgrades.In the vein of Weinstein’s critically-acclaimed first collection, Universal Love is a visionary book, written with one foot in the real world and one stepping bravely into the future.

    

    Taut, lucid, and engrossing, provocative and dark—and often darkly funny—these stories have much to offer the lover of literary fiction as well as the reader who just loves a great story.

    He is so desperate that when the peculiar Mr Rinyo-Clacton offers him one million pounds but only one year to live, he agrees to the proposal. But what happened next was even more shocking.

    Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling—these stories will remind readers of the late giant David Foster Wallace, in their straightforward accounts of anything-but-straightforward events; of modern short story pioneer Raymond Carver, a bit, in their blunt, unadorned dialogue; and of Julia Whitty, a bit, in their willingness to believe what is happening, even if it absolutely shouldn’t be. Funny, piercing, unique, memorable, this is a collection of stories readers will find nearly impossible to forget:... The barber who shaves the heads of the thugs in Bin Laden’s cave tells cheerful stories of life with the preening video-obsessed leader, who has a bald spot shaped just like Iceland.... A husband gathers all of his wife’s previous boyfriends for a long day on a winery-touring bus.... A teenage boy drives off into the sunset with his troubled sister’s small daughters…and the loser husband locked in the trunk of the car.... The late Joseph Kennedy pours out his heart to a golf-course bartender moments before the stroke that silenced him forever.… A man digging in his garden finds a brand-new baby boy, still alive, and has a chat with the teenage neighbor girl whose son it is.... A man born on a Greyhound bus eventually buys the entire Greyhound Bus Company and revolutionizes Western civilization.... A mountainous bishop dies and the counting of the various keys to his house turns… tense.... A man discovers his wife having an affair, takes up running to grapple with his emotions, and discovers everyone else on the road is a cuckold too.And many others.

    Morbid, cynical, eerie, they take you to a twilight region of flesh and spirit — and into the darkest recesses of the human mind. These are unusual constructions of terror and grim irony, reminiscent of Poe, the Gothic novel, and the Romantic short story, but having the unmistakable individual stamp of a man who knew first-hand something of the fears and specters which haunt men.In this volume you will come across a number of old favorites: "An Inhabitant of Carcosa," "The Eyes of the Panther," "The Death of Halpin Frayser," "An Adventure at Brownville," and such classics as "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot," "The Damned Thing," and "Moonlit Road," a minor masterpiece in which events of the story are told from three different points of view, including that of the victim as spoken through a medium. You will also find some less familiar, but equally fascinating stories and pieces not available elsewhere, including "Visions of the Night," in which Bierce gives us a rationale for his "reverse holiness" and the surrealistic morality that permeates these writings. Bierce's characters — possessed poets, shabby aristocrats, grimy professional men, revived corpses, haunted malefactors — live in a spare, perverse world. Patricide, the revenge of the dead, inexplicable disappearances, dreadful ironies, hypnotism and second sight, and the like, form much of the substance of these unsettling tales.

    In the second eBook short story, evil will be unmasked—but nothing is ever what it seems when Jack of Blades has the upper hand.   Finally, the people of Albion are safe. Jack of Blades, the supernatural terror, has been slayed . . . or at least, that’s what they’ve been told. But the residents of Oddwood know that Jack is alive and well. Leading a small force of mercenaries, Jack has enslaved the townsfolk and is enjoying a life of luxury—until an unassuming young man arrives on the scene, inadvertently thwarting Jack at every step. Living up to his merciless reputation, Jack of Blades decides upon a suitable punishment: throwing the newcomer into a cage with a flesh-eating Balverine. Little does Jack realize that he’s dealing with a wild card—and a shocking twist to the Fable™ saga.

    The collection includes the following titles: Almost by Elizabeth Benedict, Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum, The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss, The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell, and The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett.

    [2]. "A publication of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress"--T.p. verso. Letter of transmittal (p. [1]) from: Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc. Originally published: Washington [D.C.] : Library of Congress, 1987.

    

    In “Requiem”, a woman goes to Alaska to try and make sense of her aunt’s disappearance. An eleventh century poet wakes to find he is as an artificially intelligent companion on a starship. A woman of no account has the ability to look into the past.Singh's work dives into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within, and she unblinkingly explores the ways we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.Contents:- With Fate Conspire (2013)- A Handful of Rice (2012)- Peripeteia (2013)- Lifepod (2007)- Oblivion: A Journey (2008)- Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra (2010)- Are You Sannata3159? (2010)- Indra's Web (2011)- Ruminations in an Alien Tongue (2012)- Sailing the Antarsa (2013)- Cry of the Kharchal (2013)- Wake-Rider (2014)- Ambiguity Machines: An Examination (2015)- Requiem (2018)

    Or so believes Larry, who returns home from Desert Storm to find his hair gone and his bones rapidly disintegrating. Then there’s Lance Corporal James Laverne of the US Marines, who grows a third ear in Kuwait. And in the audaciously comic novella “Notes from a Bunker Along Highway 8,” a Green Beret deserts his team after seeing a vision of George Washington, only to find a new calling—administering aid to wounded Iraqi civilians; he’s hindered only by the furtive nature of his mission and an unruly band of chimpanzees. Together these narratives form a bracing amalgamation of devastating humor and brilliant cultural observation, in which Gabe Hudson fearlessly explores the darker implications of American military power.