A high altitude lake is the point of departure for these stories of dark adventure, in which fishing guides, amateur sportsmen, teenage misfits, scientists, mountaineers, and expatriates embark on disquieting journeys of self-discovery in far-flung places.

    Sometimes things are not always what they seem and the heart can often blind us to the truth. Gitte is a forty-something successful French lawyer in Paris. Beautiful, intelligent, captivating and athletic. Who wouldn't fall in love with her? But...often we only see that which we want to see.

    The characters who inhabit Beautiful Girls are the timid, the not-quite-fabulous, the public school Ophelias, who yearn for something grander than their current lot.Told with irresistible humor and a cockeyed economy, these stories illuminate the search for love, friendship, connection, and identity.

    In the spring of 1940, the spectre of war turned into grim reality.And on the English home front, men, women and children found themselves swept into a maelstrom of fear and uncertainty while events abroad led inexorably from the debacles of Norway and Dunkirk to the horror and glory of the Battle of Britain.For the Lovatt family - James, seconded on a hush-hush assignment to work with Churchill, and his brother Harry, a naval officer - for Bess Spofford, Joanne Schorner, Graham Smit and all the inhabitants of the history villages of the New Forest, it was the beginning of the most bizarre, funny and tragic episode of their lives.

    She escapes, only to find that the horror has spread and now threatens everything she holds dear. With each passing moment, death becomes more certain. Death's Children Collection When a routine shopping trip turns deadly, little Lucy finds herself in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Stuck in town with her authoritarian mother, she longs for the comforting arms of her father, the one person she can rely on.  Dangerous Nights Series Driven by grief, Nadia sets out into the unknown, accompanied by her two closest friends. Broken and antagonistic, she throws herself headlong into danger and makes a fatal mistake, one that could cost her everything. Can she overcome her inner demons before it's too late?  Reach - Bonus Novella Thirty years have passed since the dead rose. Lucy, one of the original survivors of the outbreak, is holding on by a thread. Hampered by depression and apathy, she just can't seem to get it together. When tragedy strikes, she's forced to flee her home and saves a young boy along the way. For all Post-Apocalyptic and Zompoc fans comes your next obsession, a boxed set featuring three complete series plus bonus material all set in the same universe. Be prepared for hours of zombie fun to keep you up long past your bedtime.  Scroll up and grab your copy today!

    Scott Fitzgerald, the iconic American writer of The Great Gatsby who is more widely read today than ever.I’d Die For You is a collection of the last remaining unpublished and uncollected short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel. Fitzgerald did not design the stories in I’d Die For You as a collection. Most were submitted individually to major magazines during the 1930s and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but were never printed. Some were written as movie scenarios and sent to studios or producers, but not filmed. Others are stories that could not be sold because their subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of Fitzgerald. They date from the earliest days of Fitzgerald’s career to the last. They come from various sources, from libraries to private collections, including those of Fitzgerald’s family. Readers will experience Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship. Rather than permit changes and sanitizing by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention. “I’d Die For You,” the collection’s title story, is drawn from Fitzgerald’s stays in the mountains of North Carolina when his health, and that of his wife Zelda, was falling apart. With the addition of a Hollywood star and film crew to the Smoky Mountain lakes and pines, Fitzgerald brings in the cinematic world in which he would soon be living. Most of the stories printed here come from this time period, during the middle and late1930s, though the collection spans Fitzgerald’s career from 1920 to the end of his life. The book is subtitled And Other Lost Stories in recognition of an absence until now. Some of the eighteen stories were physically lost, coming to light only in the past few years. All were lost, in one sense or another: lost in the painful shuffle of the difficulties of Fitzgerald’s life in the middle 1930s; lost to readers because contemporary editors did not understand or accept what he was trying to write; lost because archives are like that, and good things can wait patiently in libraries for many centuries sometimes. I’d Die For You And Other Lost Stories echoes as well the nostalgia and elegy in Gertrude Stein’s famous phrase “a lost generation,” that generation for whom Fitzgerald was a leading figure. Written in his characteristically beautiful, sharp, and surprising language, exploring themes both familiar and fresh, these stories provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career. I’d Die For You is a revealing, intimate look at Fitzgerald’s creative process that shows him to be a writer working at the fore of modern literature—in all its developing complexities.

    As Donnie's business thrives and their daughter, Stasha, plans her wedding, Laura longs for new possibilities. Could the dreams God planted in her heart years ago like to become an artist still be part of her purpose? Is there a new life of faith on the other side of this struggle? This story about a womans longing for meaning will resonate with readers of all ages.

    It's on India's southwestern coast, bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Kaliamma River to the south and east. It's blessed with rich soil and scenic beauty, and it's been around for centuries. Of its 193,432 residents, only 89 declare themselves to be without religion or caste. And if the characters in Between the Assassinations are any indication, Kittur is an extraordinary crossroads of the brightest minds and the poorest morals, the up-and-coming and the downtrodden, and the poets and the prophets of an India that modern literature has rarely addressed. A twelve-year-old boy named Ziauddin, a gofer at a tea shop near the railway station, is enticed into wrongdoing because a fair-skinned stranger treats him with dignity and warmth. George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellent sprayer, elevates himself to gardener and then chauffeur to the lovely, young Mrs. Gomes, and then loses it all when he attempts to be something more. A little girl's first act of love for her father is to beg on the street for money to support his drug habit. A factory owner is forced to choose between buying into underworld economics and blinding his staff or closing up shop. A privileged schoolboy, using his own ties to the Kittur underworld, sets off an explosive in a Jesuit-school classroom in protest against casteism. A childless couple takes refuge in a rapidly diminishing forest on the outskirts of town, feeding a group of "intimates" who visit only to mock them. And the loneliest member of the Marxist-Maoist Party of India falls in love with the one young woman, in the poorest part of town, whom he cannot afford to wed. Between the Assassinations showcases the most beloved aspects of Adiga's writing to brilliant effect: the class struggle rendered personal; the fury of the underdog and the fire of the iconoclast; and the prodigiously ambitious narrative talent that has earned Adiga acclaim around the world and comparisons to Gogol, Ellison, Kipling, and Palahniuk. In the words of The Guardian (London), "Between the Assassinations shows that Adiga...is one of the most important voices to emerge from India in recent years." A blinding, brilliant, and brave mosaic of Indian life as it is lived in a place called Kittur, Between the Assassinations, with all the humor, sympathy, and unflinching candor of The White Tiger, enlarges our understanding of the world we live in today.

    I spent time looking for a book which would show me how a "raw" story was developed through drafts, with comments received and the changes made. Struggling to find such a work, I decided to create my own, being transparent and honest in the details. Using the story that gained me an offer of a place on a Master's in Creative Writing, SHORT STORY will take you through three drafts of the work.The book details not only the major revisions, feedback given by a professional novelist and an academic, but also has a bunch of tips from my writers toolbox condensed between the drafts. I hope that the process provides something useful for you, be it a tip from the writing toolbox, a look at the editing process, or motivation in knowing that you can do better than I did!

    and Saying Goodbye to the Sun. THE LAKE THE SPIDER AND THE FLY EXHIBIT A Plus 14 Horror Microstories! BONUS STORY: One last Dinner Party, by David Dalglish, author of the Half Orc series.

    His is a voice combining humor and pathos with an edginess creating fresh new stories that are being published in great literary journals regularly.A boy acts out at the death of his father and abandonment by his brother through a savage playground beating; a young man confronts his own troubled history when asked to hire on his girlfriend's strung-out brother in an attempt to keep him out of prison; a teenage babysitter works through a scorching-hot summer afternoon that will prove to alter her life forever; a grieving widower finds comfort in the unlikeliest of places, a recently-built casino; an itinerant farm worker visits the same former lover in South Dakota year after year while following the Harvest north; two friends search for excuses and fail to claim responsibility for their own decisions after one loses his father, and the other's house burns to the ground; and a taxidermist falls in love with the ex-wife of his high school bully and tries to convince her to marry him despite her son who seems to share his father's bullying mentality."A brilliant, sometimes heartbreaking debut by this gifted young writer and Columbia writing teacher. Cross captures the angst and tenderness of the young men and women growing up in the rust belt with little hope and less luck. The moments of grace and redemption shine through. I loved every story." —Linda Bubon, Women & Children First Bookstore"There are countless moments like this in Fires of Our Choosing, lines that appear true from the moment they’ve been written and hang in the back of the mind for days afterwards... With Fires of Our Choosing, Cross climbs boldly into the ring with the greats, if only to deliver a decisive knockout punch." —Urban Waite, Fiction Writers Review"Cross offers no apologies for his characters: their poor choices, their lack of moral fortitude, their betrayals of each other and the poverty of their surroundings and, often, themselves; he leaves these things alone. They are who they are, and if dignity has been denied them by the rest of us, including us story-tellers, it is restored by this collection. That he has undertaken to serve as their raconteur should place Cross on the radar of all the big prizes that gift those blessed with talent, compassion and fearlessness, particularly during this present moment in our history." —Ru Freeman, Huffington PostEugene Cross was born and raised in Erie, Pennsylvania and received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. His stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine (which named him one of "20 Best New Writers" and his story "Harvester's" a "Top Five Story of 2009-2010"), American Short Fiction, Story Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and Callalloo among other publications. His work was also listed among the 2010 Best American Short Stories' 100 Distinguished Stories. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Chautauqua Writers' Festival, and the winner of the 2009 Dzanc Prize for Excellence in Literary Fiction and Community Service. He currently lives in Chicago where he teaches in the Fiction Department at Columbia College Chicago.

    The stories include tales of strippers, of their husbands and lovers and the helpless, ill-placed desire that is shot out of their customers, of a rape by a man of another man at a peep show in Times Square, the victim wordlessly accepting what happens to him while watching a woman dance behind glass, of fucking a woman wearing a fur coat and feeling unexplainable rage at her disregard of animal life. The story ends with the character running away into the night with the coat, "as if an animal rescued." In "Invisible Fish," a night clerk in a mall pet store tortures the animals at night until the whole place stinks of fear and rage. Dumbfounded, the store owners blugeon to death a chimpanzee, the only animal in the store that can imagine capable of such atrocities.

    From #1 Amazon Bestseller, Scott Blade.The only thing that Jack Cameron finds worse than the long day that he has had trying to hitch a ride on a long, lonely stretch of Route 66 between Texas and New Mexico is the car that comes barreling down the road at high speeds and then almost runs him over. After barely missing Cameron, the car crashes into a tree. Cameron rescues the driver and calls an ambulance for him. Only the driver is more than what he seems and Cameron is sucked into a mystery that leads him to a small roadside town and a twenty-year witness protection case. Jack Cameron is left alone to protect a witness that has no idea that an old enemy is after her. And Cameron has no idea who the enemy is, but he knows one thing that they are right behind him. Note: This is a JACK CAMERON novella.

    Students carried the book around with them. And people on the run found the length of each story (no more than 2000 words) perfect respites from their busy lives.Responding to America's love affair with the short-short, editors Shapard and Thomas consulted nearly two-hundred magazines and chose the sixty stories, written in English or translated, that they considered best. Ranging across countries and cultures, the selection includes a number of new stories from the Pacific Rim.Well-known writers—William Maxwell, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Mark Richard—join lesser-known writers—Molly Giles, Andrew Lam, Judy Troy—who will be (or should be) better known. Each story revels in its own element of surprise; each, whether traditional or experimental, proves that a tale told quickly offers pleasure long past its telling. Students and lovers of literature take note: this is serious writing that's fun to read.

    Divided into four sections: love, loss, acceptance, and growth- the content serves the purpose of making you feel and finding the light at the end of the tunnel.