The big foyer at the Bell House has been decorated for the holidays and Polly's family has been hard at work decorating the rest of the house. She's ready for anything. The managers of the Sycamore Bed and Breakfast, Reuben and Judy Greene, have moved into town. While the old farmhouse is in the middle of its restoration, they plan to renovate a storefront down the street from Sweet Beans. They found something incredible in the upstairs apartment, bringing old and new together for a heartwarming moment. Moments like that prevail in this story. Last year, Polly and Henry brought two new little boys into their lives on Christmas Eve. This Christmas Eve, Noah and Elijah help the family create a beautiful new tradition. Like always, there are a few surprises. Your job is to hold them close so others can enjoy the fun. It truly is the most wonderful time of the year in Bellingwood.

    You watch three seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians in two days. You get a pet turtle. You absent-mindedly paint what ends up looking like your high school’s football coach, but naked. You go backpacking in Australia for a few months. You try speaking with a New York accent in public, just to see if people like that version of you better. The comment still haunts you. An “indoor kind of girl.” You feel like you’re that person, but you’re not that person. In Frankie Barnet’s exquisite and funny debut collection of stories, characters stumble through their daily existence, frequently feeling confused, rejected, bored, disillusioned or misunderstood. Metatron is proud to present these five stunningly imaginative tales, which signal the arrival of a gifted writer. Frankie Barnet is a Montreal- based writer. Her work has appeared in publications such as Joyland, Lemonhound and Papirmasse, and she is the author of the 2012 chapbook Something Disgusting Happening. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Concordia University.“An Indoor Kind Of Girl veers from fading friendships to scheming call centres with an occasional sense of absurdity and also a kind of hyper-real real. Barnet’s narrators have a sharp eye for all that goes around them and they judge their own actions and others’ with a combination of ruthless honesty and vulnerability.”– MELISSA BULL, AUTHOR OF RUE “As I read, everything hit me at once; the quick prose and real characters, the humour of it, and this sort of sadness, loneliness.”– SOLILOQUIES ANTHOLOGY “A very powerful writer”– THE LINK

    That is, until Fox 8 develops a unique skill: He teaches himself to speak "Yuman" by hiding in the bushes outside a house and listening to children's bedtime stories. The power of language fuels his abundant curiosity about people—even after "danjer" arrives in the form of a new shopping mall that cuts off his food supply, sending Fox 8 on a harrowing quest to help save his pack.

    But no matter how hard she tried, it seemed like nothing she did would keep her from her fate. Knowing she should have died that night with her family, everything seemed to have come full circle as she stares down the barrel of Phantom’s gun.... Freedom has dedicated his life trying to keep Phantom on track. Being his conscience was hard, but convincing him of his loyalty was worse. With one wrong move, Zaria and Freedom’s chances of living is left dangling in the wind.... Phantom being a complicated man with a dark past, worked hard at leaving it all behind. One fatal night brought It back and his world came crashing down. Trying to pick up the pieces, he may have fallen too deep. With the clock ticking, does he climb out the trenches or does everything come crashing down? Phantom is at the point of no return and everything seems like one bad dream. Can he rise again or is this the end?

    A new coach of a small-town Oklahoma high school football team installs an offense comprised of only one, very special, play. A man explains to the police why he told the employee of his local bodega that his colleague looked like the lead singer of Depeche Mode, a statement that may or may not have led in some way to a violent crime. A college professor discusses with his friend his difficulties with the new generation of students. An obscure power pop band wrestles with its new-found fame when its song "Blizzard of Summer" becomes an anthem for white supremacists. A couple considers getting a medical procedure that will transfer the pain of childbirth from the woman to her husband. A woman interviews a hit man about killing her husband but is shocked by the method he proposes. A man is recruited to join a secret government research team investigating why coin flips are no longer exactly 50/50. A man sees a whale struck by lightning, and knows that everything about his life has to change. A lawyer grapples with the unintended side effects of a veterinarian's rabies vaccination.Fair warning: Raised in Captivity does not slot into a smooth preexisting groove. If Saul Steinberg and Italo Calvino had adopted a child from a Romanian orphanage and raised him on Gary Larsen and Thomas Bernhard, he would still be nothing like Chuck Klosterman. They might be good company, though. Funny, wise and weird in equal measure, Raised in Captivity bids fair to be one of the most original and exciting story collections in recent memory, a fever graph of our deepest unvoiced hopes, fears and preoccupations. Ceaselessly inventive, hostile to corniness in all its forms, and mean only to the things that really deserve it, it marks a cosmic leap forward for one of our most consistently interesting writers.

    The only trouble is that businessman, Edward Townsend, has exactly the same idea.With its position high on the Sussex Downs, Winfield is a stunning house, but it hasn’t been a home for a long time and there’s a lot of work to do to restore it to its former glory. It’s going to take a lot of time and money, so Edward and Abi decide to take a risk and share the house, each living in their own wing. But can these two strangers agree on a vision that suits them both? And will free-spirited Abi ever get the rather reserved Edward to reveal the secret he’s been hiding for so long?The House in the Clouds is the first novel in a brand new trilogy from the bestselling author of The Rose Girls and The Book Lovers series.

    So there are no big surprises when, yet again, she turns down her long-term partner Harry’s marriage proposal. They’re a solid, secure couple – a piece of paper won’t make any difference. That is until she accidentally stumbles across a flirtatious text message from one of his female colleagues on his phone. Overcome with suspicion and an impending fear of losing Harry, Emma goes on a quest to get to the bottom of his secret affair with the help of her ninety-three-year-old neighbour, Alistair, her best friend Ola, and Harry’s sister-in-law’s psychic app, The Magic Touch.

    "Another""What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust""The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water""On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home""Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance""She Waits, Seething, Blooming""Quiet""Your Mother and I""Naveed""Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone""About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her""Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly""After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"From the Trade Paperback edition.

    A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn’t match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl.In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.

    Bad art is from no one to no one. Am I happy? Damned if I know, but give me a few minutes and I’ll tell you whether you are. Thank heaven I don’t have my friends’ problems. But sometimes I notice an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret gratitude. I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I’ll escape the worst of it.—from 300 ArgumentsA “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight.300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in the work of David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature.

    For example, "No Panties Tuesday" started as a harmless school prank; I could never have predicted that by lunchtime I would be kneeling splay-legged on the headmaster's desk, his hand (innocently?) between my thighs just moments away from discovering my nakedness and arousal. And the day was only half over...

    But when she lands the job of her dreams, it costs her her best friend.However, apart from her creepy ex-boyfriend, Storm loves the job. Until she’s asked to go undercover to find out if sexy TV chef Nico Alvise is cheating on his girlfriend. Storm knows it’s wrong but agrees because she likes him. A LOT. And she’s determined to protect him.She didn’t bank on them falling in love though. But Nico has secrets to hide, and he hates journalists.So when he finds out what Storm does, the fallout is brutal.Suddenly jobless, friendless and heartbroken, Storm knows that no matter how hard she wishes, Nico will never forgive her…

    In "Blythe," an attorney who has become a stay-at-home mother takes a night class in poetry and meets another full-time mother, one whose charismatic brilliance changes everything. In "The Wife of the Dictator," that eponymous wife ("brought back . . . from [the dictator's] last visit to America") grows more desperately, menacingly isolated every day. In "Delicate Edible Birds," a group of war correspondents--a lone, high-spirited woman among them--falls sudden prey to a brutal farmer while fleeing Nazis in the French countryside. In "Lucky Chow Fun," Groff returns us to Templeton, the setting of her first book, for revelations about the darkness within even that idyllic small town. In some of these stories, enormous changes happen in an instant. In others, transformations occur across a lifetime--or several lifetimes. Throughout the collection, Groff displays particular and vivid preoccupations. Crime is a motif--sex crimes, a possible murder, crimes of the heart. Love troubles recur--they're in every story--love in alcoholism, in adultery, in a flood, even in the great flu epidemic of 1918. Some of the love has depths, which are understood too late; some of the love is shallow, and also understood too late. And mastery is a theme--Groff's women swim and baton twirl, become poets, or try and try again to achieve the inner strength to exercise personal freedom. Overall, these stories announce a notable new literary master. Dazzlingly original and confident, Delicate Edible Birds further solidifies Groff's reputation as one of the foremost talents of her generation.

    The same world moves beneath each of them, and one by one, through seemingly random acts of selflessness, they discover the vital parts they have played in each other's lives, a realization that shatters the illusion of their separateness. Moving back and forth in time and across continents, The Illusion of Separateness displays the breathtaking skill of, "a truly special writer who does things with abstract language that is so evocative and original your breath literally catches in your chest" (Andre Dubus III).

    After meeting Dr. Lachele, Taryn decides to turn over her search for a husband to the capable matchmaker. The day of the wedding, Taryn sneaks a peek of her groom and sees something that brings her painful past to the front of her mind. Army soldier Andrew Dawson is used to being the hero, but he never expected that his mom would end up with something he can’t save her from—breast cancer. He chooses to move back to Grace Lake, Idaho—the town he’s been running away from for the past eight years—to care for her. He soon realizes there will be no time to date—if there was anyone to date—and he isn’t confident in his ability to care for his mom alone. At the recommendation of his Aunt Eileen, he decides to give Dr. Lachele Simpson’s Matchrimony service a try. Can he trust that Dr. Lachele has picked the right woman for him? Or will he regret his choice to meet his wife at the altar? www.keirakbarton.com