Trapped in a remote Alaskan forest, pinned under his own SUV, gnawed upon by nature's finest predators, Marv Pushkin -- Corporate Warrior, Positive Thinker, Esquire subscriber -- waits impatiently for an ambulance and explains in detail the many reasons why this unfolding tragedy is everyone's fault but his own.

    The titular story revolves around an aging English professor who, mourning the loss of his wife, robs other people's homes of their sentimental knick-knacks. In "Free Ham," a young dropout wins a ham after her house burns down and refuses to accept it. “Has my ham done anything wrong?” she asks when the grocery store manager demands that she claim it. In "Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph," a failed commercial writer moves into the basement of a convent and inadvertently discovers the secrets of the Sisters of Saint Joseph. A girl, hoping to talk her brother out of enlisting in the army, brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner in the quiet, dreamy "North Of." In “The Idea of Marcel,” Emily, a conservative, elegant girl, has dinner with the idea of her ex-boyfriend, Marcel. In a night filled with baffling coincidences, including Marcel having dinner with his idea of Emily, she wonders why we tend to be more in love with ideas than with reality. In and out of the rooms of these gritty, whimsical stories roam troubled, funny people struggling to reconcile their circumstances to some kind of American Ideal and failing, over and over.  The stories of Safe as Houses are magical and original and help answer such universal and existential questions as: How far will we go to stay loyal to our friends? Can we love a man even though he is inches shorter than our ideal? Why doesn’t Bob Dylan ever have his own smokes? And are there patron saints for everything, even lost socks and bad movies? All homes are not shelters. But then again, some are. Welcome to the home of Marie-Helene Bertino.

    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.

    Stacked with brilliant emerging writers alongside some of the strongest established voices in contemporary literature, WARMED AND BOUND crosses literary boundaries on all sides, to deliver an altogether unique reading experience. Through seemingly opposed conventions, beautiful prose makes a hard impression on the short story form. From a scary love story to a nostalgic thriller, a hardboiled pursuit of salvation to the black humor that is existentialism, WARMED AND BOUND is rogue humility and lovesick noir, where humanity is a dirty puzzle. It 's Velvet Noir. Welcome. Matt Bell Tim Beverstock Blake Butler Vincent Louis Carrella Craig Clevenger Craig Davidson Chris Deal DeLeon DeMicoli Christopher J Dwyer Brian Evenson Sean P Ferguson Amanda Gowin JR Harlan Gordon Highland Anthony David Jacques Mark Jaskowski Jeremy Robert Johnson Stephen Graham Jones Nik Korpon Gary Paul Libero Kyle Minor Doc O Donnell J David Osborne Rob Parker Bob Pastorella Gavin Pate Cameron Pierce Edward J Rathke Caleb J Ross Bradley Sands Axel Taiari Richard Thomas Brandon Tietz Gayle Towell Paul Tremblay Pela Via Craig Wallwork Nic Young"The writers of the Velvet are contemporary fiction 's most effective and least self-conscious aesthetic guerrillas . . . The result is fiction at once conceived from high artistic intent and executed with depraved populist energy." Steve Ericksonauthor of Zeroville and The Sea Came in at Midnight

    Morris, uses the crisp immediacy of the present tense to lead the reader on a hallucinatory journey from humanity to inhuman transcendence. After a miraculous recovery from near death, a young man known only as the Divinity Student is beset by strange dreams whose lingering effects further alienate him from his fellows.

    writer Priya Sharma, All the Fabulous Beasts collects 16 stunning and monstrous tales of love, rebirth, nature, and sexuality. A heady mix of myth and ontology, horror and the modern macabre.

    Flying carpets; subterranean amusement parks; a band of teenage girls who meet secretly in the night in order to do "nothing at all"; a store with departments of Moorish courtyards, volcanoes, and Aztec temples: these are Millhauser's stock-in-trade as a storyteller, and he employs them to characteristically magical effect. As in Millhauser's other books, including Edwin Mullhouse and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler, his subject is nothing less than the faculty of imagination itself. Here, however, the flights of fancy are unencumbered by Martin Dressler's wealth of period detail, and the result is fun-house prose whose pleasures and terrors are equally gossamer. Millhauser possesses the unique ability to render the quotidian strange, so that, emerging from his stories, the reader often feels the world itself an unfamiliar place--as do the shoppers at his department store, that marketplace of skillful illusion: "As we hurry along the sidewalk, we have the absurd sensation that we have entered still another department, composed of ingeniously lifelike streets with artful shadows and reflections--that our destinations lie in a far corner of the same department--that we are condemned to hurry forever through these artificial halls, bright with late afternoon light, in search of the way out."

    The words haunt him as he studies the Kaiju (Japan’s giant monsters) on an island reserve, attempting to understand the beauty his wife saw.“The Return to Monsterland” opens 'Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone,' a collection of twelve fabulist and genre-bending stories inspired by Japanese folklore, historical events, and pop culture. In “Rokurokubi”, a man who has the demonic ability to stretch his neck to incredible lengths tries to save a marriage built on secrets. The recently dead find their footing in “The Inn of the Dead’s Orientation for Being a Japanese Ghost”. In “Girl Zero”, a couple navigates the complexities of reviving their deceased daughter via the help of a shapeshifter. And, in the title story, a woman instigates a months-long dancing frenzy in a Tokyo where people don’t die but are simply reborn without their memories.Every story in the collection turns to the fantastic, the mysticism of the past, and the absurdities of the future to illuminate the spaces we occupy when we, as individuals and as a society, are at our most vulnerable.

    These stories are explorations of the extreme in human behaviour, where the bizarre chills the spine, and few authors can match Grabinski's depiction of seething sexual frenzy. The Dark Domain will introduce to English readers one of Europe's most important authors of literary fantasy.

    They span many fiction genres; jungle tale, Gothic horror story, psychological study, and morality tale- and possess a universality that has made him a classic Latin American writer.Horacio Quiroga was a master storyteller and author of over two hundred pieces of Latin American fiction that have been compared to the works of Poe, Kipling, and London. Like his stories, his own life from his birth in Uruguay to his suicide in Argentina was filled with adventure, tragedy, and violence.

    In the process, Rombes found the freedom of fiction pushing him towards a new type of writing. For the reader, there is little we can know for sure, but this is what makes the book so exciting."—Irish Times"I very much enjoyed this weird, disturbing, sometimes effed-up novel about strange films, lost films, and the fragile faith in the difference between our fictions and our realities."—Jeff VanderMeer, Electric Literature"Kafka directed by David Lynch doesn’t even come close. It is the most hauntingly original book I’ve read in a very long time. Nicholas Rombes' The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is a strong contender for novel of the year."—3:AM Magazine"Excellent and nightmarish... Rombes’s novel is a love letter to this art of misremembering: these “destroyed films” become as real as any film playing in a theater near you."—Paris Review Daily"Like a cross between Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee's Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling. It is expert at creating a quietly building sense of dread while claiming to do something as straightforward as describe lost films—like those conversations you have in which you realize only too late that what you actually talking about and what you think you are talking about are not the same thing at all. With Rombes, Two Dollar Radio deftly demonstrates why it is rapidly becoming the go-to press for innovative fiction."—Brian Evenson"This hallucinatory and terrifying secret history of film is so meticulously researched and gorgeously written that I wonder if, in fact, Nicholas Rombes has uncovered a lost trove of works by David Lynch, Orson Welles, Antonioni and Jodorowsky somewhere in the California desert. The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is post-modern noir at its best: beautiful and nightmarish by turns. I read it late into the night and couldn't put it down."—Elizabeth Hand"Suffused with the best elements and obscure conspiracies of Bolaño, Ligotti and speculative fiction, Rombes' work gnaws away at the limits of what a novel looks like. Through the writing of films that never existed, it finds a space at once eerily familiar and entirely of its own."—Evan Calder WilliamsIn the mid-'90s a rare-film librarian at a state university in Pennsylvania mysteriously burned his entire stockpile of film canisters and disappeared. Roberto Acestes Laing was highly regarded by acclaimed directors around the globe for his keen eye, appreciation for eccentricity, and creativity in interpretation.Unsure at first whether Laing is a pseudonym or some sort of Hollywood boogeyman, a journalist manages to track the forgotten man down to a motel on the fringe of the Wisconsin wilds. Laing agrees to speak with the journalist, but only through the lens of the cinema. What ensues is an atmospheric, cryptic extrapolation of movies and how they intertwine with life, and the forgotten films that curse the lost librarian still.Nicholas Rombes teaches in Detroit, Michigan. He is author of Ramones from the 33 1/3 series and the book 10/40/70. His writing has appeared in the Believer, Filmmaker Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and the Rumpus.

    The absurdity of both life and death are on full display; in "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In "Knock, Knock," a son hopes to tell one last off-color joke to a father in his final moments, while in "Tunnel of Love," a massage therapist runs the curious practice of providing 'relief' to dying clients. And in "Expedition," fans will be thrilled to find to see a side of Tyler Durden never seen before in a precursor story to Fight Club.Funny, caustic, bizarre, poignant; these stories represent everything readers have come to love and expect from Chuck Palahniuk. They have all the impact of a sharp blow to the solar plexus, with considerable collateral damage to the funny bone.

    Donihe is the best kept secret of the bizarro fiction genre." - Carlton Mellick III, author of Adolf in Wonderland There once was an odd reclusive little man who was in love with his house. He loved this house not in the way that normal people love their homes. His was a more intimate love, like the love between two humans. He loved his house so much that he asked it to marry him, and he believed that his house happily replied with a yes. Unfortunately, their love was to be torn apart the day before their wedding, on the day of the great house holocaust. On this day, every house in the world collapsed for no explainable reason. It was as if they killed themselves, and took many of their occupants with them. Distraught and despairing over the death of his fiance, this man must go on a quest to find out what happened to his beloved home. On his quest: He will meet Tony, a self-declared superhero, who looks kind of like a black Man-At-Arms from the old He-Man cartoons and claims to protect the world from quasi-dimensional psychopomps with his powerful sexpounding abilities. He will meet Manhaus, who seems to be part man and part house. And, finally, he will venture to House Heaven, a world where houses live inside of bigger houses made of people.

    Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through America's rural waterways; In Watermelon Sugar expresses the mood of a new generation, revealing death as a place where people travel the length of their dreams, rejecting violence and hate; and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly 100 poems, first published in 1968.

    . . A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer's victim . . . In the fifteen stories collected here—including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name—Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.Axolotl House taken over Distances Idol of the Cyclades Letter to a young lady in Paris Yellow flower Continuity of parks Night face up Bestiary Gates of heaven Blow-up End of the game At your service Pursuer Secret weapons.