These are vibrant, weighty stories that herald the arrival of a young writer of surprising feeling and depth.“Terror Birds” tracks the dissolution of a marriage set against an ostrich farm in the sweltering Arizona desert; “Dharma at the Gate” features the tempest of young love as a teenaged girl must choose between man’s best friend, her damaged boyfriend, and a beckoning future; “Captivity” follows an octopus handler at an aquarium still haunted by the disappearance of her brother years ago; “The Girls of Apache Bryn Mawr” details a Greek chorus of Jewish girls at a summer camp whose favorite counselor goes missing under suspicious circumstances; “In the Spirit Room” centers on a scientist suffering the heartbreaking loss of a parent from Alzheimer’s while living in the natural history museum where they both worked; in “Fire Blight” a father grieving over his wife’s recent miscarriage finds an outlet for comfort in their backyard garden and makes a surprising discovery on how to cherish living things; and in the title story, a retired woman traces the steps of the husband who left her thirty years ago, burning the letters he had sent along the way, while the luminous and exotic wildlife of the Pacific Ocean opens up to receive her.Unflinching, exciting, ambitious and yet heartfelt, The Last Animal will guide readers through a menagerie of settings and landscapes as it underscores the connection among all living things.Content: Terror birds Dharma at the gate Captivity Silence The girls of Apache Bryn Mawr Isaiah on Sunday In the spirit room Landscaping Fire blight The last animal.

    Chiusano’s dazzling stories delve into family, boyhood, sports, drugs, love, and all the weird quirks of growing up in a tight-knit community on the edge of the city. In the tradition of Junot Díaz’s Drown, Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, and Russell Banks’s Trailerpark, this is a poignant and piercing collection—announcing the arrival of a distinct new voice in American fiction.

    Weird Women, edited by award-winning anthologists Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger, collects some of the finest tales of terror by authors as legendary as Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Charlotte Gilman-Perkins, alongside works of writers who were the bestsellers and critical favorites of their time—Marie Corelli, Ellen Glasgow, Charlotte Riddell—and lesser known authors who are deserving of contemporary recognition.As railroads, industry, cities, and technology flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, so did stories exploring the horrors they unleashed. This anthology includes ghost stories and tales of haunted houses, as well as mad scientists, werewolves, ancient curses, mummies, psychological terrors, demonic dimensions, and even weird westerns. Curated by Klinger and Morton with an aim to presenting work that has languished in the shadows, all of these exceptional supernatural stories are sure to surprise, delight, and frighten today’s readers.

    Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere—and, sometimes, turning back again. A pharmacist living in New York smuggles drugs to his ailing father in Manila, only to discover alarming truths about his family and his past. In Bahrain, a Filipina teacher drawn to a special pupil finds, to her surprise, that she is questioning her own marriage. A college student leans on her brother, a laborer in Saudi Arabia, to support her writing ambitions, without realizing that his is the life truly made for fiction. And in the title story, a journalist and a nurse face an unspeakable trauma amidst the political turmoil of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s.In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s powerful debut collection explores the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. Deeply compassionate and richly felt, In the Country marks the emergence of a formidable new writer.

    A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool—a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination—but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister's? A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg.Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.

    “As soon as you complete a description of what a good story must be, a new example flutters through an open window, lands on your sleeve, and proves your description wrong,” writes Anthony Doerr about the task of selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. The year’s best stories are a diverse, addictive group exploring everything from America’s rich rural culture to its online teen culture to the fragile nature of the therapist-client relationship. This astonishing collection brings together the realistic and dystopic, humor and terror. For Doerr, “with every new artist, we simultaneously refine and expand our understanding of what the form can be.”  The Best American Short Stories 2019 includes Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Jamel Brinkley, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ursula K. Le Guin, Manuel Muñoz, Sigrid Nunez, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Jim Shepherd, Weike Wang, and others.

    A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon--until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won't come out of the fitting room--and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband's features are beginning to slide around his face--to match her own.In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien--and, through it, find a way to liberation. The English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearlessly inventive young writers.

    Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., Richard Yates’s domestic realism, B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter—how such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to its startling and singular charm.

    Dick and Thomas Harris, Etchinson's award-winning fiction is justly known for its creepy ambiance.

    / My journey to your depths begins tonight / To serve immortal till the stars turn right."These lines from a poem by Ann K. Schwader are the coda for this fine collection of tales about H.P. Lovecraft's Innsmouth--that decadent, smugly rotting New England town where half-human creatures with forbidding batrachian faces follow the arcane practices of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. In his erudite and witty introduction, Robert M. Price calls Innsmouth "the most effective, most evocative ... example of Lovecraft's full-blown alien civilizations." The Innsmouth Cycle includes 13 stories and 3 poems, including the three tales by Lord Dunsany, Robert W. Chambers, and Irvin S. Cobb that inspired Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth." This collection is planned as the first of a pair, the second half of which will be Tales of Innsmouth, containing (according to Price) all new works of "fishy fiction."A fun detail: this book is "respectfully dedicated to Ben Chapman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon." --Fiona Webster

    Until now, those stories have been unpublished and unavailable for others to read but - due to popular demand - he has compiled them in this collection. Included within this collection: Some Drabbles To Get You Started Under The Safe House (novella) Room To Breathe (novella) The First Cuddle (short story) Santa’s Secret (short story) Smoking Kills (short story) Needles (short story) Cold (short story) Sleeping Dogs (short story) Ugly (short story) About the author: Matt Shaw is the published author, and film director, of over 200 stories including his infamous black cover range of extreme horrors. In those titles he is known for pushing boundaries and has been nominated for multiple awards within the "splatterpunk" genre but do not be fooled - Shaw isn't only capable of writing the extremes. His dark psychological horrors are known for getting under the skin of the readers, causing both sleepless nights and restless dreams... PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR “There is a ferocity about Matt Shaw's writing that is both welcome and also necessary when it comes to horror.” - Shaun Hutson, author of "Slugs" Categories for "UNDER THE SAFE HOUSE & OTHER STORIES" - Horror - Psychological Fiction - Depression - Grief - Bullying - Suspense horror

    A woman offers colonizer blood to the Mother of Chaos. A boy joins corpse destroyers to seek vengeance for the death of his father.These stories intertwine with those of a vengeful spirit and a hungry creature to paint a timely, compelling, pulpy portrait of revenge, family, and hope.

    A deadbeat dad gains employment as a lady-in-waiting in a fairytale bromance where every character looks exactly like someone else from John Carpenter’s The Thing. The unknowing victim of a cruel prank, a simpleton spends his entire life waiting on a park bench for the hottest girl in school. Using only his twenty-sided die and good old-fashioned D&D magic, a man must continually resurrect the neighborhood kid regularly murdered on his own front lawn. An aging slaughterhouse worker and the iconic figure from Edvard Munch’s The Scream hit the clubs every weekend in a vain attempt to get laid.These and many more absurdities await in Clown Tear Junkies, the debut collection from Douglas Hackle.

    Whether based in sf or fantasy, Shea's short fiction is not for the squeamish.Contents:Polyphemus (1981)The Angel of Death (1979)Uncle Tuggs (1986)The Pearls of the Vampire Queen (1982)The Horror on the #33 (1982)The Extra (1987)The Autopsy (1980)

    Gary Handler has issues. His boss hates him, his mother hounds him, and his cat thinks he’s an idiot. But that’s okay because Gary’s got the perfect solution to all of life’s troubles: a porn site subscription and his right hand.Sadly, all habits grow old, even the fun ones. Gary soon finds himself at the doorstep of a creepy old pawn shop where he buys a used adult novelty toy to spice up his one-man sex life.Pity for him that it’s cursed by the angry spirits of all the “kids” he’s flushed down the toilet. Needless to say, hairy palms are about to become the least of his worries.----------Jack on, jack off ... with the Jacklight in book 2 of Shingles, the horror comedy series that’s not for those with faint hearts or weak bladders.