In true McInerney style, this new collection of stories examines post 9/11 America in all its dark and morally complex glory

    . . an alphabet soup of -delight in language. Eat up."—Alice Sebold"Brilliant. Wildly inventive, profane, and hilarious."—Bret Easton EllisThe author of the acclaimed cult classic Dear Dead Person ("refreshing, nauseating, hilarious"—Kirkus) returns with this long-awaited collection of brilliantly written and outrageously imaginative short stories.Benjamin Weissman is the author of Dear Dead Person (High Risk/Serpent’s Tail, 1995). He is a contributing editor to Bomb Magazine and writes regularly for the contemporary art magazines Parkett and Artforum. A painter and a professor at Art Center College of Design and Otis College of the Arts, he now lives in Los Angeles.

    He is a chronicler and mentor of young poets, was a leader of the antiwar movement, founded the men's movement, and wrote the bestselling book Iron John, which brought the men's movement to the attention of the world. Throughout these activities, Bly has continued to deepen his own poetry, a vigorous voice in a period of more academic wordsmiths. Here he presents his favorite poems of the last decades-timeless classics from Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. A complete section of marvelous new poems rounds out this collection, which offers a chance to reread, in a fresh setting, a lifetime of work dedicated to fresh perspectives.

    Who are they? They are him and her. They are you and me. They are rowing to salvage what remains of themselves. They are rowing to remember the fun we’ve had."Michael Seidlinger is a homegrown Calvino, a humanist, and wise and darkly whimsical. His invisible cities are the spires of the sea where we all sail our coffins in search of our stories."--Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville“Melding the static, high-concept premise of two humans floating alone on a coffin in a sea devoid of all else with stark and meditative prose, The Fun We've Had evokes a highly unexpected experience, somewhere between Beckett's most hopeless solipsists and the mysterious energy of a child's Choose Your Own Adventure-era dream.”--Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year and Three Hundred Million“It is obvious that Michael J Seidlinger had a great deal of fun writing The Fun We've Had. What more could a reader ask for?”--Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray“The best poets are writing poetry no matter what they are writing, creating entirely new and weird spaces. There is no doubt Seidlinger has made one of the weirdest spaces we will ever inhabit. In The Fun We’ve Had, every visible thing is a love of disturbing tremors, keeping ahead of our ever-curious eyes, hoping to savor every line. What a magnificent book.”--CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank"Seidlinger’s imagination is a sea unto itself, the reader riding these rollicking waves. This book will have you clutching pages as though they’re life vests. Fans of Calvino and Shelley Jackson will dig the slow submerge into this crazy romp."--Joshua Mohr, author of Damascus"Michael J Seidlinger writes with the kind of weird, wonderful, joyful abandon that reminds the reader that world is still the great unknown. In The Fun We’ve Had, he examines the long blank space between life and death, fills it with love and loss and boats made of coffins, with people clinging to life and using the weight of the past as ballast. This is a fun read, true; but it's also a true read, and that's what makes it so beautifully sad."--Amber Sparks, author of The Desert Places and May We Shed These Human Bodies“Ready for an analogy? Here goes: When you need to give a dog a pill, you don’t just jam it down his throat, you wrap that pill in something yummy, like, say, ham. Michael J Seidlinger understands that this principle extends to people and books. So he’s got this pill he wants you to swallow, right? That pill is the truth about love and death and strife and, more generally, the messy mysterious business of being human, and also of being nothingness. Pretty heavy, right? Big old horse pill. But then Seidlinger, no fool, wraps it in the yummy slow-smoked maple goodness of his humor. He obviously had a fine time writing this book, which is precisely the reason you’ll have a fine time reading it.”–Ron Currie Jr., author of Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

    Like in every culture, Chinese folktales too have been instrumental in passing on Chinese tradition, beliefs, customs and values from one generation to the next.Chinese folklore consists of fables, legends, mythology tales and historical accounts. Magical creatures, demons, mythical animals, malicious step-mothers and witty and valiant protagonists take you through the common themes of the triumph of cleverness and wisdom.This collection of Chinese folktales includes the well-known tale of the 'Valiant Shu Lang', the woman who dressed herself as a man to join the military, 'The Laughing Monks' who taught the path to a contentted life throguh the only language they knew - laughter, and 'The Great Discovery', the tale of how a phenix led a young couple to a treasure they later discover to be salt.

    Convincing her well-intentioned but misinformed coworkers that she’s as capable as ever is her biggest challenge…until Connor shows up on her door. Can they heal old wounds and give their fledgling marriage a fresh start?Meanwhile, tragedy strikes young Zoe, and Emily has a life-changing choice to make.Follow along as Garth and Emily step out, together, to meet every challenge.

    Its primary mechanic is the advanced artificial intelligence that lets the neighbor remember the players actions to foresee his future moves. Avoiding detection — essential to complete the game — thus becomes more complicated the more the player takes a similar path while trying to sneak past the neighbor. Frequently taken routs are quickly armed with traps (that prevent escape), obstacles (such as boards in windows), and alarms (like cameras placed here and there)

    Has her chess champion husband found a final move beyond the grave? A chess fable from the wildly inventive, immensely talented author of A Cure for Suicide and Silence Once Begun, “The Lesson” is a surprising, poignant, macabre tale of games, children, and the unknowability of the beyond. Channeling the chess masterpieces of Nabokov and Stefan Zweig, Jesse Ball's newest is a fabulous and entertaining novella that astonishes from first move to last.

    It was new, it was shiny, and that meant he would be able to make a killing by playing it. Joshua's a professional gamer, someone who makes a living by selling items and accounts in the 23rd century, and Macrocosm promises to be better than every game before it. When he discovers that starting as a zombie provides amazing bonuses, Joshua felt like he didn't have a choice but to pick it. Macrocosm has its own gods, and they treat the players like pawns in their own little games. Joshua quickly draws the attention of the Plague God Filth, and his peaceful plans quickly take a turn for the worse as he finds himself the subject of one such game. Behind the scenes, the mysterious company behind Macrocosm has its own plans. What are they recruiting high level players for, and why are these players never seen again?

    Through a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices, these poems take us from coast to coast, New York to LA, and toward uneasy questions about intimacy, love, death, and the human spirit. Dimitrov critiques America’s long-lasting obsessions with money, celebrity, and escapism—whether in our personal, professional, or family lives. What defines a life? Is love ever enough? Who are we when together and who are we by ourselves? These questions echo throughout the poems, which resist easy answers. The voice is both heartfelt and skeptical, bruised yet playful, and always deeply introspective.from "Water"What is aging exactly?There are new jobs and peopleand someone dies before noon every day.I am swimming and swimming…in May or an ocean,I don’t see the reason. “But that’s unimportant,” you said.“Just keep doing it over again until one day you can’t.”Spring excites us and we know what it is every time.The minutes in meetings are life’s most undistinguished;that’s obvious. And what’s obvious makes us all foolsthen fast friends.Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013), and the online chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review. He is the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets where he edits the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. He has taught creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Marymount Manhattan College, Bennington College, and lives in New York City.

    Her long dark auburn hair cascaded over her shoulders and her pale, attractive face, wide set eyes and full sensuous lips took his breath away. Robert could not help staring at her in frank amazement. He found it difficult to equate this alluring woman with the tall, awkward girl he vaguely remembered while a young boy at Fairlee Manor in Scotland.* * *Action, adventure and erotic entanglements loom large in young Robert Hamilton’s future as he seeks to make his fortune in the rough and tumble world of the Johannesburg goldfields in the closing years of the nineteenth century.Robert’s business interests and adventures in the wilds of South Africa, bring him into close contact with the Boer peoples of the Transvaal Republic. As the threat of a British invasion looms large over the country, his support for the Boer cause finds him on the opposing side to his fellow uitlanders – foreigners. He is dismayed to discover that both of his brothers have enlisted in Canadian regiments ready to fight on the side of Britain in the Anglo-Boer War.

    Ben will stop at nothing to save his son, but what awaits him is an evil, more dangerous and insidious than he could have ever anticipated. Into the Lion’s Den is a fast-paced action thriller, a compelling saga of the love of family and the indomitable will to survive in the face of an implacable malevolence.

    Resistant to the label of Gunfighter, Persimmon vehemently rejects offers to be a gun for hire, preferring to drift aimlessly in a futile effort to outrun his memories. It takes a young boy and his widowed mother to give Persimmon purpose once more. Befriended by a failed writer, the pair take a reluctant journey across the country to help her. What they discover is that happiness sometimes carries a steep price tag. Saving the widow will cost more than they could have imagined. Persimmon must decide whether or not to make the purchase, even if that means paying with his life.

    Most people know one another; if not by name, then by face. And yet neighbours do not ask one another what they did in Liberia, for the question is considered an accusation. Many people here fled Liberia's brutal civil war, a conflict that claimed the lives of one in fourteen Liberians. The question of who is responsible is a bitter one. Jacob Massaquoi arrived on Park Hill Avenue in 2002 limping heavily. Before he had been there a week, a hundred stories abounded about his injury. By this time Rufus Arkoi was the acknowledged leader of New York's Liberians, a man who had sat out the war in America, but who harboured hopes of one day returning home to run for president. Within a year the two men were locked in a conflict that threatened to consume the community. The suspicions and accusations the residents had bottled up for years exploded at once. To observers it appeared that this enclave of exiles was frozen at the time of their flight, restarting a war that had ended back home.Jonny Steinberg spent two years in New York shadowing Rufus and Jacob, eventually journeying to Liberia to piece together their biographies from the people who once knew them. What emerges is a story of a horrific and heart-wrenching civil war, of a deeply troubled relationship between America and West Africa, of personal ambition wrestling with moral responsibility, of memory wrestling with forgetfulness and of the quest to be human in a world losing its humanity. Mixing history, reportage and a wealth of extraordinary personal stories Jonny Steinberg takes up the tale of a fractured African nation and its diaspora to remarkable effect. Little Liberia is a unique and important book, told with clarity and compassion, by one of our best and brightest young writers.

    In one narrative, a man wakes up one morning to find the odor of dead fish won't go away, but no one else can smell it. In another, a couple's visit with friends to watch the Academy Awards has the protagonist envying his friends' lawn and lifestyle. In these and eleven other stories, Christopher Meeks balances tragedy and wit. As novelist David Scott Milton explains, "In this collection, Christopher Meeks examines the small heartbreaks of quiet despair that are so much a part of all our lives. He does it in language that is resonant, poetic, and precise.... If you like Raymond Carver, you'll love Meeks. He may be as good--or better."