In this dazzling literary debut, Rebecca Curtis displays the gifts that make her one of the most talented writers of her generation. Her characters--young women struggling to find happiness, love, success, security, and adventure--wait tables, run away from home, fall for married men, betray their friends, and find themselves betrayed as well.

In "Hungry Self," a young waitress descends into the basement of a seemingly ordinary Chinese restaurant; in "Twenty Grand," a young wife tries to recover her lost fortune; in "Monsters," one family's paranoia leads to a sacrifice; and in "The Witches," an innocent swim on prom night proves more dangerous than anyone could have imagined. With elegant prose and a wicked sense of humor, these stories reveal Curtis's provocative and uncompromising view of life, one that makes her writing so poignant and irresistible.

Lee Smith is a "teller of tales for tale tellers to admire and envy . . . and] a reader s dream" ("Houston Chronicle"). A celebrated and bestselling writer with a dozen novels under her name, including "Fair and Tender Ladies," "Oral History," and" The Last Girls," she is just as widely recognized for her exceptional short stories. Here, in "Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger," Smith collects seven brand-new stories along with seven of her favorites from three earlier collections. The result? A book of dazzling richness. As the "New York Times Book Review" put it, "In al- most every one of her stories] there is a moment of vision, or love, or unclothed wonder that transforms something plain into something transcendent."

The Astra Militarum is the largest body of fighting men and women in the galaxy. Drawn from the myriad planets of the Imperium, it is the solemn duty of these grim soldiers to fight the wars of the Immortal Emperor against the many enemies that threaten the very existence of humanity. With incredible manpower, and supported by massive battle tanks and hordes of priests, clerks and engineers, it is an indomitable war machine, the Shield of the Emperor. This anthology contains three novels - Fifteen Hours, Death World and Rebel Winter - each with its own associated short story. It is the ideal introduction to the Astra Militarum, and their struggles on the battlefields of the far future.

Meet the women of American Housewife... They smoke their eyes and paint their lips. They channel Beyonce while doing household chores. They drown their sorrows with Chanel No. 5 and host book clubs where chardonnay trumps Charles Dickens. They redecorate. And they are quietly capable of kidnapping, breaking and entering, and murder. These women know the rules of a well-lived life: replace your tights every winter, listen to erotic audio books while you scrub the bathroom floor, serve what you want to eat at your dinner parties, and accept it: you're too old to have more than one drink and sleep through the night. Vicious, fresh and darkly hilarious, American Housewife is a collection of stories for anyone who has ever wondered what really goes on behind the facades of the housewives of America...

Since its first publication, "The Things They Carried" has become an unparalleled Vietnam testament, a classic work of American literature, and a profound study of war that illuminates the capacity, and the limits, of the human heart and soul.

To the tradition of eldritch horror pioneered and refined by writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti comes Laird Barron, an author whose literary voice invokes the grotesque, the devilish, and the perverse with intensity and astonishing craftsmanship. Collected here for the first time are nine terrifying tales of cosmic horror, including the World Fantasy Award-nominated novella "The Imago Sequence," the International Horror Guild Award-nominated "Proboscis," and the never-before-published "Procession of the Black Sloth." Together, these stories, each a masterstroke of craft and imaginative irony, form a shocking cycle of distorted evolution, encroaching chaos, and ravenous insectoid hive-minds hidden just beneath the seemingly benign surface of the Earth. With colorful protagonists, including an over-the-hill CIA agent, a grizzled Pinkerton detective, and a failed actor accompanying a group of bounty hunters, Barron's stories are resonant and authentic, featuring vulnerable, hard-boiled tough guys attempting to stand against the stygian wasteland of night. Throughout the collection, themes of desolation, fear, and masculine identity are played out against the backdrop of an indifferent, devouring cosmos. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Anthony De Sa makes his fiction debut with this stunning collection of interlinked stories that explore the innocent dreams and bitter disappointments of the immigrant experience. Hailed as tender and raw, morbid and surprisingly gentle by the "Vancouver Sun," "Barnacle Love" was a finalist for Canada s highly prestigious Giller Prize.
Moving from a small Portuguese fishing village in the Azores to the shores of Newfoundland, "Barnacle Love" then takes us into the dark alleys of Toronto s Portuguese community in the 1970s. The first half of the book is told by Manuel Rebelo, who has fled his homeland and the crushing weight of his mother s expectations to build a future for himself in a new land. Manuel struggles hard to adjust, but fulfilling the promise of his adopted home is not as simple as he had hoped. The second half of the book is told with candor by Manuel s son Antonio, who along with his sister and mother lives in the shadows cast by Manuel s failures.
With fantastic, sometimes magical details and passionate empathy, Anthony De Sa invites readers into the lives of the Rebelo family. The results are, in the words of writer Nino Ricci, haunting and elegiac. "

In semiautobiographical stories set largely in David Vann's native Alaska, Legend of a Suicide follows Roy Fenn from his birth on an island at the edge of the Bering Sea to his return thirty years later to confront the turbulent emotions and complex legacy of his father's suicide.

"Seismic. A brilliant writer at the height of her powers"
'Sunday Telegraph'

"A stunning collection of eleven tales about the hard lives of the ranchers, cowpokes and country wives who struggle to survive in an unforgiving environment. Written in a wonderfully flexible style that can be both spare and extravagant, her book has been hailed by American critics as a masterpiece."
'Daily Telegraph'

"Proulx's command of the raw idiom of rodeo-riders and cow-hands is astonishing; it gives her the power to summon up entire lives within a few paragraphs. In all their grim, gritty perfection, these stories reveal a supreme stylist at work."
'Esquire'

"Maybe the best writer in America"
'Independent on Sunday'

"A knockout. Buy this book."
'Observer'

"Magnificent."
'Sunday Times'

The music of the Smiths and their iconic frontman Morrissey is beautiful, witty, melancholic--music that makes outsiders feel as though they are part of something. Now an eclectic collection of acclaimed, up-and-coming writers lets their love of the band, its words and music, manifest itself in literary form with smart, emotion-filled, Smiths-inspired short fiction.

In "Please," edited by Peter Wild, love blooms by the cemetery gates and the death of a Miami disco dancer inspires a new TV show. Shoplifters of the world unite to tug a reluctant aardvark from a hole, while a naked birthday rendition of "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" is beamed across the globe. Here is fiction that melds the worlds of music and literature while celebrating the unique artistic contributions of one of the most beloved bands of the past two and a half decades.

In "We'll Always Have Paris"--a new collection of stories gathered together for the first time--the inimitable Ray Bradbury once again delights us with prose that soars and sings. He imagines great things and poignantly observes human foibles and frailties. He enchants us with the magic he mastered decades ago and still performs flawlessly. Whether he's exploring the myriad ways to be reborn, or the circumstances that can make any man a killer, or returning us to Mars, Bradbury opens the world to us and beckons us in. His tales will live forever--we will always have Bradbury.

Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. 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.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE In this inventive collection of stories, Chris Adrian treads the terrain of human suffering--illness, regret, mourning, sympathy--in the most unusual ways. A bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. A boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. A ne'er-do-well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent. With A Better Angel's cast of living and dead characters, at once otherworldly and painfully human, Adrian has created a haunting work of spectral beauty and wit.

The Haiti of Yanick Lahens's path-breaking short fiction is a country demanding our compassion as it reveals to us its horrors. For decades among the forefront of Haitian writers, Lahens has embarked on a renewal of the genre of short stories that she inherited from Caribbean--and especially Haitian--traditions. Through her elliptical and sharp style she succeeds in conveying the authenticity of her people's tragic fight for survival within the scope of our shared human experience. Here is day-to-day life, packed with its myriad emotions, desires, and contradictions, against a backdrop of extraordinary circumstances.

The men and women glimpsed in Lahens's stories are confronted with the overwhelming task of simply staying alive. "The Survivors" unfolds under the Duvalier dictatorship. The story, centered on a group of men who dream of somehow striking out against the regime, shows how fear is passed down from generation to generation. Life is no simpler in the post-Duvalier world of the title story, in which a young man is caught between a mother who lives a devout life filled with self-imposed restrictions and an aunt who religiously serves the spirits of Vodou but makes no apologies for working in the black market. The twelve-year-old girl who narrates "Madness Had Come with the Rain" finds herself swept up in a violent riot following the death of a modern Robin Hood. Lahens's women, although they may act as the poto mitan (or "central pole") in family life and society, experience a particularly grim fate. In the eviction tale "And All This Unease" a beautiful girl reminisces about her happy childhood in the country in order to forget her current life as a prostitute.

Yanick Lahens presents testimonies, opens intimacies, sometimes offers hope, but always returns to the despair afflicting Haiti, because lying within it is the key to her country. The first collection of Lahens's unforgettable short stories available in English, this volume will bring one of the most important voices in contemporary literature to the wider audience it deserves.

Selected as one of the Best Books of the Year in science fiction and fantasy by Amazon.com.

Delving deeper into the genre-spanning territory explored in "Interfictions," the Interstitial Arts Foundation's first groundbreaking anthology, "Interfictions 2" showcases twenty-one original and innovative writers. It includes contributions from authors from six countries, including the United States, Poland, Norway, Australia, France, and Great Britain.

Newcomers such as Alaya Dawn Johnson, Theodora Goss, and Alan DeNiro rub shoulders with established visionaries such as Jeffrey Ford ("The Drowned Life"), Brian Francis Slattery ("Liberation"), Nin Andrews ("The Book of Orgasms"), and M. Rickert ("Map of Dreams"). Also featured are works by Will Ludwigsen, Cecil Castellucci, Ray Vukcevich, Carlos Hernandez, Lavie Tidhar, Elizabeth Ziemska, Peter M. Ball, Camilla Bruce, Amelia Beamer, William Alexander, Shira Lipkin, Lionel Davoust, Stephanie Shaw, and David J. Schwartz.

Colleen Mondor, of the well-known blog "Chasing Ray," interviews the editors for the afterword.

Henry Jenkins, ex-director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program and now a member of USC's Annenberg School for Communication and School of Cinematic Arts, provides a fantastic introduction sure to set readers' imaginations alight.

"Interfictions 2" is here and ready to be read, discussed, taught, blogged, taken apart, and re-interpreted.

Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo, Japan, and brought up in New York City. She earned a PhD in Renaissance Studies at Brown University and taught at Boston University and Northeastern University. She is the author of the novels "Through a Brazen Mirror," "The Porcelain Dove," "Changeling," and "The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen." A co-founder of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, she lives in New York City.

Christopher Barzak is the author of the novels "One for Sorrow" and "The Love We Share Without Knowing." His stories have appeared in Nerve.com, "Pindeldyboz," "Strange Horizons," "Descant," and the first volume of "Interfictions." He teaches writing at Youngstown State University.

With this first book of fiction, a gifted young writer brings together eight superbly crafted stories that peer deeply into the human heart, exploring lives derailed by the loss of a vital connection to the land and to the natural world of which they are a part.

"Mule Killers" evokes the end of an era and of a grandfather's dreams when he decides to replace animal power on his farm with tractors. Two restless young girls in "Sweethearts of the Rodeo" live out their last summer of innocence, riding ponies recklessly and spying on their boss and the wealthy women who visit him. In "Phantom Pain," the Tennessee woods are a sliver of what they once were, men now hunt with GPS and cell phones, and the rumor of a dangerous panther on the loose stirs up a small town.

An unexpected vision of the beauty and mystery of life redeems the darkest moments in this stellar debut collection, a book that readers will want to read and reread.

In a voice so unfailingly chipper it's suspicious, Alex Burrett poses in fiction some disturbing yet certainly possible futures for the human race (and other ambitious, earthbound mammals). Always ready with an impeccable phrase or a sly wink, he shares stories of the most darkly ironic sort, including a field report from a human abattoir, a chronicle of dating Death, and, of course, the tale of the goat that ate its own legs. These thirty brilliant, bizarre, and morbidly hilarious "tales for adults" will delight anyone who doesn't take life (or death) too seriously.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he remains one of the most important voices of Bengali culture to this day. These short stories, written mostly in the 1890s, vividly portray Bengali life and culture. Tagore's treatment of caste culture, bureaucracy and poverty paint a vivid portrait of nineteenth-century India, and all are interwoven with Tagore's perceptive eye for detail, strong sense of humanity and deep affinity for the natural world. Tagore's stories continue to rise above geographic and cultural boundaries to capture the imaginations of readers around the world.

Acclaimed cult-writer Cooper continues to study the material he's always explored so honestly--pornography, violence, and mutilation--but with a satirical touch. This is high-risk literature.--"The New York Times Book Review."

There is a town that brews a strange intoxicant from a rare fruit called the deathberry--and once a year a handful of citizens are selected to drink it. . . .

There is a life lived beneath the water--among rotted buildings and bloated corpses--by those so overburdened by the world's demands that they simply give up and go under. . . .

In this mesmerizing blend of the familiar and the fantastic, multiple award-winning "New York Times" notable author Jeffrey Ford creates true wonders and infuses the mundane with magic. In tales marked by his distinctive, dark imagery and fluid, exhilarating prose, he conjures up an annual gale that transforms the real into the impossible, invents a strange scribble that secretly unites a significant portion of society, and spins the myriad dreams of a restless astronaut and his alien lover. Bizarre, beautiful, unsettling, and sublime, "The Drowned Life" showcases the exceptional talents of one of contemporary fiction's most original artists.