She that fights monsters might take care lest she become a monster - Friedrich Nietzsche This is a story about Christine and the day she grew a penis.

Welcome to New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller Brandon Sanderson's first collection of short fiction. These wonderful works, originally published individually, have been collected for the first time and convey the true expanse of the Cosmere. Telling the exciting tales of adventure Sanderson fans have come to expect, Arcanum Unbounded include the Hugo Award-winning novella 'The Emperor's Soul', an excerpt from the graphic novel 'White Sand', and the never-before-published Stormlight Archive novella 'Edgedancer'. The collection will include nine works in all: 'Edgedancer' (Stormlight Archive) 'The Hope of Elantris' (Elantris) 'The Eleventh Metal' (Mistborn) 'The Emperor's Soul' (Elantris) 'Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania' (excerpt; Mistborn) 'White Sand' (excerpt; Taldain) 'Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell' (Threnody) 'Sixth of Dusk' (First of the Sun) 'Mistborn: Secret History' (Mistborn) This superb collection also includes essays and illustrations which offer an insight into the numerous worlds in which the stories are set.

After a life dedicated to the study of languages, A. Colin Wright has distilled his life's observations into this engaging collection of short stories, most of which have been previously published in literary journals. Now retired, his life's adventures, which include serving in the British Air Force, attending Cambridge University, and being a professor of Russian, have inspired this collection. "I'm a librarian and I kissed a film star once. I touched her nipples too. At least, I think I did." So begins "Queen's Grill." Horatio Humphries, one of the unreliable narrators, strikes up a brief friendship with a movie star on a rough Atlantic crossing, but his "twin" brother doesn't believe him. In "A Pregnant Woman with Parcels at Brock and Bagot," an unnamed woman may or may not have an affair with a man she met at a party-depending on whether she can get by a woman in front of her. "Distantly from Gardens," a variant on the theme of the "double" found often in Russian literature, presents a man with a split personality, inhabited by two narrators who are his past as well as his present. While other stories are told in either the first or third person, the subject here demands the use of the second. The stories in A Cupboardful of Shoes explore subjects as wide-ranging as largely disappointed love, violence, and war, sometimes with an underlying religious theme, serving to illustrate Wright's eclectic style and literary interests.

Love beneath the Napalm is James D. Redwood's collection of deeply affecting stories about the enduring effects of colonialism and the Vietnamese War over the course of a century on the Vietnamese and the American and French foreigners who became inextricably connected with their fate. These finely etched, powerful tales span a wide array of settings, from the former imperial capital of Hue at the end of the Nguyen Dynasty, to Hanoi after the American pullout from Vietnam, the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, contemporary San Francisco, and Schenectady, New York. Redwood reveals the inner lives of the Vietnamese characters and also shows how others appear through their eyes. Some of the images and characters in Love beneath the Napalm-the look that Mr. Tu's burned and scarred face always inflicts on strangers in the title story; attorney and American Vietnam War-veteran Carlton Griswold's complicated relationship with Mary Thuy in "The Summer Associate"; Phan Van Toan's grief and desire, caught between two worlds in "The Stamp Collector"-provide a haunting, vivid portrayal of lives uprooted by conflict. Throughout, readers will find moments that cut to the quick, exposing human resilience, sorrow, joy, and the traumatic impact of war on all those who are swept up in it.