In hyperbolic fashion, the preface to this volume reads, "There are times in the lives of us all in which we are at a loss for words. This volume attempts a partial solution." What follows are thirty things perhaps we shouldn't say, but find ourselves saying anyway. The book is pointedly funny.

Death of a Poet is rhyming couplets meet etched illustrations in this whimsically dark chapbook about poets and their deaths. In hyperbolic fashion, the preface to Thirty Polite Things to Say reads, "There are times in the lives of us all in which we are at a loss for words. This volume attempts a partial solution." What follows are thirty things perhaps we shouldn't say, but find ourselves saying anyway. The book is pointedly funny. Dog Truths includes absurd graphs, charts, and diagrams that tell the truth about dogs-their size, attitude, and likeability is laid bare for all to read and enjoy.

In a coastal town on the Outer Carolina Banks, David Ribault and Merrill Poulnot are at odds, and David wonders if he loves her enough to commit to marriage. When a slick developer, Rawson Steele, arrives in town and starts buying up property, David isn't fooled by his smooth charm and is suspicious of Rawson's seemingly romantic conversations with Merrill. When David agrees to a 4:30 am meeting with Rawson, he hopes to confront him, but while he waits, the population of Kraven Island, including Steele, vanishes. Something just lifted everybody-Merrill, her fanatical father, and kid brother, and aII-out of this space and time and dropped them in a mysterious new place. The question is where.

Kit Reed is one of modern science fiction's most striking voices; her latest novel, "Thinner Than Thou", was acclaimed in both the mainstream and science fiction press. "Dogs of Truth" presents seventeen new or previously uncollected short stories by a writer "The New York Times Book Review" hails as "visionary." Three brand new stories are the centre piece of "Dogs of Truth". They tell of the "Grand Opening" of the world's largest mega-mall, study the relationship of a writer and his muse in "Getting it Back," and take a dark look at the child-free lifestyle in "The Shop of Little Horrors." Stories never-before published in book form include "High Rise High," about a student revolt at the ultimate "secure" high school; "Focus Group," where a star-struck fan and cutting edge biochips dictate what the rest of us see on TV; "Escape from Shark Island," where attachment parenting and the family bed are taken to extremes; and Precautions," in which germ-phobia reigns supreme.

In the tomorrow of Thinner Than Thou, the cult of the body has become the one true religion. The Dedicated Sisters are a religious order sworn to help anorexic, bulimic, and morbidly obese youth. Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps. And through hypnotically powerful evangelical infomercials, the Reverend Earl preaches the heaven of the Afterfat, where you will look like a Greek god and can eat anything you want. Just sign over your life savings and come to Sylphania, the most luxurious weight-loss spa in the world, where the Reverend himself will personally supervise your attainment of physical perfection.
But the glory of youth and thinness that America worships conceals a hidden world where teens train for the competitive eating circuit, where fat porn and obese strippers feed people's dark desires, and where an underground railroad of rebellious religions remember when people worshipped God instead of the Afterfat.
As Annie, an anorexic, and her friend Kelly, who is so massive she can barely walk, find out, the tender promises of the Dedicated Sisters are fulfilled by forced feedings and enforced starvation in hidden prisons.
As middle-aged Jeremy discovers, Sylphania is a concentration camp where failure to lose weight and tone up leads to brutal punishment.
The Rev. Earl's public sympathy for the overweight conceals a private contempt . . . and, beneath that, a terrible longing known only to a select few.
The inevitable decay of old age is the only thing keeping mankind from reaching perfection. Luckily, Reverend Earl has a plan that will take care of that . . . .

The chapbook includes absurd graphs, charts, and diagrams that tell the truth about dogs-their size, attitude, and likeability is laid bare for all to read and enjoy.

Rhyming couplets meet etched illustrations in this whimsically dark chapbook about poets and their deaths.

Called "one of our brightest cultural commentators" by Publishers Weekly, Kit Reed draws from life--with a difference. This new collection brings together thirty-four of her strong, original stories, from early classics like "The Wait" and "Winter" to six never-before-collected short stories, including "The Legend of Troop 13" and "Wherein We Enter the Museum." An early favorite, "Automatic Tiger," is the first in a series of Reed's stories about animals. There's a monkey who grinds out bestsellers with the help of a "creative writing" app. Her uncanny black dog can enter a crowded room and sit down at the feet of the next man to die. Her characters confront war in various arenas: mother/daughter battles, the war of the sexes, the struggles of men scarred by war. Kit Reed's self-described "transgenred" fiction is confirmation of an "extraordinary talent" (The Financial Times). The range and complexity of her work speaks for itself in The Story Until Now.

Seven for the Apocalypse brings together Kit Reed's powerful 1994 novella with seven short stories about love and isolation. A work of metaphysical science fiction and a finalist for the Tiptree award, Little Sisters of the Apocalypse interweaves two stories. The first follows a motorcycle gang of radical nuns on their mission to save an island of women, abandoned by the men who have gone to war, from a band of outlaws. Of course, not all of the women need, or want, to be saved. The second narrative traces the long-term illness and eventual death of the author's mother, herself a World War II widow. The accompanying short stories, never before collected, include the highly acclaimed "River," "The Singing Marine," and "Voyager." These intense, intelligent tales take a hard and often humorous look at the myths we create in order to comfort ourselves, myths whose danger lies in their very perfection.

Kit Reed has been delighting and terrifying readers for over thirty years with her darkly comic speculative fiction. This collection of short stories, drawn from a lifetime's work, shows Reed at the top of her form. First published in venues ranging from The Missouri Review to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, these twenty stories deal with women's lives and feminist issues from the kitchen sink and pink dishmop era through the warlike years of the women's movement to the uneasy accommodation of the present.