Whether you're an avid gamer, a Twitch subscriber, or just an incidental Subway Surfer, video games have changed the way you interact with the world, and have been part of our lives for over fifty years. Critical Hits is a celebration of play and playfulness, and the lasting impact of videogames. Composed of sharp, impassioned, and inquisitive essays, this collection begins with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado and presents video games through the eyes of eighteen writer-gamers as they straddle real and artificial worlds. In games, they find solace from illness and grief, test ideas about language, bodies, race, and technology, and see their experiences and identities reflected in-or complicated by-the interactive virtual realities they inhabit. From a deep dive into "portal fantasy" games by Charlie Jane Anders and a comic by MariNaomi about her time as a video game producer, to the overlaps in gaming and poetry by Stephen Sexton, Critical Hits illuminates fragments of an industry that is wildly popular, grossly misunderstood, and absolutely spellbinding.

'Ravishingly beautiful' Observer 'Excruciatingly honest and yet vibrantly creative' Irish Times 'Provocative and rich' Economist 'Daring, chilling, and unlike anything else you've ever read' Esquire 'An absolute must-read' Stylist WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021 'A masterpiece. Proceed with caution' Phoebe Bridgers In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

As heard on BBC Radio 4's Front Row: the radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years: in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer. 'A creepily prescient tale ... Insidiously horrifying!' Margaret Atwood 'A masterpiece of creeping dread.' Emily St. John Mandel This is Britain: but not as we know it. THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks - and those who resist. THEY capture dissidents - writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless - in military sweeps, 'curing' these subversives of individual identity. Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget ... Lost for half a century, newly introduced by Carmen Maria Machado, Kay Dick's They (1977) is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece of art under attack: a cry from the soul against censorship, a radical celebration of non-conformity - and a warning. 'Every bit as creepy, tense and strange as when I first read it 40 years ago.' Ian Rankin 'Delicious and sexy and downright chilling ... Read it!' Rumaan Alam 'Crystalline ... The signature of an enchantress.' Edna O'Brien 'I'm pretty wild about this paranoid, terrifying 1977 masterpiece.' Lauren Groff 'Deft, dread filled, hypnotic and hopeful. Completely got under my skin.' Kiran Millwood Hargrave 'Lush, hypnotic, compulsive ... A reminder of where groupthink leads.' Eimear McBride 'A masterwork of English pastoral horror: eerie and bewitching.' Claire-Louise Bennett 'A short shocker: creepy, disturbing, distressing and highly enjoyable.' Andrew Hunter Murray 'Prophetic, chilling and a reminder from the past that we have everything to fight for in the future.' Salena Godden

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FICTION PRIZE 2017

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2018

'Brilliantly inventive and blazingly smart' Garth Greenwell

'Impossible, imperfect, unforgettable' Roxane Gay

'A wild thing ... covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi' New York Times

In her provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism.

A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the mysterious green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague spreads across the earth. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery about a store's dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted house guest.

A dark, shimmering slice into womanhood, Her Body and Other Parties is wicked and exquisite.

The Stoker Award-winning chilling anthology of 18 short stories in tribute to the genius of Shirley Jackson, collecting today's best horror writers. Featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand and more. A collection of new and exclusive short stories inspired by, and in tribute to, Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson is a seminal writer of horror and mystery fiction, whose legacy resonates globally today. Chilling, human, poignant and strange, her stories have inspired a generation of writers and readers. This anthology, edited by legendary horror editor Ellen Datlow, will bring together today's leading horror writers to offer their own personal tribute to the work of Shirley Jackson. Featuring: Joyce Carol Oates Josh Malerman Carmen Maria Machado Paul Tremblay Richard Kadrey Stephen Graham Jones Elizabeth Hand Kelly Link Cassandra Khaw Karen Heuler Benjamin Percy John Langan Laird Barron Jeffrey Ford M. Rickert Seanan McGuire Gemma Files Genevieve Valentine.

The Stoker Award-winning chilling anthology of 18 short stories in tribute to the genius of Shirley Jackson, collecting today's best horror writers. Featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand and more. A collection of new and exclusive short stories inspired by, and in tribute to, Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson is a seminal writer of horror and mystery fiction, whose legacy resonates globally today. Chilling, human, poignant and strange, her stories have inspired a generation of writers and readers. This anthology, edited by legendary horror editor Ellen Datlow, will bring together today's leading horror writers to offer their own personal tribute to the work of Shirley Jackson. Featuring: Joyce Carol Oates Josh Malerman Carmen Maria Machado Paul Tremblay Richard Kadrey Stephen Graham Jones Elizabeth Hand Kelly Link Cassandra Khaw Karen Heuler Benjamin Percy John Langan Laird Barron Jeffrey Ford M. Rickert Seanan McGuire Gemma Files Genevieve Valentine.

By the bestselling author of The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train * 'By opening this book, you've given Patricia Highsmith permission to follow you, catch you, take you apart. Get ready to run' CARMEN MARIA MACHADO * 'Every story shimmers like a dark gem as Highsmith turns her gimlet eye on domesticity, suburban madness, toxic families and the loneliness of childhood. Often mordantly funny and always psychologically acute, this collection is not to be missed' MEGAN ABBOTT * 'The sheer macabre, amoral brilliance of Patricia Highsmith surely makes her one of the finest writers in the English language' RICHARD OSMAN INTRODUCED BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO Patricia Highsmith was one of the great twentieth-century novelists, celebrated for classics The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train, but she was also a masterful and prolific short-story writer. This definitive new collection, featuring two stories that have never been published before, confirms Highsmith as a genius of the genre. Peerlessly disturbing, exhilarating and savagely funny, Highsmith's stories still have the power to startle, presenting a world that is frighteningly familiar and as relevant today as when they were written. * Includes two newly discovered stories * This is the only volume of Highsmith's stories to select from a lifetime of short-story writing

The brilliant new post-apocalyptic collection by master anthologist John Joseph Adams, for the first time including new stories by the edgiest modern writers. WASTELANDS, the unsurpassed collection of thrilling and mind-bending post-apocalyptic short fiction, is breaking new ground. For the first time, volume three--THE NEW APOCALYPSE--will feature ALL-NEW stories by some of the most acclaimed authors today, including New York Times bestsellers Veronica Roth (Divergent), Richard Kadrey (Devil Said Bang), Scott Sigler (Alive), Seanan McGuire (The Winter Long), Tananarive Due (The Good House), and many more! Continuing the tradition that made the earlier volumes definitive, this collection also will feature reprints of the best post-apocalyptic works of recent times. The who's who of short fiction will include Catherynne M. Valente, Ken Liu, Carrie Vaughn, Nisi Shawl, Timothy Mudie, Sofia Samatar, and Shaenon K. Garrity. Representing a diverse range of philosophies and points of view, WASTELANDS: THE NEW APOCALYPSE will be as essential as the original anthologies.

This modern classic of LGBT writing includes an introduction from Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties, and a new afterword from Lillian Faderman. Born in 1940, Lillian Faderman is the only child of an uneducated and unmarried Jewish woman who left Latvia to seek a better life in America. Lillian grew up in poverty, but fantasised about becoming an actress. When her dreams led to the dangerous, seductive world of the sex trade and sham-marriages in Hollywood of the fifties, she realised she was attracted to women, and that show-biz is as cruel as they say. Desperately seeking to make her life meaningful, she studied at Berkeley; paying her way by working as a pin-up model and burlesque dancer, hiding her lesbian affairs from the outside world. At last she became a brilliant student and the woman who becomes a loving partner, a devoted mother, an acclaimed writer and ground-breaking pioneer of gay and lesbian scholarship. Told with wrenching immediacy and great power, Naked in the Promised Land is the story of an exceptional woman and her remarkable, unorthodox life.

100 years after Karel Capek coined the word, "robots" are an everyday idea, and the inspiration for countless stories in books, film, TV and games. They are often among the least privileged, most unfairly used of us, and the more robots are like humans, the more interesting they become. This collection of stories is where robots stand in for us, where both we and they are disadvantaged, and where hope and optimism shines through. Including stories by: Brooke Bolander * John Chu * Daryl Gregory * Peter F. Hamilton * Saad Z. Hossain * Rich Larson * Ken Liu * Ian R. Macleod * Annalee Newitz * Tochi Onyebuchi * Suzanne Palmer * Sarah Pinsker * Vina Jie-Min Prasad * Alastair Reynolds * Sofia Samatar * Peter Watts

There's something in the woods... Shudder-to-Think, Pennsylvania, has been on fire for years. The woods are full of rabbits with human eyes, a deer woman who stalks hungry girls, and swaths of skinless men. And the people of Shudder-to-Think? Well, they're not doing so well either. When El and Octavia wake up in a movie theatre with no memory of the last few hours of their lives, the two teenage dirtbags embark on a horrifying journey to uncover the truth about the strange town that they call home. From critically acclaimed writer Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties) comes The Low, Low Woods, from the smash-hit lineup of the Hill House Comics library. Featuring stunning artwork by Dani (Lucifer), this volume collects The Low, Low Woods #1-6.

The brilliant new post-apocalyptic collection by master anthologist John Joseph Adams, for the first time including new stories by the edgiest modern writers.

The new post-apocalyptic collection by master anthologist John Joseph Adams, featuring never-before-published stories and curated reprints by some of the genre's most popular and critically-acclaimed authors.

In WASTELANDS: THE NEW APOCALYPSE, veteran anthology editor John Joseph Adams is once again our guide through the wastelands using his genre and editorial expertise to curate his finest collection of post-apocalyptic short fiction yet. Whether the end comes via nuclear war, pandemic, climate change, or cosmological disaster, these stories explore the extraordinary trials and tribulations of those who survive.

Featuring never-before-published tales by: Veronica Roth, Hugh Howey, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Tananarive Due, Richard Kadrey, Scott Sigler, Elizabeth Bear, Tobias S. Buckell, Meg Elison, Greg van Eekhout, Wendy N. Wagner, Jeremiah Tolbert, and Violet Allen plus, recent reprints by: Carmen Maria Machado, Carrie Vaughn, Ken Liu, Paolo Bacigalupi, Kami Garcia, Charlie Jane Anders, Catherynne M. Valente, Jack Skillingstead, Sofia Samatar, Maureen F. McHugh, Nisi Shawl, Adam-Troy Castro, Dale Bailey, Susan Jane Bigelow, Corinne Duyvis, Shaenon K. Garrity, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Darcie Little Badger, Timothy Mudie, and Emma Osborne.

Continuing in the tradition of WASTELANDS: STORIES OF THE APOCALYPSE, these 34 stories ask: What would life be like after the end of the world as we know it?

Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond is a groundbreaking speculative fiction anthology that showcases the work from some of the most talented writers inside and outside speculative fiction across the globe-including Junot Diaz, Victor LaValle, Lauren Beukes, N. K. Jemisin, Rabih Alameddine, S. P. Somtow, and more. These authors have earned such literary honors as the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker, among others.

INTRODUCED BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

Patricia Highsmith was one of the great twentieth-century novelists, celebrated for classics The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train, but she was also a masterful and prolific short-story writer. This definitive new collection, featuring two stories that have never been published before, confirms Highsmith as a genius of the genre. Peerlessly disturbing, exhilarating and savagely funny, Highsmith's stories still have the power to startle, presenting a world that is frighteningly familiar and as relevant today as when they were written.

• Includes two newly discovered stories
• This is the only volume of Highsmith's stories to select from a lifetime of short-story writing

from Okazaki Fragments by Kanika Agrawal These proceedings in nature These proceedings in cold biology These proceedings in chemical society These proceedings in physical communication We refer to the concentration of residues We observe that one sediments faster than the other We presume as fact that most of what we do is in growing incomplete short chains We further support the conclusion We indicate direction also by another method We are grateful to Drs. BAX 2020, guest-edited by Joyelle McSweeney and Carmen Maria Machado, is the sixth edition of the critically acclaimed anthology series compiling an exciting mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and genre-defying work. Featuring a diverse roster of new and established authors - including Anne Boyer, Alice Notley, and Raquel Salas Rivera - BAX 2020 presents an expansive view of high-energy writing.