Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1991. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2011), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. The story is included in the collection Extremities (1998).

Still reeling from his divorce, would-be painter Austen takes a fall in a 7-Eleven parking lot that leaves him with brain damage and strange visions, a madness that sends him on a cross-country odyssey of debauchery and pain.

This short story originally appeared in Universe 2 (1992), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection (1993), edited by Gardner Dozois.

This novelette originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Mid-December 1988. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection (1989), edited by Garnder Dozois.

In the hypnotic, psychological landscape of Extremities, people pushed to the limits of endurance enter extreme states of mind and being. These stories shine an eerie light on the netherworld of artistic exploration and insanity; they probe obsession and vengeance and wander along the intersecting paths of the living and the dead. Frequently Koja's characters are betrayed by imagination - artists enslaved by their muses, women dominated by fantasy lovers, ordinary men bewitched by inner voices or inexplicably endowed with powers they cannot control. Koja's language is gorgeously descriptive: every sense is exquisitely evoked. These stories shiver with her simmering intensity.

Table of Contents:

• Arrangement for Invisible Voices - (1993) - short story
• The Neglected Garden - (1991) - short story
• Bird Superior - (1991) - short story
• Illusions in Relief - (1990) - short story
• Reckoning - (1990) - short story
• The Company of Storms - (1992) - short story
• Teratisms - (1991) - short story
• Angels in Love - (1991) - short story
• Waking the Prince - (1995) - short story
• Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard - (1993) - short story
• Lady Lazarus - (1996) - short story
• The Disquieting Muse - (1994) - short story
• Queen of Angels - (1994) - short story
• Jubilee - (1995) - short story
• Pas de Deux - (1995) - short story
• Bondage - (1998) - short story

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2016, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 139, April 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Tess is a sculptor who uses scrap metal to make her art; Bibi is a dancer who revels in the pain of muscular movement. When they come together, they create a new underground art, an obsession with pain, metal, and flesh.

This short story originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, July 1989. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection (1990), edited by Gardner Dozois.

When a black hole materializes in the storage room down the hall from his apartment, poet and video store clerk Nicholas allows his curiosity to lead him into the depths of terror.

From a wartime brothel to the intricate high society of 1870s Brussels, Under the Poppy is a breakout novel of childhood friends, a love triangle, puppetmasters, and reluctant spies.

Under the Poppy is a brothel owned by Decca and Rupert. Decca is in love with Rupert, but he in turn is in love with her brother, Istvan. When Istvan comes to town, louche puppet troupe in tow, the lines of their age-old desires intersect against a backdrop of approaching war. Hearts are broken when old betrayals and new alliances--not just their own--take shape, as the townsmen seek refuge from the onslaught of history by watching the girls of the Poppy cavort onstage with Istvan's naughty puppets...

Under the Poppy is a vivid, sexy, historical novel that zips along like the best guilty pleasure.

From the award-winning author of The Cipher and Buddha Boy, comes Velocities, Kathe Koja's second electrifying collection of short fiction. Thirteen stories, two never before published, all flying at the speed of strange.

Table of Contents:

• 3 - At Eventide - (2000) - short story
• 13 - Baby - (2011) - short story
• 23 - Velocity - (2003) - short story
• 35 - Clubs - short story
• 45 - Urb Civ - (2018) - short story
• 55 - Fireflies - (2006) - short story
• 59 - Coyote Pass - short story
• 71 - Road Trip - (2002) - short story
• 83 - Toujours - (2011) - short story
• 93 - Far and Wee - short story (variant of Far & Wee 2008)
• 102 - The Marble Lily - short story
• 109 - La Reine d'Enfer - (2013) - short story
• 127 - Pas de Deux - (1995) - short story

Acclaimed author Kathe Koja brings her expert eye and editorial sense to the second volume of the Year's Best Weird Fiction. Contributing authors include Julio Cortazar, Jean Muno, Karen Joy Fowler, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Nick Mamatas, Carmen Maria Machado, Nathan Ballingrud, and more. No longer the purview of esoteric readers, weird fiction is enjoying wide popularity. Chiefly derived from early 20th-century pulp fiction, its remit includes ghost stories, the strange and macabre, the supernatural, fantasy, myth, philosophical ontology, ambiguity, and a healthy helping of the outre. At its best, weird fiction is an intersecting of themes and ideas that explore and subvert the Laws of Nature. It is not confined to one genre, but is the most diverse and welcoming of all genres.

Table of Contents:

• Forward - essay by Michael Kelly
• At Home With the Weird - essay by Kathe Koja
• The Atlas of Hell - (2014) - shortfiction by Nathan Ballingrud
• Wendigo Nights - (2014) - shortfiction by Siobhan Carroll
• Headache - (2014) - shortstory by Julio Cortázar (trans. of Cefalea 1951)
• Loving Armageddon - shortfiction by Amanda C. Davis
• The Earth and Everything Under - (2014) - shortfiction by K. M. Ferebee
• Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story - (2013) - shortstory by Karen Joy Fowler
• The Girls Who Go Below - (2014) - shortstory by Cat Hellisen
• Nine - (2014) - shortfiction by Kima Jones
• Bus Fare - (2014) - shortstory by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• The Air We Breathe Is Stormy, Stormy - (2014) - shortstory by Rich Larson
• The Husband Stitch - (2014) - novelette by Carmen Maria Machado
• Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa - (2014) - shortstory by Carmen Maria Machado
• Resurrection Points - (2014) - shortstory by Usman T. Malik
• Exit Through the Gift Shop - (2014) - shortstory by Nick Mamatas
• So Sharp That Blood Must Flow - (2014) - shortstory by Sunny Moraine
• The Ghoul - shortfiction by Jean Muno
• A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide - (2014) - shortstory by Sarah Pinsker
• Migration - (2014) - shortstory by Karin Tidbeck
• Hidden in the Alphabet - (2014) - shortfiction by Charles Wilkinson
• A Cup of Salt Tears - (2014) - shortstory by Isabel Yap