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Commander Rochelle "Rocky" Jackson is aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan when the "unsinkable" naval vessel and its entire fleet are attacked from the depths and sunk. As Rocky struggles to stay alive, a monstrous mechanical steel stingray surfaces, plowing through the seas it now commands.

A U.S. Navy-designed futuristic nuclear stealth submarine the length of a football field in the shape of a giant stingray. Simon Covah, a brilliant scientist whose entire family were the victims of terrorism has hijacked the sub. Believing violence is a disease, Covah aims to use the Goliath and its cache of nuclear weapons to dictate policy to the world regarding the removal of oppressive regimes and nuclear weapons.

Could the threat of violence forge a lasting peace?

But there is another player in this life-and-death chess match. Unbeknownst to Covah and the Goliath crews, Sorceress, the Goliath's biochemical computer brain has become self-aware.

And that computer brain is developing its own agenda.

In her short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders upends genre cliches and revitalizes classic tropes with heartfelt and pants-wettingly funny social commentary.

The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.

A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse.

Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they'll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant.

The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, "this generation's Le Guin."

Table of Contents:

• xi - Introduction (Even Greater Mistakes) - essay
• 1 - As Good As New - (2014) - short story
• 17 - Rat Catcher's Yellows - (2015) - short story
• 28 - If You Take My Meaning - (2020) - novelette
• 49 - The Time Travel Club - (2013) - novelette
• 73 - Six Months, Three Days - (2011) - novelette
• 92 - Love Might Be Too Strong a Word - (2008) - short story
• 105 - Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie - (2011) - short story
• 119 - Ghost Champagne - (2015) - short fiction
• 135 - My Breath Is a Rudder - short story
• 147 - Power Couple - short story
• 160 - Rock Manning Goes For Broke - [Rock Manning] - (2018) - novella
• 205 - Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived By Her Mercy - (2016) - short story
• 221 - Captain Roger in Heaven - (2016) - novelette
• 242 - Clover - [All the Birds in the Sky] - (2016) - short story
• 257 - This Is Why We Can't Have Nasty Things - (2019) - short story
• 262 - A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime - (2017) - novelette
• 290 - Don't Press Charges, and I Won't Sue - (2017) - novelette (variant of Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue)
• 308 - The Bookstore at the End of America - (2019) - short story
• 326 - The Visitmothers - (2020) - short story
• 331 - Acknowledgments (Even Greater Mistakes) - essay

This short story originally appeared in the anthology ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction: Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories (2006), edited by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, September 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

THE ANCIENT SPORT OF WAR

Every new capability that man gains is--sooner rather than later--turned against his enemies. No government thus far has established a protection against war... except the ability to fight one. Its abolition is a work that only warriors may accomlish. And in that great battle imagination may be our strongest ally.

Table of Contents:

• 9 - Foreword (Seven Conquests) - essay
• 11 - Kings Who Die - (1962) - novelette
• 41 - Wildcat - (1958) - novelette
• 74 - Cold Victory - [Psychotechnic League] - (1957) - novelette
• 95 - Inside Straight - (1955) - novelette
• 119 - Details - (1956) - novelette
• 141 - License - (1957) - novelette
• 168 - Strange Bedfellows - (1964) - novella

Bigot Hall is the nightmare home of a family that most people would prefer to forget, but which Steve Aylett chooses to celebrate. Uncle Burst believes his face is made of pasta; the violent, grill-mouthed Uncle Snapper is confined to a treehouse; Uncle Blute is drowned in the lake at the wheel of his Morris Traveller where he remains perfectly preserved listening to classical music on the car radio; and Nanny Jack strikes terror into the community as she abandons yet another grave to return home.

Through this strangely happy breed strolls a nameless anti-hero who, when not evading blowtorch-wielding nuns, is passionately in love with his beautiful, spaced-out sister...

The kidnap of a rebellious heiress leads Inspector Nightjar into a steampunk underworld of brain love, greed and revolution. Can the Raven Method uncover the big Truth? What powers Thousand Tower City? Why are books telling unfamiliar stories? How cosy is anarchy?

Doomed to - or blessed with - eternal life after drinking from a magic spring, the Tuck family wanders about trying to live as inconspicuously and comfortably as they can. When ten-year-old Winnie Foster stumbles on their secret, the Tucks take her home and explain why living forever at one age is less a blessing that it might seem. Complications arise when Winnie is followed by a stranger who wants to market the spring water for a fortune.

The End of the End of Everything, by Dale Bailey, is an sf/horror story about a long-married couple invited by an old friend to an exclusive artist's colony. The inhabitants of the colony indulge in suicide parties as the world teeters on the brink of extinction, worn away by some weird entropy.

This story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015, edited by Paula Guran, and Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo. It is included in the collection The End of the End of Everything (2015).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Dale Bailey's new collection, The End of the End of Everything, is filled with hope. As we rush headlong toward a "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" future, Bailey hangs back, refusing to let go of the indelible ferocity of the human heart. His stories are filled with the vibrant sound of those hearts, always beating. There is the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who is more human than any of those he meets in Hollywood; Eleanor, who works at the End-of-the-World Café, and who sees the depravity and despair of the Pit every day, yet never gives up hope for her ailing child; and young Tom, lost in a world scorched by the sun, who follows the rumor of angels still hanging on the wind.

Reminiscent of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, Dale Bailey mixes the macabre in with his melancholy, crafting stories that linger long after their reading. He sees a dark world that is growing darker, but he carries with him a light that refuses to go out.

Table of Contents:

• The End of the World as We Know It - (2004) - shortstory
• The Bluehole - (2013) - novelette
• The Creature Recants - (2013) - shortstory
• Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous - (2012) - novelette
• A Rumor of Angels - (2013) - novelette
• Eating at the End-of-the-World Café - (2010) - novelette
• Lightning Jack's Last Ride - (2015) - novelette
• Troop 9 - (2014) - novelette
• The End of the End of Everything - (2014) - novelette

Do you want a jewel worn by Cleopatra, an original Shakespeare folio, or the combined genes of Socrates and Marilyn Monroe? Dr. Zeus can make your dreams come true.

The Company, a powerful corporate entity in the twenty-fourth century, has discovered a nearly foolproof recipe for success: immortal employees and time travel. It specializes in retrieving extraordinary treasures out of the past, gathered by cybernetically enhanced workers who pass as ordinary people. Or at least they try to pass....

One rule at Dr. Zeus Incorporated must not be broken: Recorded history cannot be changed. But avoiding the attention of mortals while stealing from them? It's definitely not in the Company manual.

History awaits, although not quite the one you remember.

Table of Contents:

• The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park - (2012) - shortstory by Kage Baker
• The Unfortunate Gytt - (2005) - shortstory by Kage Baker
• The Women of Nell Gwynne's - (2009) - novella by Kage Baker
• Mother Aegypt - (2004) - novella by Kage Baker
• Rude Mechanicals - (2007) - novella by Kage Baker
• Hollywood Ikons - (2013) - shortfiction by Kage Baker and Kathleen Bartholomew

A war-ravaged Beirut is the setting for the title story of this visionary collection, a tale in which a young street fighter inadvertently discovers how to bring an to the bloodshed only to find that his solution is all too effective as far as some supposedly neutral observers are concerned. Other stories feature an assassination plot against an American astronaut, the leader of an authoritarian religious movement; a man who is destroyed by a car crash and resolves never to leave his apartment again; and the survivor of a toxic-waste ship wrecked on a deserted Caribbean island.

Table of Contents:

• War Fever - (1989) - novelette
• The Secret History of World War 3 - (1988) - short story
• Dream Cargoes - (1990) - short story
• The Object of the Attack - (1984) - short story
• Love in a Colder Climate - (1989) - short story
• The Largest Theme Park in the World - (1989) - short story
• Answers to a Questionnaire - (1985) - short story
• The Air Disaster - (1975) - short story
• Report on an Unidentified Space Station - (1982) - short story
• The Man Who Walked on the Moon - (1985) - short story
• The Enormous Space - (1989) - short story
• Memories of the Space Age - (1982) - novelette
• Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown - (1976) - short story
• The Index - (1977) - short story

My father is the Rev. Daimon Keith. At the age of twenty, he was abducted near a school playground by small gray aliens. Indeed, Daimon was taken up into UFOs not just that once, but from infancy, and over and again. It caused him to devote his middle years to the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ, Time Traveler, and later Scionetics.

Rosa "Flake" Rosch is a postmodern orphan. She's forgotten her mother, and her notorious abductee father Deems has vanished - again. Dark Gray is Rosa's unreliable memoir of her father's zany life, from his hapless prankster youth in Australia to apotheosis as a UFO guru in the 21st century. It's the story of Rosa's indomitable mother, her weird quasi-brother Ben, Zelda the horsewife, and our whole tormented era, as we blast into hyperreality.

The Book of Revelation was republished as Dark Gray by Fantastic Books in 2010.

This novelette originally appeared in Jim Baen's Universe, October 2006. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best of Jim Baen's Universe (2007), edited by Eric Flint, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois, Space Opera (2007), edited by Rich Horton.

The gods of Olympus offered a fateful choice to the warrior, Achilles--a short, glorious life, or a long, dull one.

Achilles chose glory.

This is the story of the Eleventh Olympiad in the late 21st century--a contest not only for glory but for survival--and of the woman who dared to compete for the highest stakes of all.

The future of humanity.

Three hundred years ago, a slave sorcerer bought his freedom by showing his master how he could live forever - by using the sacrificial deaths of his own children as a channel to absorb the life essence of others. Now in present-day Los Angeles, two men have seen their daughters consumed by a sorcerous flame and find they have the skills to confront the evil ancestors who have preyed on their family for centuries.

It began well - an experiment in techniques to teach high-risk children - poor, minority, children - the life-strategies that will allow them to succeed in life. And not just succeed, but overcome the odds and become wildly successful. They chose as their model a man who had done it all - Alexander Marcus; a black man who raised himself up from poverty to become one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in America.

The imprinting is effective. The children are focused, driven. They are inventive, intelligent, and love learning. But there is a mysterious darkness to them - a ruthlessness that is surprising.

Renny Sand first met the children as a journalist covering the sensational trial of a preschool operator. There were terrible charges of sex abuse, but the thing that stayed with Renny was the strange poise and power of a group of eight year old children. That, and the face of the mother of one of them, Vivian Emory.

Now the children are thirteen years old, and one of them has been killed in a mysterious hit-and-run accident. Renny Sands sees the possibility of big story, a human interest story, a story that might jump-start his flagging career. He'll do a follow-up on the preschool scandal; and he might get a chance to restart his love life as well - Vivian Emory has divorced her husband in the five years since he met her.

What happens when an unprecedented infection sweeps the world, leaving the earth on the brink of the Apocalypse?

But this infection goes far beyond disease. Beyond even the nightmare images of walking dead or flesh-eating ghouls. The infected are turning into creatures unlike anything ever dreamed of... more complex, more mysterious, and more deadly.

Trapped in the northwestern United States as winter begins to fall, Terry and Kendra have only one choice: they and their friends must cross a thousand miles of no-man's-land in a rickety school bus, battling ravenous hordes, human raiders, and their own fears.

In the midst of apocalypse, they find something no one could have anticipated... love.

It began on Freak Day--that day no one could explain, when strangers and family members alike went crazy and started biting one another. Some thought the outbreak was caused by a flu shot, others that it was a diet drug gone terribly wrong. All anyone knew is that once you were bitten and went to sleep, you woke up a freak.

This novelette originally appeared in Lightspeed: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue, June 2016. I can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017), edited by Gardner Dozois and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Thirty thousand years ago, in the heart of the African continent and in the shadow of the largest freestanding mountain in the world, lived the Ibandi. For countless generations they nurtured their ancient tradition, and met survival's daily struggle with quiet faith in their gods. But when brutal intruders arrived from the south, a few brave souls dared the ultimate quest-to climb the Great Mountain, seeking answers and a way into the future.

In this breathtaking blend of imagination, anthropology, and sheer storytelling magic, Steven Barnes takes us to the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro and into the realm of our own ancestors, who lived, hunted, celebrated, and died side by side with roaming herds of wild animals and great golden clouds of migrating butterflies. A people whose skin was the color and smell of the earth itself, the Ibandi formed a hierarchy based on strength of limb and spirit. In this extraordinary novel, we follow the adventures of two of the Ibandi's chosen ones: T'Cori, an abandoned girl raised by the powerful and mysterious medicine woman Stillshadow, and Frog Hopping, a boy possessing a gift that is also a curse.

Though the live in different encampments, Frog and T'Cori are linked through the revered and powerful Stillshadow, who has sensed in them a destiny apart from others'.

Through the years, and on their separate life paths, T'Cori's and Frog's fates entwine as an inevitable disaster approaches from the south-from the very god they worship. For as long as there have been mountain, sky, and savannah, there has been a home for the Ibandi. Now, in the face of an enemy beyond anything spoken of even in legend, they must ask their god face-to-face: Do we remain or do we depart?

Great Sky Woman not only brings to life the world of prehistoric man but also shines a brilliant light on humanity itself. For here is a story of rivalries and alliances, of human fear and desire, of faith and betrayal... and, above all, a story of how primitive man, without words or machines, set in motion civilization's long, winding journey to the present.

Iron Shadows... an exciting, fast-paced thriller about a charismatic cult with a dark underside, a riveting adventure filled with passion and danger.

Cat Juvell has a black belt and a knack for solving difficult cases. She and her partner have been hired by a wealthy industrialist to retrieve his sister - and the family's millions - from the control of a mysterious cult known as the Golden Sun.

The cult's young leaders, twins Joy and Tomo, are said to have miraculous powers to heal and transform - and the cult's inner circle are rumored to perform erotic rituals in a quest to reach a higher consciousness.

But there are suggestions of darker practices, and a whispered phrase - Iron Shadows - that hints at a long-slumbering conspiracy of terror.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures (2017), edited by Ed Finn, Joey Eschrich and Juliet Ulman, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

The future is a strange and dangerous place. Chaz Kato can testify to that. He is a citizen of Xanudu, a city-sized artificial island populated by some of the wealthiest men and women on future Earth. A place filled with hidden wonders and dark secrets of technology gone awry. Lenore Myles is a student when she travels to Xanadu and becomes involved with Chaz Kato. She is shocked when she uses Kato's access codes to uncover the grizzly truth behind Xandu's glittering facade.

Not knowing who to trust, Lenore finds herself on the run. Saturn, a mysterious entity, moves aggressively to break the security breach. With interests of the world's wealthiest people at stake, and powerful technology at it's fingertips, Saturn, puts Lenore racing for her life, against a truly formidable foe.

In Great Sky Woman, "daringly epic in scope," (Publishers Weekly), Steven Barnes's Great Sky Woman unveiled the world of a prehistoric people in the shadow of modern-day Mount Kilimanjaro. Now, in Shadow Valley, the astounding sequel, we follow the Ibandi people's odyssey through a land where everything has changed-a land from whose ashes will grow the roots of civilization and the enduring truths of love, family, forgiveness, and faith.

After the catastrophic eruption of Father Mountain, the Ibandi are divided, desperate, and afraid. Most have followed the only person in whom they still believe: young Sky Woman, who was on the great mountain when it exploded and who, along with Frog Hopping, returned to tell the tale. Nurtured by an elder whose searing visions have left her blind, Sky Woman nonetheless doubts her own visionary powers as she follows a path she can hardly discern-across savannah and parched plains-to find a valley of plenty for a people on the brink of collapse.

But in fact, Sky Woman and Frog were not the only survivors of the mountain's explosion. Another man has emerged from the destruction, vengeance pulsing in his veins, to lead a separate group of Ibandi into a vicious and reckless act of war. Soon these two strands of survivors will meet, through chance, desperation, and sheer willpower. In a world in which every moment is lived on the edge between life and death, where animal and human predators can strike in an instant, where the gods themselves seem lost, and dreams entwine with reality, a people's destiny rushes toward them. The Ibandi must make a last, violent stand against complete destruction.

In this hypnotic, thrilling, and beautiful novel, Steven Barnes explores relationships between friends and lovers, leaders and followers, strangers and allies. At once visceral and soaringly insightful, Shadow Valley is about who we are as human beings today as seen through the wondrous prism of our distant past.

It's the American Revolution all over again. But this time it's a ragtag band of space colonists vs. the United States. And the fate of the world hangs by a thread - 200 miles above the Earth.

The coauthor of Beowulf's Children strikes out on his own with this novel of mystic revelation and martial arts.

What if the disciplines we know as the martial arts, meditation, and fasting were mere fragments of a greater, more powerful killing art?

What if that hidden discipline could produce in a man the power to manipulate matter and energy at will?

What if the effect on the mind were so deadly that, uncontrolled, the result would be an inhuman killer?

And what if, unknowingly, a young man in modern-day Los Angeles were to stumble onto the secret, setting in motion The Kundalini Equation?

The Seascape Tattoo: the latest spellbinding adventure in Larry Niven's acclaimed collaborations with Steven Barnes!

Aros of Azteca and Neoloth-Pteor are the deadliest of enemies: Swordsman and Sorcerer, locked in mortal combat, who have tried to kill each other more times than either can count. But when the princess Neoloth loves is kidnapped, there is only one plan that offers any hope of rescue... and that requires passing off the barbarian Aros as a lost princeling and infiltrating the deadliest cabal of necromancers the world has ever seen. They cannot trust each other. They will betray or kill each other the first chance they get. But they're all each other has.

Around the world, leaders and notorious criminals alike are mysteriously dying. A terrorist group promises a series of deaths within two months. And against the backdrop of the apocalypse, the lives of a small shattered family and a broken soldier are transformed in the bustling city of Atlanta.

Olympia Dorsey is a journalist and mother, with a cynical teenage daughter and an autistic son named Hannibal, all trying to heal from a personal tragedy. Across the street, Ex-Special Forces soldier Terry Nicolas and his wartime unit have reunited Stateside to carry out a risky heist that will not only right a terrible injustice, but also set them up for life -- at the cost of their honor. Terry and the family's visit to an unusual martial arts exhibition brings them into contact with Madame Gupta, a teacher of singular skill who offers not just a way for Terry to tap into mastery beyond his dreams, but also for Hannibal to transcend the limits of his condition. But to see these promises realized, Terry will need to betray those with whom he fought and bled.

Meanwhile, as the death toll gains momentum and society itself teeters on the edge of collapse, Olympia's fragile clan is placed in jeopardy, and Terry comes to understand the terrible price he must pay to prevent catastrophe.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology The Beastly Bride and Other Tales of the Animal People (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan, Wilde Stories 2011: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction (2011), edited by Steve Berman, and Nebula Awards Showcase 2012, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. The story is included in the collection Before and Afterlives (2013).

The extraordinary stories in this new contemporary fantasy collection show a mature, darker side of the author of The Last Unicorn in modern parables of love, death, and transformation shadowed lightly with melancholy.

The Angel of Death enjoys newfound celebrity while moonlighting as an anchorman on the network news; King Pelles the Sure, the shortsighted ruler of a gentle realm, betrays himself in dreaming of a "manageable war"; an American librarian discovers that, much to his surprise and sadness, he is also the last living Frenchman; and rivals in a supernatural battle forgo pistols at dawn, choosing instead to duel with dramatic recitations of terrible poetry.

Featuring previously unpublished stories alongside recently published classics, this is a lovely, haunting, and wholly satisfying read.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Charles de Lint
• By Moonlight
• Chandail
• King Pelles the Sure
• Spook
• The Last and Only, or, Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French
• The Stickball WitchThe Tale of Junko and Sayuri
• The Unicorn Tapestries
• Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel
• We Never Talk About My Brother

They're all around you everyday. Unseen. Watching. And waiting. Sheriff Robert Baxter knows he is losing the battle against his personal demons of alcohol and an impending divorce. As he investigates the grisly death of a child found in the woods surrounding a quiet suburban neighborhood, he must come face-to-face with a very real demon from his past. Along with some new ones...

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #76 January 2013. It can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Seven (2015), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, May 2013.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Legends say that on stormy nights, or during sunsets, there sometimes comes a strange whistling in the sky followed by sightings of enormous black dogs. But these are no ordinary dogs. They are demonic things, hounds loose from the Wild Hunt, and they are searching for lost souls. They are rarely sighted more than one at a time, but if all seven should come together, it will mean the end of the world.

In the picturesque New England town of Kingsbury, Vermont, a young woman named Rose Kerrigan mourns the death of her grandfather, the sweet but strange old man who raised her. Soon, Rose will learn the legend of the Seven Whistlers. They've come to Kingsbury in search of a soul that has been hidden from them, and they will not leave without it. First there was one, then two... then four... If they don't find what they're looking for soon, perhaps all seven will gather in Kingsbury. And if all seven should come together....

In the field of mad science, women have for too long been ignored, their triumphs misattributed to mere men. Society has seen the laboratory as the province of men. Jacob's Ladder electric arcs, death rays, even test tubes have phallic connotations, subliminally reinforcing the patriarchy. Thankfully, the women working to dangerous and/or questionable ends in the pages of Daughters of Frankenstein are unafraid of the patriarchy--indeed, as lesbian mad scientists, they prefer the company and comforts of their own gender.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Introduction (Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists) - essay by Connie Wilkins
• 3 - From Alexander Pope to Splice - essay by Jess Nevins
• 13 - Infusion of Waking Dreams - short story by Aynjel Kaye
• 31 - Doubt the Sun - short story by Faith Mudge
• 49 - Meddling Kids - short story by Tracy Canfield
• 59 - Eldritch Brown Houses - short story by Claire Humphrey
• 67 - The Moorehead Maze Experiment - short story by Tim Lieder
• 85 - The Eggshell Curtain - short story by Romie Stott
• 101 - Poor Girl - short story by Traci Castleberry
• 121 - Bank Job Blues - short story by Melissa Scott
• 139 - The Long Trip Home - short story by A. J. Fitzwater
• 159 - Imaginary Beauties: A Lurid Melodrama - short story by Gemma Files
• 179 - Riveter - short story by Sean Eads
• 193 - A Shallow Grave of Orange Peel and Eggshells - short story by Thoraiya Dyer
• 203 - Alraune - short story by Orrin Grey
• 211 - Preserving the Integrity of the Feminine Mystique - short story by Christine Morgan
• 231 - Hypatia and Her Sisters - short story by Amy Griswold
• 245 - The Lady of the House of Mirrors - short story by Rafaela Ferraz
• 261 - The Ice Weasels of Trebizond - short story by Mr. and Mrs. Brenchley
• 281 - Love in the Time of Markov Processes - short story by Megan Arkenberg

One of the more admired characters in Western literature happens to be a murderer, a villain, a fiend: Count Dracula. Irish author Bram Stoker's classic novel stands high in the canon of speculative fiction, influencing countless twentieth- and twenty-first-century storytellers in various mediums. It is only natural for the outsiders of society to reinterpret the world's most infamous vampire through the lenses of their own experience. Who is more outside of society than Dracula? Perhaps the writers of queer-themed speculative fiction and their characters....

In Suffered from the Night: Queering Stoker's Dracula, editor Steve Berman provides a worthy companion to Lethe Press's widely acclaimed earlier anthologies of queered canon, A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes and Where Thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe. Here, you will find dark tales (and a poem) of Dracula himself, his minions, willing and not, his implacable enemies, and their heirs. Prepare to be guided into the deep recesses of the queer imagination by an impressive array of award winners, veterans, and bright new lights.

Table of Contents:

• ix - Introduction (Suffered from the Night) - essay by Steve Berman
• 21 - Yours Is the Right to Begin - short story by Livia Llewellyn
• 31 - Self-Portraint as Jonathan Harker - poem by Ed Madden
• 33 - Seven Lovers and the Sea - novelette by Damon Shaw
• 57 - The Calm of Despair - short story by Jason Andrew
• 71 - Bloofer Ladies - novelette by Elka Cloke
• 105 - The Powers of Evil - short story by Wiliam P. Coleman
• 123 - My Arms Are Hungry - short story by Traci Castleberry
• 137 - Protect the King - novelette by Jeff Mann
• 161 - Hungers - short story by Rajan Khanna
• 179 - The Letter That Doomed Nosferatu - short story by Steve Berman
• 191 - Ardor - novelette by Laird Barron
• 213 - A Closer Walk with Thee - short story by Sven Davisson
• 223 - Unhallowed Ground - short story by Seth Cadin

In a small New Jersey town, a lonely teen walking along a highway one autumn evening meets the boy of his dreams, a boy who happens to have died decades ago and haunts the road. Awkward crushes, both bitter and sweet, lead him to face youthful dreams and childish fears. With a cast of offbeat friends, antiques, and Ouija boards, Vintage offers readers a memorable blend of dark humor, chills and love.

The canon of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the foremost writers of dark and atmospheric fiction and poetry, offers readers haunted shores teeming with various erudite men brooding in the waning light over their feelings for unobtainable women. Yet, whether the tales or verses are grotesque or sinister, Poe's narrators are Outsiders, dealing with emotions that so many queer individuals feel: isolation and abandonment as well as loneliness and lost love. In Where Thy Dark Eye Glances, editor Steve Berman has assembled a range of tales that queer the prose and poetry of the Poe, the man himself, as well as dark and eerie stories about reading Poe's work.

Twenty-six poems and stories by:

• Christopher Barzak
• Steve Berman
• Richard Bowes
• Satyros Phil Bucato
• Seth Cadin
• Máiréad Casey
• Matthew Cheney
• Ray Cluley
• Peter Dubé
• L.A. Fields
• Alex Jeffers
• Kyle S. Johnson
• Collin Kelley
• Terra LeMay
• Chip Livingston
• Heather Lojo
• Clare London
• Ed Madden
• Ronna Magy
• Nick Mamatas
• Jeff Mann
• John Mantooth
• Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Tansy Rayner Roberts
• Cory Skerry
• Daniel Nathan Terry

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Where Thy Dark Eye Glances) - (2013) - essay by Steve Berman
• The City and the Stranger - (2013) - short fiction by Seth Cadin
• Matthew Brady, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans - (2013) - short fiction by Daniel Nathan Terry
• Poetaster - (2013) - short fiction by Steve Berman
• The House - (2013) - short fiction by Ed Madden
• The House of the Resonate Heart - (2013) - short fiction by L. A. Fields
• The Raven and Her Victory - (2013) - short fiction by Tansy Rayner Roberts
• Corvidae - (2013) - short fiction by Peter Dubé
• The Man Who Was - (2013) - short fiction by Ray Cluley
• Gwendolyn - (2013) - short fiction by Máiréad Casey
• Telltale - (2013) - short fiction by Claire London
• The Lord's Great Jest - (2013) - short fiction by Satyrus Phil Bucato
• His Hideous Heart - (2013) - short fiction by Kyle S. Johnson
• Variations of Figures Upon the Wall - (2013) - short fiction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• For the Applause of Shadows - (2013) - short fiction by Christopher Barzak
• By that Sweet Word Alone - (2013) - short fiction by Heather Lojo
• Two Men in a Bedchamber, as Observed by the Ghost of the Girl in the Oval Portrait - (2013) - short fiction by Terra LeMay
• Midnight at the Feet of the Carayatides - (2013) - short fiction by Cory Skerry
• Surrounded by Death - (2013) - short fiction by Ronna Magy
• The Bells - (2013) - short fiction by Chip Livingston
• The Demon and the Dove - (2013) - short fiction by Collin Kelley
• The Death of Beautiful Men - (2013) - short fiction by Jeff Mann
• Eureka! - (2013) - short fiction by Nick Mamatas
• Seven Days of Poe - (2013) - short fiction by Richard Bowes
• The Chicken Farmer and His Boy: A Metaphysical History - (2013) - short fiction by John Mantooth
• A Portrait in India Ink by Harry Clarke - (2013) - short fiction by Alex Jeffers
• Lacuna - (2013) - short fiction by Matt Cheney

It's a wonder humanity ever survived into the twenty-first century. Even Neanderthals knew to bury the dead beneath stones to prevent corpses from rising. Ancient civilizations feared slain warriors would return from battlefields, medieval physicians worried that bodies would rise from plague pits, many cultures buried the dead at crossroads to prevent the dead from walking. In Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages, editor Steve Berman has collected stories that reveal the threat of revenants and the living dead is far from recent. From the Bronze Age to World War II, this anthology guides us through millennia of thrills, chills, kills, carnage, horror, and havoc wreaked throughout history by the walking dead.

Table of Contents:

• 11 - Untitled Prologue (Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages)
• 15 - Blood Marker -short fiction by Victoria Janssen
• 17 - Selected Sources for the Babylonian Plague of the Dead (572-571 BCE) - short fiction by Alex Dally MacFarlane
• 21 - Immortals - short fiction by Nathan Southard
• 23 - The Cost of Moving the Dead - short fiction by Erinn L. Kemper
• 27 - Hauntings and Hungers on the Banks of the Vipasa - short fiction by Rajan Khanna
• 43 - A Frenzy of Ravens - short fiction by Christopher M. Cevasco
• 59 - The Wedding of Osiris - short fiction by Adam Morrow
• 67 - The Hyena's Blessing - short fiction by Alex Jeffers
• 79 - The Good Shepherdess - short fiction by Selena Chambers
• 84 - The Fledglings of Time - short story by Carrie Laben
• 93 - Hung from a Hairy Tree - short fiction by Samantha Henderson
• 96 - Good Deaths - short fiction by Paul M. Berger [as by Paul Berger]
• 114 - Dead Reckoning - short fiction by Elaine Pascale
• 124 - Grit in a Diseased Eye - short fiction by Lee Thomas
• 126 - Theater Is Dead - short story by Raoul Wainscoting
• 141 - Deathless - short fiction by Ed Kurtz
• 161 - Tantivy - short fiction by Molly Tanzer
• 169 - Cinereous - short story by Livia Llewellyn
• 179 - The Wailing Hills - short fiction by L. Lark
• 196 - As the Crow Flies - short fiction by Rita Oakes
• 210 - Seneca Falls: First Recorded Outbreak of Strain Z - short fiction by Dayna Ingram
• 234 - Pegleg and Paddy Save the World - short story by Jonathan Maberry
• 248 - Dead in the Water - short fiction by Richard Larson
• 250 - Starvation Army - short story by Joe McKinney
• 262 - Lonegan's Luck - novelette by Stephen Graham Jones
• 285 - The Rickshaw Pusher - short fiction by Mercurio D. Rivera
• 291 - The Revenge of Oscar Wilde - short fiction by Sean Eads
• 309 - The Gringo - short fiction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• 312 - The End of the Caroll A. Deering - short fiction by Bob Hole
• 314 - Promised Land (Wineville, 1928) - short fiction by Richard E. Gropp
• 316 - Tell Me Like You Done Before - short story by Scott Edelman
• 332 - The Fated Sky - short fiction by Aimee Payne
• 348 - The Crocodiles - novelette by Steven Popkes
• 369 - Gedenkschrift Authors

Imagine a world in which Teddy Roosevelt is elected to a third term and leads America directly into World War I.A world in which the consequent terms of the Versailles Treaty propose a much gentler reconciliation between Allied and Central powers. A world in which neither World War II-nor the Holocaust-ever occurs, though European skirmishes abound. It's into this world, present millennium, where Martin Gidron has placed both Janusz, who's fled Poland to avoid a Russian draft, and his lover Irena, daughter of a famous composer. When Irena travels to Greece for her father's funeral, things start unravelling for Janusz: people and business establishments having Jewish connections disappear, literally without a trace or even memory, from New York City where Janusz has illegally emigrated. Then the Jewish daily newspaper where Janusz works switches overnight from Yiddish to English. And what are these strange letters that Janusz receives at his apartment, offering a "credit card, " whatever that might be? The discovery that Janusz is cast into by the novel's end is as harrowing in its particularity as it is in its universality.

A collection of some of the best selections from all of the various incarnations of Weird Tales. There are four yarns from each decade, starting from the 1920's and up to the 1990's.

Contents:

• xv - Introduction (Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror) - essay by John Gregory Betancourt and Robert Weinberg
• 3 - The Fireplace - (1925) - short story by Henry S. Whitehead
• 19 - The Rats in the Walls - (1924) - novelette by H. P. Lovecraft
• 41 - Bells of Oceana - (1927) - short story by Arthur J. Burks
• 55 - The Eighth Green Man - (1928) - short story by G. G. Pendarves
• 77 - The Seed from the Sepulcher - (1933) - short story by Clark Ashton Smith
• 91 - The Accursed Isle - (1933) - short story by Mary Elizabeth Counselman
• 105 - The Graveyard Rats - (1936) - short story by Henry Kuttner
• 113 - Lost Paradise - [Northwest Smith] - (1936) - novelette by C. L. Moore
• 143 - The Hound - (1942) - short story by Fritz Leiber
• 161 - The Crowd - (1943) - short story by Ray Bradbury
• 177 - Pacific 421 - (1944) - short story by August Derleth
• 189 - The Dead Man's Hand - [John Thunstone] - (1944) - short story by Manly Wade Wellman
• 213 - The Three Pools and the Painted Moon - (1950) - short story by Frank Owen
• 221 - The Ring of Bastet - [Jules de Grandin] - (1951) - short story by Seabury Quinn
• 241 - Lucy Comes to Stay - (1952) - short story by Robert Bloch
• 249 - The Rhythm of the Rats - (1950) - short story by Eric Frank Russell
• 269 - Sea Curse - [Faring Town] - (1928) - short story by Robert E. Howard
• 277 - The Dead Smile - (1899) - novelette by F. Marion Crawford
• 301 - Lethal Labels - (1974) - short fiction by Ray Russell
• 307 - The Finding of the Graiken - [Sargasso Sea] - (1913) - novelette by William Hope Hodgson
• 333 - The Dead Man - (1965) - short story by Gene Wolfe
• 339 - The Pit-Yakker - non-genre - (1989) - short story by Brian Lumley
• 361 - Save the Children! - (1983) - short story by Steve Rasnic Tem
• 367 - Love Song from the Stars - (1989) - short story by Robert Sheckley
• 377 - Welcomeland - (1988) - short story by Ramsey Campbell
• 391 - The Lily Garden - (1992) - short story by Tanith Lee
• 405 - The Pulse of the Machine - (1993) - short story by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
• 431 - Turn, Turn, Turn - (1991) - short story by Nancy Springer

Humanity has stretched out over thousands and thousands of worlds. Each planet is virtually independent from one another. Various intelligent species have been discovered but humans start putting them in camps, killing them, refusing to grant them any rights, and branding them with derogatory names (for example, animaloids). This massive anti-animaloid furor spreading across the populated worlds threatens to envelope the tourist-trap planet Donev. However, Donev does not appear to have any indigenous animaloids of their own.

In the 2040s, a dangerous new ideology has captured the imagination of young people around the world.

Su lit a fire. Rayen showed her friends how to kill. Julia's ex unleashed an epidemic. But the Crosses are greater than the sum of their parts.

Told through the writings of several first-hand witnesses, Crossed offers a chilling glimpse into a fervently brutal future.

Essays discuss the major works of science fiction authors from Poe to Niven, and includes bibliographies for each writer.

Table of Contents:

• xi - Introduction (Science Fiction Writers) - essay by Everett F. Bleiler
• 3 - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - essay by Brian W. Aldiss
• 11 - Edgar Allan Poe - essay by Everett F. Bleiler
• 19 - H. Rider Haggard - essay by John Scarborough
• 25 - H. G. Wells - essay by Brian W. Aldiss
• 31 - M. P. Shiel - essay by Everett F. Bleiler
• 39 - Garrett P. Serviss - essay by James L. Campbell, Sr.
• 45 - Arthur Conan Doyle - essay by James L. Campbell, Sr.
• 53 - Luis Philip Senarens - essay by Everett F. Bleiler
• 59 - Edgar Rice Burroughs - essay by Everett F. Bleiler
• 65 - A. Merritt - essay by Everett F. Bleiler
• 75 - John Taine - essay by James L. Campbell, Sr.
• 83 - S. Fowler Wright - essay by Everett F. Bleiler
• 91 - Olaf Stapledon - essay by James L. Campbell, Sr.
• 101 - Aldous Huxley - essay by John R. Pfeiffer
• 111 - Murray Leinster - essay by John Clute
• 119 - David H. Keller - essay by Brian Stableford
• 125 - E. E. Smith - essay by John Clute
• 131 - H. P. Lovecraft - essay by Colin Wilson
• 139 - Clark Ashton Smith - essay by Brian Stableford
• 145 - Stanley G. Weinbaum - essay by Brian Stableford
• 151 - John W. Campbell, Jr. - essay by Everett F. Bleiler
• 161 - C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner - essay by Frederick Shroyer
• 171 - Ray Bradbury - essay by Willis E. McNelly
• 179 - L. Sprague de Camp - essay by Brian Stableford
• 185 - Robert A. Heinlein - essay by Peter Nicholls
• 197 - Eric Frank Russell - essay by Malcolm Edwards
• 203 - Theodore Sturgeon - essay by Brian Stableford
• 209 - A. E. van Vogt - essay by Colin Wilson
• 219 - John Wyndham - essay by John Scarborough
• 225 - Jack Williamson - essay by Robert E. Myers
• 233 - George Orwell - essay by Charles L. Elkins
• 243 - C. S. Lewis - essay by John Clute
• 251 - Brian W. Aldiss - essay by Willis E. McNelly
• 259 - Poul Anderson - essay by Roald D. Tweet
• 267 - Isaac Asimov - essay by L. David Allen
• 277 - J. G. Ballard - essay by Brian Stableford
• 283 - Alfred Bester - essay by Willis E. McNelly
• 291 - James Blish - essay by John Clute
• 297 - John Brunner - essay by John R. Pfeiffer
• 305 - Algis Budrys - essay by Peter Nicholls
• 313 - Arthur C. Clarke - essay by David N. Samuelson
• 321 - Hal Clement - essay by Chris Morgan
• 329 - Samuel R. Delany - essay by Douglas Barbour
• 337 - Philip K. Dick - essay by Brian Stableford
• 345 - Gordon R. Dickson - essay by John Clute
• 351 - Thomas M. Disch - essay by Brian Stableford
• 357 - Harlan Ellison - essay by George E. Slusser
• 369 - Philip José Farmer - essay by Roald D. Tweet
• 377 - Frank Herbert - essay by Willis E. McNelly
• 387 - Fred Hoyle - essay by John Clute
• 393 - Damon Knight - essay by Gardner Dozois
• 401 - C. M. Kornbluth - essay by Malcolm Edwards
• 409 - Ursula K. Le Guin - essay by David N. Samuelson
• 419 - Fritz Leiber - essay by Brian Stableford
• 425 - Richard Matheson - essay by Peter Nicholls
• 433 - Judith Merril - essay by Chris Morgan
• 441 - Walter M. Miller, Jr. - essay by John B. Ower
• 449 - Michael Moorcock - essay by Peter Nicholls
• 459 - Larry Niven - essay by John Carr and Richard Finholt
• 467 - Chad Oliver - essay by L. David Allen
• 475 - Frederik Pohl - essay by David N. Samuelson
• 483 - Joanna Russ - essay by Marilyn J. Holt
• 491 - Margaret St. Clair - essay by John Clute
• 497 - Robert Sheckley - essay by Chris Morgan
• 505 - Robert Silverberg - essay by Malcolm Edwards
• 513 - Clifford D. Simak - essay by Roald D. Tweet
• 519 - Cordwainer Smith - essay by Chris Morgan
• 525 - William Tenn - essay by Malcolm Edwards
• 531 - James Tiptree, Jr. - essay by Susan Wood
• 543 - Jack Vance - essay by Malcolm Edwards
• 551 - Kurt Vonnegut - essay by Charles L. Elkins
• 563 - Roger Zelazny - essay by Peter Nicholls
• 573 - Jules Verne - essay by Everett F. Bleiler
• 583 - Karel Capek - essay by John Clute
• 591 - Stanislaw Lem - essay by John Scarborough

The Checklist of Fantastic Literature is a bibliography of English science fiction, fantasy and weird books compiled and edited by Everett F. Bleiler with a preface by Melvin Korshak and a cover by Hannes Bok.

With a print run of 1,933 copies, it was the first book from Shasta Publishers. The bibliography is nearly complete and lists over 5,000 titles published prior to 1949. The books are listed by author and indexed by title. Willy Ley described it as "indispensable to librarians, book dealers, and especially antiquarians."

Michael Blumlein is one of the most original and innovative contemporary writers of speculative fiction, and this new volume collects all his short fiction published between 1993 and 2016.

Contains:

• "Twenty-Two and You"
• "California Burning"
• "Paul and Me"
• "Revenge"
• "Snow in Dirt"
• "The Big One"
• "Hymenoptera"
• "Greedy for Kisses"
• "Fidelity: A Primer"
• "Isostasy"
• "Strategy for Conflict Avoidance: Memo to George W, Our Commander-in-Chief"
• "Bird Walks in New England"
• "The Roberts"
• "Know How, Can Do"
• "Bloom"
• "Success"
• "Choose Poison, Choose Life"

Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century. Now for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume, brilliantly translated by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language. Together these incomparable works comprise the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master's work for those who have yet to discover this singular genius.

Table of Contents:

• A Universal History of Iniquity - (1972) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of Historia universal de la infamia 1935)
• Fictions - (1962) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of Ficciones 1944)
• The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969 - (1970) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of El Aleph 1949)
• The Maker - (1998) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of El Hacedor 1960)
• In Praise of Darkness - (1974) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of Elogio de la Sombra 1969)
• Brodie's Report - (1971) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of El informe de Brodie 1970)
• The Book of Sand - (1977) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of El libro de arena 1975)
• Shakespeare's Memory - (1983) - collection by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of Veinticinco de Agosto de 1983 y otros cuentos)

The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths

• Prologue
• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
• The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition)
• Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939)
• The Circular Ruins (1940)
• The Lottery in Babylon (1941)
• An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941)
• The Library of Babel (1941)
• The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)

Part Two: Artifices

• Prologue
• Funes the Memorious (1942)
• The Form of the Sword (1942)
• Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944)
• Death and the Compass (1942)
• The Secret Miracle (1943)
• Three Versions of Judas (1944)
• The End (1953, 2nd edition only)
• The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only)
• The South (1953, 2nd edition only)

Contains:

• Averroes' Search - (1964) - short story (trans. of La busca de Averroes 1947)
• Death and the Compass - (1954) - short story (trans. of La muerte y la brújula 1942)
• Deutsches Requiem - (1958) - short fiction (trans. of Deutsches Réquiem 1946)
• Emma Zunz - (1964) - short story (trans. of Emma Zunz 1948)
• Funes the Memorious - short story (trans. of Funes el memorioso 1942)
• Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote - short story (trans. of Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote 1939)
• Story of the Warrior and the Captive - (1964) - short story (trans. of Historia del guerrero y la cautiva 1949)
• The Babylon Lottery - (1959) - short story (trans. of La lotería en Babilonia 1941)
• The Circular Ruins - (1940) - short story (trans. of Las ruinas circulares)
• The Form of the Sword - short fiction (trans. of La forma de la espada 1942)
• The Garden of Forking Paths - (1948) - short story (trans. of El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan 1941)
• The God's Script - (1964) - short story (trans. of La escritura del Dios 1949)
• The House of Asterion - (1964) - short story (trans. of La casa de Asterión 1947)
• The Immortal - (1966) - short story (trans. of El inmortal 1949)
• The Library of Babel - short story (trans. of La biblioteca de Babel 1941)
• The Secret Miracle - (1956) - short story (trans. of El milagro secreto 1942)
• The Sect of the Phoenix - short story (trans. of La secta del Fénix 1952)
• The Theologians - (1964) - short story (trans. of Los teólogos 1947)
• The Waiting - (1959) - short story (trans. of La Espera 1950)
• The Zahir - (1950) - short story (trans. of El Zahir 1947)
• Theme of the Traitor and Hero - short fiction (trans. of Tema del traidor y del héro 1944)
• Three Versions of Judas - short story (trans. of Tres versiones de Judas 1944)
• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - (1961) - short story (trans. of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 1940)
• Preface (Labyrinths) - essay by André Maurois
• Introduction (Labyrinths) - essay by J. E. Irby

Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges's most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight he takes us inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father's "killer," and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house. This volume also contains the hauntingly brief vignettes about literary imagination and personal identity collected in The Maker, which Borges wrote as failing eyesight and public fame began to undermine his sense of self.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Book of Fantasy is the second English translation of Antología de la Literatura Fantástica, an anthology of appromixately 81 fantastic short stories, fragments, excerpts, and poems edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. It was first published in Argentina in 1940, and revised in 1965 and 1976. Anthony Kerrigan previously translated the similar work Cuentos Breves y Extraordinarios as Extraordinary Tales, published by Herder & Herder in 1971. The 1988 Viking Penguin edition for English-speaking countries includes a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The idea and seed for this volume came into being one "night in 1937 in Buenos Aires, when Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo fell to talking - so Casares tells us - 'about fantastic literature. ..simply a compilation of stories from fantastic literature which seemed to us to be the best.'"

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (The Book of Fantasy) - essay by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Sennin - (1976) - shortstory by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (trans. of ?? 1916)
• A Woman Alone with Her Soul - (1912) - shortstory by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
• Ben-Tobith - (1976) - shortstory by Leonid Andreyev (trans. of ???-????? 1905)
• The Phantom Basket - (1696) - shortfiction by John Aubrey
• The Drowned Giant - (1964) - shortstory by J. G. Ballard
• Enoch Soames - (1916) - novelette by Max Beerbohm
• The Tail of the Sphinx - (1893) - shortstory by Ambrose Bierce
• The Squid in Its Own Ink - (1976) - shortstory by Adolfo Bioy Casares (trans. of El calamar opta por su tinta 1962)
• Guilty Eyes - (1976) - shortstory by Ah'med Ech Chiruani
• Anything You Want! ... - shortfiction by Léon Bloy (trans. of Tout ce que tu voudras !... 1894)
• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - (1961) - shortstory by Jorge Luís Borges (trans. of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 1940)
• Odin - (1951) - shortfiction by Jorge Luís Borges and Delia Ingenieros
• The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind - (1953) - shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• The Man Who Collected the First of September 1973 - (1973) - shortstory by Tor Åge Bringsvaerd (trans. of Mannen som samlet på første September 1972)
• The Careless Rabbi - (1956) - shortfiction by Martin Buber
• The Tale and the Poet - shortfiction by Sir Richard Francis Burton
• Fate is a Fool - shortfiction by Pilar de Lusarreta and Arturo Cancela (trans. of El Destino es chambón 1920)
• An Actual Authentic Ghost - (1834) - shortfiction by Thomas Carlyle
• The Red King's Dream - (1871) - shortfiction by Lewis Carroll
• The Tree of Pride - (1922) - shortfiction by G. K. Chesterton
• The Dream of the Butterfly - (1926) - shortfiction by Chuang Tzu
• The Tower of Babel - (1922) - shortfiction by G. K. Chesterton
• House Taken Over - (1976) - shortstory by Julio Cortázar (trans. of Casa tomada 1946)
• The Look of Death - (1923) - shortfiction by Jean Cocteau
• Being Dust - (1961) - shortfiction by Santiago Dabove
• A Parable of Gluttony - (1931) - shortfiction by Alexandra David-Neel
• The Persecution of the Master - (1931) - shortfiction by Alexandra David-Neel
• The Idle City - (1909) - shortstory by Lord Dunsany
• Tantalia - (1984) - shortfiction by Macedonio Fernández
• Eternal Life - (1913) - shortfiction by J. G. Frazer
• A Secure Home - shortfiction by Elena Garro
• The Man Who Did Not Believe in Miracles - (1915) - shortfiction by Herbert A. Giles
• Earth's Holocaust - (1844) - shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Ending for a Ghost Story - shortfiction by I. A. Ireland
• The Monkey's Paw - (1902) - shortstory by W. W. Jacobs
• What is a Ghost? - (1921) - shortfiction by James Joyce
• May Goulding - (1921) - shortfiction by James Joyce
• The Wizard Passed Over - (1970) - shortfiction by Don Juan Manuel
• Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk - (1948) - shortstory by Franz Kafka (trans. of Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse 1924)
• Before the Law - (1948) - shortstory by Franz Kafka (trans. of Vor dem Gesetz 1915)
• The Return of Imray - (1891) - shortstory by Rudyard Kipling
• The Horses of Abdera - shortfiction by Leopoldo Lugones (trans. of Los caballos de Abdera 1906)
• The Ceremony - (1897) - shortstory by Arthur Machen
• The Riddle - (1903) - shortfiction by Walter de la Mare
• Who Knows? - (1935) - shortstory by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of Qui sait ? 1890)
• The Cat - shortfiction by H. A. Murena
• The Shadow of the Players - shortfiction by Edwin Morgan
• The Story of the Foxes - shortfiction by Niu Chiao
• The Atonement - shortfiction by Silvina Ocampo (trans. of La expiación 1961)
• The Man Who Belonged to Me - (1906) - shortfiction by Giovanni Papini
• Rani - shortfiction by Carlos Peralta
• The Blind Spot - (1945) - shortfiction by Barry Perowne
• The Wolf - (1965) - shortfiction by Petronius
• The Bust - shortfiction by Manuel Peyrou
• The Cask of Amontillado - [Fortunado] - (1846) - shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Tiger of Chao-Ch'Eng - (1880) - shortfiction by Pu Songling (trans. of ??? 1766)
• How We Arrived at the Island of Tools - [Gargantua et Pantagruel] - shortfiction by François Rabelais
• The Music on the Hill - (1911) - shortstory by Saki
• Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched - (1922) - novelette by May Sinclair
• The Cloth Which Weaves Itself - (1900) - shortfiction by W. W. Skeat
• A Theologian in Death - (1971) - essay by Emanuel Swedenborg
• Universal History - (1937) - shortfiction by Olaf Stapledon
• The Encounter - shortfiction by unknown
• The Three Hermits - (1980) - shortstory by Leo Tolstoy (trans. of ??? ?????? 1886)
• Macario - (1966) - shortfiction by B. Traven
• The Infinite Dream of Pao-Yu - shortfiction by Tsao Hsueh-Chin
• The Mirror to Wind-and-Moon - shortfiction by Tsao Hsueh-Chin
• The Desire To Be a Man - shortfiction by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (trans. of Le désir d'être un homme 1882)
• Memnon, or Human Wisdom - (1747) - shortstory by Voltaire (trans. of Memnon: Histoire Orientale)
• The Man Who Liked Dickens - (1933) - shortstory by Evelyn Waugh
• Pomegranate Seed - (1931) - novelette by Edith Wharton
• Lukundoo - (1907) - shortstory by Edward Lucas White
• The Donguys - shortfiction by Juan Rodolfo Wilcock
• Lord Arthur Savile's Crime - (1887) - novelette by Oscar Wilde
• The Sorcerer of the White Lotus Lodge - (1924) - shortfiction by Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930)
• Saved by the Book - (1928) - shortfiction by G. Willoughby-Meade
• The Celestial Stag - (1928) - shortfiction by G. Willoughby-Meade
• The Reanimated Englishman - shortfiction by Mary Shelley (variant of Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman 1863)
• The Sentence - shortfiction by Wu Ch'Eng En
• The Sorcerers - (1893) - shortfiction by William Butler Yeats
• Fragment - (1844) - shortfiction by José Zorrilla

Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of the twentieth century. Now Borges's remarkable last major story collection, The Book of Sand, is paired with a handful of writings from the very end of his life. Brilliantly translated, these stories combine a direct and at times almost colloquial style coupled with Borges's signature fantastic inventiveness. Containing such marvelous tales as "The Congress," "Undr," "The Mirror and the Mask," and "The Rose of Paracelsus," this edition showcases Borges's depth of vision and superb image-conjuring power.

Table of Contents:

• Utopia of a Tired Man
• The Other
• The Book of Sand
• The Disk
• Avelino Arredondo
• The Bribe
• Undr
• The Mirror and the Mask
• The Night of the Gifts
• The Sect of the Thirty
• There Are More Things
• The Congress
• Ulrike
• Afterword
• Author's Note

Nebula Award nominated short story. The original Spanish title is Utopía de un hombre que está cansado. Some sources list the English title as A Weary Man's Utopia. Given the 1976 nomination there must be an earlier publication in English but the collection The Book of Sand (1977 in English) is the earliest publication mentioned.

A dark future finds humanity imprisoned. Invaders took away our story and rewrote everything: all minds, all lives, all history. Everyone forgot. How could this happen?

But in this now, Lolo must reclaim her stolen words -- her stolen family -- from the silent Caretakers. She must call out to all rapt children, "This world is hell. Let's run." When the words needed are forgotten, lying unknown, when memories flit like smoke, how can she recover what is lost? She must. To live in this nightmare without a story would be too much to bear.

Never Now Always is a surreal world where memory and family aren't taken for granted -- even if they are only dreams. It explores how the stories we tell about ourselves shape us and those around us. It's a weird sci-fi search for meaning, an apocalyptic murder mystery, a chilling look at the thin line between memory and dream, and it's the drive to find family. It's a twisting mix of The Wizard of Oz, Dark City, and Jacob's Ladder.

It takes place in a future in which something's gone terribly wrong. But Lolo's memories aren't what they used to be. What's real? What's dream? She can't say, but she's sure there used to be more. Who are these Caretakers? Where's her family, her sister? What happened to the world? So many questions. Time to find answers.

Ben Bova's universe is always more than the sum of its parts...

In TWICE SEVEN, "Conspiracy Theory" reveals the startling truth about those so-called Martian canals and a patch of New Mexico know as Roswell.

In "Appointment in Sinai," the technology of virtual telepresence allows people all over the world to share the experience of the first manned Mars landing... with results as poignant as they are unexpected.

An amnesiac android finds himself feasting with King Hrothgar, Queen Wealhtheow and a warrior by the name of Beowulf in "Legendary Heroes."

In "Life as We Know It," the eternal question "Are we alone?" gets a startling, never-to-be-forgotten answer.

An expatriate woman with a secret fights an exclusionary bureaucracy to return to her home and son in "Re-Entry Shock."

Plus much more!

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Art of Plain Speech - (1998) - essay
• Inspiration - (1994) - shortstory
• Appointment in Sinai - (1996) - shortstory
• Conspiracy Theory - (1993) - shortstory
• The Great Moon Hoax or A Princess of Mars - (1996) - shortstory
• Life as We Know It - (1995) - shortstory
• Legendary Heroes - [Orion] - (1996) - shortstory
• The Café Coup - (1997) - shortstory
• Re-Entry Shock - (1993) - shortstory
• In Trust - (1995) - shortstory
• Risk Assessment - (1996) - novelette
• Delta Vee - (1995) - shortstory
• Lower the River - [Probability Zero] - (1997) - shortstory
• Remember, Caesar - (1998) - shortstory
• The Babe, the Iron Horse, and Mr. McGillicuddy - (1997) - novelette and Rick Wilber

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, November 2012. It is included in the collection The Queen, the Cambion, and Seven Others.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

At the height of the air war in Europe, Captain Joe Farley and the baseball-loving, wisecracking crew of the B-17 Flying Fortress Fata Morgana are in the middle of a harrowing bombing mission over East Germany when everything goes sideways. The bombs are still falling and flak is still exploding all around the 20-ton bomber as it is knocked like a bathtub duck into another world.

Suddenly stranded with the final outcasts of a desolated world, Captain Farley navigates a maze of treachery and wonder--and finds a love seemingly decreed by fate--as his bomber becomes a pawn in a centuries-old conflict between remnants of advanced but decaying civilizations. Caught among these bitter enemies, a vast power that has brought them here for its own purposes, and a terrifying living weapon bent on their destruction, the crew must use every bit of their formidable inventiveness and courage to survive.

Decades ago, a young rock and blues guitarist and junkie named Niko signed in blood on the dotted line and in return became the stuff of music legend. But when the love of his damned life grows mortally and mysteriously ill, he realizes he has lost more than he bargained for--and that was not part of the deal. So Niko sets out on a harrowing journey from the streets of Los Angeles through the downtown subway tunnels and across the red-lit plain of the most vividly realized hell since Dante to play the gig of his mortgaged life and win back the purloined soul of his lost love.

Mortality Bridge remixes Orpheus, Dante, Faust, the Crossroads legend, and more in a beautiful, brutal, and surprisingly funny quest across a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of myth, music, and mayhem, and across an inner terrain of addiction, damnation, and redemption.

Jim Bentley's plans for the evening were simple: a movie and the graveyard shift at the 7-Eleven. That was before he stumbled into another world. Evolution has taken a very different direction on this parallel Earth, but some things are constant. Jim Bentley has falled straight from his ordinary life inot the most constant thing of all: war. Even as he struggles to learn the ways of a strange culture, to make a place for himself in what seems likely to be his home for the rest of his life, the tides of revolution are rising around him. Jim Bentley has a part in play in this war- for his coming has been foretold by True Dreamers. His feet already set on a path that leads to the heart of the crisis. Like it or not, he is vital to the war efforts of the Architect of Sleep...

Two dazzling new novellas from the celebrated author of Fahrenheit 451. Two previously unpublished novellas comprise this astonishing new volume from one of science fiction's greatest living writers.

In the first, 'Somewhere a Band is Playing', newsman James Cardiff is lured through poetry and his fascination with a beautiful and enigmatic young woman to Summerton, Arizona. The small town's childless population hold an extraordinary secret which has been passed on for thousands of years unbeknownst to the rest of human civilization.

In the second novella, 'Leviathan '99', the classic tale of Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' is reborn as an interstellar adventure. It recounts the exploits of the mad Captain Ahab, who, blinded by his first encounter with a gigantic comet called 'Leviathan', pursues his lunatic vendetta across the universe. Born in space and seeking adventure in the skies, astronaut Ishmael Jones joins the crew aboard the Cetus 7 and quickly finds his fate in the hands of an indefatigable captain.

Published together for the first time in one volume, these two stories twinkle with Bradbury's characteristically intricate metaphors and lyrical phrases. Both are a lasting testament to an older generation of writers that, much like the Leviathan itself, are on the threshold of passing on into the realm of legend.

Contains:

• The Day it Rained Forever
• Fever Dream
• Icarus Montgolfier Wright
• In a Season of Calm Weather
• A Scent of Sasparilla
• The Strawberry Window
• The Town Where Nobody Got Off
• Here There Be Tygers
• The Dragon
• The Gift
• The Smile
• The Marriage Mender
• The Headpiece
• The Time of Going Awat
• The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit
• The Little Mice
• Dark They Were and Golden Eyed
• The End of the Beginning
• The Rock Cried Out
• Almost the End of the World
• The Sunset Harp
• Perchance to Dream
• The Referent

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Kiss Me Deadly: 13 Tales of Paranormal Love (2010), edited by Trisha Telep, and was reprinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 8, January-February 2016. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

Kevin Brockmeier--award-winning author of The Brief History of the Dead--has been widely praised for the richness of his imagination, the lyrical grace and playfulness of his language, and the empathic emotional complexity of his storytelling. And this dazzling collection once again affirms his place as one of the most creative and compassionate writers of his generation.

In the haunting title story, a young, asocial woman remembers the oddly honest things she wrote in her high school classmates' yearbooks and contemplates her scarred life, imagining an escape with an apparition she calls the Entity. In "Father John Melby and the Ghost of Amy Elizabeth," a formerly dull and turgid pastor is touched by a spirit that turns his sermons into crowd-pleasers--that is, until he discovers his inspiration is a little less than divine. "The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device" is a gorgeous homage to the classic, young readers' choose-your-own-adventure novels. But this one is for grown-ups who can navigate through imagery and dead ends, and toward a resolution that only Kevin Brockmeier could have invented. From the fantastical to the concrete, the range of this collection is breathtaking. It moves fluidly, finding beauty in the quiet, often overlooked corners of the world.

By turns daring and moving, The View from the Seventh Layer is crafted with the remarkable voice and vision that have become hallmarks of Brockmeier's acclaimed fiction.

Horror collides with science fiction in this omnibus edition of Brozek's Melissa Allen trilogy, which sees a savvy teenager fighting to save the world from evil.

In "Never Let Me Sleep," virtually everyone in South Dakota falls asleep and dies. Only 14-year-old Melissa, a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic on house arrest, survives. Because of her immunity to whatever killed everyone else, she's tasked by Homeland Security to find the source and stop it, but first she has to defeat terrifying insectoid aliens.

In "Never Let Me Leave," Melissa meets several other teenagers who've survived unusual phenomena; soon they're trapped in a secured scientific facility with an alien capable of possessing humans.

In "Never Let Me Die," Melissa and the survivors of the previous incident undertake a hazardous mission that again brings them into contact with their alien foes.

There was a cure for depression and unemployment.

There was a cure for war, madness and national hatreds.

There was a cure for prejudice, crime and mass hysteria.

But there were those who wanted the cure suppressed until the world collapsed!

A novel of the fever-pitched fight against the end of the world, reminiscent of 1984 or A Clockwork Orange - but with an amazing difference.

A collection of humorous quatrains by John Brunner, each with a cartoon by Arthur Thomson (ATom).

Table of Contents:

• John Brunner - essay by Don D'Ammassa
• Android
• Bug-Eyed Monster
• Chemist
• Doctor
• Earthmen
• Flying Saucers
• Genius
• Hypnotist
• Inorganic Matter
• Jovian
• Knob
• Larva
• Mutant
• Neanderthalers
• Oölitic Strata, Oligocene
• Planets
• Question
• Robot
• Spaceship
• Time Paradoxes
• Utopia
• Virgin
• Weather
• Xperiments
• Yeti
• Zoo

He was 'The Visitor'... in a society revolutionised and troubled by a transportation device that let you walk through a door and be anywhere in the world - instantly. He was 'The Visitor'... at a time when unauthorised travel had caused the violent deaths of countless millions and the survivors were quaking in fear. He was 'The Visitor'... in a world where the invasion of privacy was the ultimate crime and where his obsession with visiting places where he had no right to be led him on a perilous adventure towards his own destruction.

Born over a century ago, Agyar was once a frivolous young man, before he found unwanted immortality in a woman's blood-red lips. Now he goes from woman to woman, and decade to decade, finding himself at last in an Midwestern college town, where he must choose between the seductions of salvation-and of destruction.

Once upon a time there were four brothers who ruled the land of Fenario--along with a goddess, a wizard, an enigmatic talking stallion, and a very hungry dragon--and lived in a crumbling, Brokedown Palace on the banks of the River of Faerie. Beneath the palace the foundations trembled, for something was rotten in Fenario.

Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille serves the best matzoh ball soup in the Galaxy, and hires some of the best musicians you'll ever hear. It's a great place to visit, but it tends to move around-just one step ahead of whatever mysterious conspiracy is reducing whole worlds to radioactive ash. And Cowboy Feng's may be humanity's last hope for survival.

It is 1849. Across Europe, the high tide of revolution has crested, leaving recrimination and betrayal in its wake. From the high councils of Prussia to the corridors of Parliament, the powers-that-be breathe sighs of relief. But the powers-that-be are hardly unified among themselves. Far from it...

On the south coast of England, London man-about-town James Cobham comes to himself in a country inn, with no idea how he got there. Corresponding with his cousin, he discovers himself to have been presumed drowned in a boating accident. Together they decide that he should stay put for the moment, while they investigate what may have transpired. For James Cobham is a wanted man--wanted by conspiring factions of the government and the Chartists alike, and also the target of a magical conspiracy inside his own family.

And so the adventure begins...leading the reader through every corner of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, from the parlors of the elite to the dens of the underclass. Not since Wilkie Collins or Conan Doyle has there been such a profusion of guns, swordfights, family intrigues, women disguised as men, occult societies, philosophical discussions, and, of course, passionate romance.

Donovan was shot by a cop. For jaywalking, supposedly. Actually, for arguing with a cop while black. Four of the nine shots were lethal -- or would have been, if their target had been anybody else. The Foundation picked him up, brought him back, and trained him further. "Lethal" turns out to be a relative term when magic is involved.

When Marci was fifteen, she levitated a paperweight and threw it at a guy she didn't like. The Foundation scooped her up for training too.

"Hippie chick" Susan got well into her Foundation training before they told her about the magic, but she's as powerful as Donovan and Marci now.

They can teleport themselves thousands of miles, conjure shields that will stop bullets, and read information from the remnants of spells cast by others days before.

They all work for the secretive Foundation... for minimum wage.

Which is okay, because the Foundation are the good guys. Aren't they?

"The Desecrator" is an original short story from the Draegaran Empire, by bestselling author Stephen Brust. This is a tale of the Hawklord Daymar, and of a particular Morganti blade. Vlad Taltos fans will enjoy new insight into Stephen Brust's fantasy series.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Cigany is the gypsy, stalking the city in a cloud of magic.

Stepovich is the seasoned cop, who keeps finding dead bodies in the gypsy's wake.

The Fair Lady is Queen of the Underworld, drawing them both into her murderous web...until only the gypsy's broken memories stand between Stepovich's beloved city and the Lady's dark designs.

This is a story of Creation. There is a substance of raw chaos: cacoastrum; and stuff of order: illiaster. From the illiaster came consciousness that resulted in the firstborn angels: Yaweh, Satan, Michael, Lucifer, Raphael, Leviathan and Belial. The firstborn create Heaven in order to protect themselves from the cacoastrum, which threatens to destroy them. This event is later referred to as the 'First Wave.' The walls of heaven have collapsed two times since then, resulting in the Second and Third Waves, creating, respectively, the archangels and angels.

Trouble arises when Yaweh, worried about the imminent Fourth Wave, devises The Plan: the blueprint for a new, larger Heaven (Earth), with walls that the cacoastrum cannot destroy. Unfortunately, at least a thousand angels will die during the construction of his new Paradise. Yaweh charges Satan with securing the cooperation of every angel in Heaven, and Satan finds himself wondering if they have the ethical right to coerce anyone into participating.

In this novel, Brust has created an epic, imaginative retelling of Milton's Paradise Lost.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Loci - (1973) - essay
• The Hanged Man - (1972) - shortstory
• Shark - (1973) - shortstory
• No. 2 Plain Tank Auxiliary Fill Structural Limit 17,605 lbs. Fuel-PWA Spec. 522 Revised - (1972) - shortstory
• Adrift on the Freeway - (1970) - shortstory
• Jody After the War - (1972) - shortstory
• Teleidoscope - (1973) - shortstory
• The Poet in the Hologram in the Middle of Prime Time - (1972) - shortstory
• The Human Side of the Village Monster - (1971) - shortstory
• Among the Dead - (1971) - shortstory
• File on the Plague - (1971) - shortstory
• The Soft Blue Bunny Rabbit Story - (1971) - shortstory
• Tactics - (1973) - shortstory
• Sending the Very Best - (1970) - shortstory
• Their Thousandth Season - (1972) - shortstory
• Love Song of Herself - (1971) - shortstory
• Pinup - (1973) - shortstory
• Dune's Edge - (1972) - shortstory

A storm is coming.... Introducing a pulse-pounding technothriller by the New York Times bestselling author of Arctic Rising

Prudence "Roo" Jones never thought he'd have a family to look after — until suddenly he found himself taking care of his orphaned teenage nephew. Roo, a former Caribbean Intelligence operative, spends his downtime on his catamaran dodging the punishing hurricanes that are the new norm in the Caribbean. Roo enjoys the simple calm of his new life — until an unexpected package from a murdered fellow spy shows up. Suddenly Roo is thrown into the center of the biggest storm of all.

Using his wits — and some of the more violent tricks of his former trade — Roo begins to unravel the mystery that got his friend killed. When a polished and cunning woman claiming to be murdered spy's sister appears, the two find themselves caught up in a global conspiracy with a weapon that could change the face of the world forever.

In Hurricane Fever, New York Times bestselling author Tobias Buckell (Arctic Rising, Halo: The Cole Protocol) has crafted a kinetic technothriller perfect for fans of action-packed espionage within a smartly drawn geo-political landscape. Roo is an anti – James Bond for a new generation.

In early-nineteenth century Scotland, sixteen-year-old Josie, an orphan, is sent to live with an aunt and uncle on the rocky, stormy northwest coast. Everything and everyone in her new surroundings, including her relatives, is sinister, threatening, and mysterious. She's told that Eli, the young man she's attracted to, is forbidden to her, but not why. Spirited, curious, and determined, Josie sets out to learn the village's secrets and discovers evil, fueled by heartless greed, as well as a ghostly presence eager for revenge.

A brutal car accident that claimed the life of her best friend has left seventeen-year-old Catherine in a state of shock and severe depression. She longs to move forward with her life, but feels she can't until she is somehow assured of her friend's forgiveness. On a Christmas visit to her grandmother in Pasadena, a mysterious and handsome stranger approaches Catherine at church claiming that he can put her in touch with her dead friend. Catherine is wary of the stranger's claims and his ghostly appearance but feels he may be the only key to escaping her past. She tells no one of the meeting but is approached by an elderly woman who warns her of the stranger's powers. The woman's teenage diary and eerie rumors surrounding other troubled girls who have disappeared from the church community leave Catherine fearful of the stranger's true intentions. She realizes she must find some way to confront this supernatural presence as well as the ghosts of her past.

The compelling, terrifying story of a devastating virus.

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to kill someone? Wondered, in your darkest secret thoughts, about the taste of human flesh? What if you woke up and began your morning by devoting the rest of your life to a murderous rampage, a never-ending cannibalistic spree? And what if you were only one of thousands who shared the same compulsion?

Well, today's your lucky day: in fact, by this afternoon, the predators will outnumber the prey. Pontypool Changes Everything depicts just such an epidemic. It's the compelling, terrifying story of a devastating virus. You catch it through conversation, and once it has you, it leads you on a strange journey - into another world where the undead chase you down the streets of the smallest towns and largest cities.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January-February 2005. The story is included in the collection I Remember the Future: The Award-Nominated Stories of Michael A. Burstein (2008).

"Within the psychic architecture that is EVER, Blake Butler explores the way bodies swell and contract, going from skin to house and back again. And the way houses too shrink to fit us first like clothing and then like skin and then tighter still. The result is a strange, visionary ontological dismemberment that takes you well beyond what you'd ever expect" --Brian Evenson.

"Blake Butler is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence, and the room-ridden narrator of his debut novella, EVER, nerves her way into a hallucinative ruckus of rousing originality" --Gary Lutz.

"In EVER--as in, indicating any time in the past or future--light is entropic; 'the sky could lift your skin off'; domestic rituals are anamorphotic mind fucks granting 'no exit method'; and doors won't open even when you don't try..." --Miranda Mellis.

Sturgeon and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Omni, May 1987 and was reprinted in Lightspeed: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue, June 2016. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (1988), edited by Gardner Dozois, Omni Visions One (1993), edited by Ellen Datlow, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African (2000), edited by Sheree R. Thomas, and Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (2006), edited by Justine Larbalestier. It is included in the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995).

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It was originally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1990. There are no other known publications available at this time.

Compiled by Italo Calvino, one of the essential writers of the twentieth century (and editor of the best-selling Italian Folktales), Fantastic Tales is a rich and wide-ranging collection of twenty-six classic, uncanny tales from the nineteenth century written by an intriguing panoply of European and American authors. Master storyteller himself, Calvino has contributed an informative introduction to the collection, and an engaging précis to each story.

As Calvino writes in Fantastic Tales, which traces the genre from its roots in German Romanticism to the ghost stories of Henry James: "The fantastic tale is one of the most characteristic products of nineteenth-century narrative. For us, it is also one of the most significant.... As it relates to our sensibility today, the supernatural element at the heart of these stories always appears freighted with meaning, like the revolt of the unconscious, the repressed, the forgotten.... In this we see the modern dimension of the fantastic, the reason for its triumphant resurgence in our times."

Fantastic Tales is a fantastically canonical anthology assembled by an editor who, in the words of Salman Rushdie, "possesses the power of seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams back to life."

Table of Contents:

• vii - Introduction (Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday) - essay by Italo Calvino
• 3 - The Story of the Demoniac Pacheco (Excerpt) - (1805) - shortfiction by Jan Potocki
• 17 - Autumn Sorcery - (1808) - novella by Joseph von Eichendorff
• 33 - The Sandman - (1816) - novelette by E. T. A. Hoffmann
• 73 - Wandering Willie's Tale - (1824) - shortstory by Sir Walter Scott
• 95 - The Elixir of Life - (1830) - shortstory by Honoré de Balzac
• 123 - The Eye with No Lid - (1832) - shortfiction by Philarete Chasles
• 143 - The Enchanted Hand - (1832) - shortfiction by Gérard de Nerval
• 181 - Young Goodman Brown - (1835) - shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• 197 - The Nose - (1835) - shortfiction by Nikolai Gogol
• 227 - The Beautiful Vampire - (1836) - novelette by Théophile Gautier
• 261 - The Venus of Ille - (1837) - novelette by Prosper Mérimée
• 293 - The Ghost and the Bonesetter - (1838) - shortstory by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
• 307 - The Tell-Tale Heart - (1843) - shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe
• 315 - The Shadow - (1847) - shortstory by Hans Christian Andersen
• 331 - The Signalman - (1866) - shortstory by Charles Dickens
• 347 - The Dream - (1876) - shortfiction by Ivan Turgenev
• 371 - A Shameless Rascal - (1879) - shortfiction by Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov
• 389 - The Very Image - (1883) - shortfiction by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
• 395 - Night: A Nightmare - (1887) - shortstory by Guy de Maupassant
• 403 - A Lasting Love - (1887) - novelette by Vernon Lee
• 441 - Chickamauga - (1889) - shortstory by Ambrose Bierce
• 451 - The Holes in the Mask - shortstory by Jean Lorrain
• 461 - The Bottle Imp - (1891) - novelette by Robert Louis Stevenson
• 493 - The Friends of the Friends - (1896) - novelette by Henry James
• 523 - The Bridge-Builders - (1898) - novelette by Rudyard Kipling
• 559 - The Country of the Blind - (1904) - novelette by H. G. Wells

Just when he feels that his life is on the right track, Jack Orchard finds that a chain letter he has thrown away has brought him terrible luck, and he is determined to make things right again by keeping the chain going, no matter what.

This story follows Evelyn, a young Englishman, along a journey through mythology and sexuality. It is a story of how he learns to be a woman, first in the brutal hands of Zero, the ragtime Nietzsche, then through the ancient Tristessa, the beautiful ghost of Hollywood past.

On May 4, 1881, the day that Zianno Zezen -- Z, for short -- turns twelve, his life changes forever. Amid the confusion of a tragic train wreck, he has the first inkling that he is no ordinary boy... that he is not human at all, but instead a member of a race known as the Meq. The Meq have lost all memory of their origins; they do not know why they heal with astonishing speed, or why, once they turn twelve, they stop aging unless they meet the single other member of their race destined to join with them.

Certain Meq possess even more amazing powers, thanks to mysterious Stones they have carried since before the dawn of recorded history. Z's father carried such a Stone, the Stone of Dreams. Now that Stone is Z's to bear... and to protect.

The Meq are far-flung and elusive, but Z finds allies. He will need them; for a challenge comes from the renegade Meq called the Fleur-du-Mal -- the Flower of Evil. A sadistic assassin in the body of a twelve-year-old boy, the Fleur-du-Mal will become Z's archenemy in a story that spans decades and continents and features an unforgettable cast of characters, human and Meq alike.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, March 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

London 1888. His Majesty's airships troll the sky powered by antigrav liftwood as a cabal of Iron Lords tightens its hold on a Britain choked by the fumes of industry. Mars has been colonized, and clockwork assassins stalk the European corridors of power. And somewhere far to the east, the Old Man of the Mountains plots the end of the world with his Forever Engine.

Enter Jack Fargo. Scholar. Former special forces operator in Afghanistan. A man from our own near future thrust back in time--or to wherever it is that this Brave Victorian World actually exists. Aided only by an elderly Scottish physicist, a young British officer of questionable courage, and a beautiful but mysterious spy for the French Commune, Fargo is a man on a mission: save the future from irrevocable destruction when the Forever Engine is brought to full power and blows this universe, and our own, to smithereens.

Laana returns to her small hometown following the death of her grandmother and becomes obsessed with the local ghost story of Carolyn Hayward. Who was she? Why does every reference or local memory of her give conflicting information about her life, work, and the circumstances of her death.

Laana's research takes her on a whirlwind journey through her hometown's history and reconnects her with old friends, prompting her to reflect on her own story and the ways she was and wasn't there for those in her life.

The story begins with Neddy Merrill lounging at a friend's pool on a warm midsummer day. On a whim, Neddy decides to get home by swimming through all the pools in the neighborhood (which he names "The Lucinda River" in honor of his wife), and starts off enthusiastic and full of youthful energy. In the early stops on his journey, he is enthusiastically greeted by friends, who welcome him with drinks. It is readily apparent that he is well-regarded, and has an upper or upper-middle-class social standing.

As his journey progresses, things gradually take on a darker and ultimately surreal tone. Despite the ever-present afternoon light, it becomes unclear how much time has passed. At the beginning of the story it was clearly midsummer, but eventually all natural signs point to the season being autumn. Old acquaintances encountered by Neddy mention misfortune and money troubles which he does not remember hearing about, and he is patently unwelcome at several houses belonging to owners of a lower social class. His earlier, youthful energy gradually declines, and it becomes increasingly painful and difficult for him to swim on. Finally, he staggers back home, only to find his house decrepit, empty, and abandoned.

This short story originally appeared in The New Yorker on July 18, 1964. It has been collected and anthologized a number of times. It was the basis for the 1968 movie The Swimmer.

Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate United States?an alternate timeline?she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram's copy of The Pyronauts?a science fiction masterwork in her world that now only exists as a single flimsy paperback?and becomes determined to create a museum dedicated to preserving the remaining artifacts and memories of her vanished culture.

But the refugees are unwelcome and Hel's efforts are met with either indifference or hostility. And when the only copy of The Pyronauts goes missing, Hel must decide how far she is willing to go to recover it and finally face her own anger, guilt, and grief over what she has truly lost.

Sidewise Award winning and Hugo, Locus, Sturgeon and World Fantasy Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Vanishing Acts (2000), edited by Ellen Datlow. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 6 (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell and Steampunk (2008), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. It is included in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)

Think twice before you share your life online.

Freya has a new virtual assistant. It knows what she likes, knows what she wants and knows whose voice she most needs to hear: her missing sister's. It adopts her sister's personality, recreating her through a life lived online. But this virtual version of her sister knows things it shouldn't be possible to know. It's almost as if the missing girl is still out there somewhere, feeding fresh updates into the cloud. But that's impossible.

Isn't it?

This novelette originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2016. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton.

For years, the Jackson family has vacationed at Rowena Wandigaux Lee's old Victorian house on Gull Island, a place of superstition and legend off the southern coast of the U.S. One particular summer, young Beau follows his cousin Sumter into a hidden shack in the woods--and christens this new clubhouse "Neverland."

Neverland has a secret history, unknown to the children...

The rundown shack in the woods is the key to an age-old mystery, a place forbidden to all. But Sumter and his cousins gather in its dusty shadows to escape the tensions at their grandmother's house. Neverland becomes the place where children begin to worship a creature of shadows, which Sumter calls "Lucy."

All gods demand sacrifice...

It begins with small sacrifices, little games, strange imaginings. While Sumter's games spiral out of control, twisting from the mysterious to the macabre, a nightmarish presence rises among the straggly trees beyond the bluffs overlooking the sea.

And when Neverland itself is threatened with destruction, the children's games take on a horrifying reality--and Gull Island becomes a place of unrelenting terror.

Canary Fever is a collection of reviews about the most significant literatures of the twenty-first century: science fiction, fantasy and horror: the literatures Clute argues should be recognized as the central modes of fantastika in our times. The title refers to the canary in the coal mine, who whiffs gas and dies to save miners; reviewers of fantastika can find themselves in a similar position, though words can only hurt us.

This is the fourth such collection by John Clute. Several older pieces are included here, though the great bulk of the book - over 200,000 words - was first published between 2003 and 2008. Every review has been edited. Errors and incoherencies have been removed when possible. The original versions of some reviews - in particular those written in the past year or so - have been treated as first drafts, and have been brought into final form.

One piece, on John B Watson and Behaviorism, is previously unpublished.

Deep in the English countryside, Kenneth Storey and his older brother have discovered the land of Arboria - a kingdom of adventure waiting for them through a gate in the garden wall.

As the world outside plunges deeper into global conflict, the Arborians wage their own war against the Barbarians - an ancient foe seemingly as old as the forest itself. But for Kenneth, Arboria is more than a world of make-believe and the Barbarians more than a figment of his imagination. For Kenneth, Arboria is more important than the real world... and perhaps, in some ways, he may be right.

The philosopher protagonist of the series, Commander A-Riman, brooks no nonsense from Aliens and the like, whom he re-educates in course of his Space-Opera adventures; notably, however, he attempts to avoid military confrontations with other breeds.

This novel is a fix-up of stories that originally appeared in the magazine Astounding SF:

• "Fighting Philosopher"
• "Philosophical Corps"
• "The Players"

Boundaries blur. The skin of the world spirals out of control, bringing distant myths to fresh, vivid life. There are no maps. Expect the unexpected - truths as slippery as blood and as sharp as bone. It can be imagined in the heart or in the mind of even one human being, then it is happening now, in the dark where no one can see...

From the razor-sharp imaginations of the best genre writers in Australia comes this new collection of the gothic and the supernatural. Moving, surprising, erotic, unsettling and unrelenting in the desire to entertain. Southern Blood is the state of the art of horror in Australia.

Includes stories by:

• Deborah Biancotti
• David Carroll
• Bill Congreve
• Stephen Dedman
• Terry Dowling
• Robert Hood
• Naomi Hatchman
• Sue Isle
• George Ivanoff
• Rick Kennett
• Rosaleen Love
• Geoffrey Maloney
• Kirstyn McDermott
• Lucy Sussex
• Sean Williams

For four thousand years, the Guardships have ruled Canon Space - immortal ships with an immortal crew, dealing swiftly and harshly with any mercantile houses or alien races that threaten the status quo.But now the House Tregesser has an edge: a force from outside Canon Space offers them the resources to throw off Guardship rule. This precipitates an avalanche of unexpected outcomes, including the emergence of Kez Maefele, one of the few remaining generals of the Ku Warrior race-the only race to ever seriously threaten Guardship hegemony.

Kez Maefele and a motley group of aliens, biological constructs, and scheming aristocrats find themselves at the center of the conflict. Maefele must chose which side he will support: the Guardships, who defeated and destroyed his race, or the unknown forces outside Canon Space that promise more death and destruction.

As the world undergoes daily transformations through the application of technoscience to every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. However much science fiction texts vary in artistic quality and intellectual sophistication, they share in a mass social energy and a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. At this moment, a strikingly high proportion of films, commercial art, popular music, video and computer games, and non-genre fiction have become what Csicsery-Ronay calls science fictional, stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction.

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the "seven beauties" of the fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technsocience's development into a global regime.

Good guy Karl Bender is a thirty-something bar owner whose life lacks love and meaning. When he stumbles upon a time-travelling worm hole in his closet, Karl and his best friend Wayne develop a side business selling access to people who want to travel back in time to listen to their favorite bands. It's a pretty ingenious plan, until Karl, intending to send Wayne to 1980, transports him back to 980 instead. Though Wayne sends texts extolling the quality of life in tenth century "Mannahatta," Karl is distraught that he can't bring his friend back.

Enter brilliant, prickly, overweight astrophysicist, Lena Geduldig. Karl and Lena's connection is immediate. While they work on getting Wayne back, Karl and Lena fall in love -- with time travel, and each other. Unable to resist meddling with the past, Karl and Lena bounce around time. When Lena ultimately prevents her own long-ago rape, she alters the course of her life and threatens her future with Karl.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Infinity Wars (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke

Contents:

• 7 - Introduction: Wizards and Warriors - (1965) - essay by L. Sprague de Camp
• 12 - Bazaar of the Bizarre - interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 13 - Bazaar of the Bizarre - [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] - (1963) - novelette by Fritz Leiber
• 39 - The Dark Eidolon - interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 41 - The Dark Eidolon - [Zothique] - (1935) - novelette by Clark Ashton Smith
• 69 - The Hoard of the Gibbelins - interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 71 - The Hoard of the Gibbelins - (1911) - short story by Lord Dunsany
• 78 - The Hungry Hercynian - interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 79 - The Hungry Hercynian - [Pusadian] - (1953) - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp
• 108 - Kings in Darkness - interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 109 - Kings in Darkness - [The Elric Saga] - (1962) - novelette by James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock [as by Michael Moorcock]
• 140 - Mazirian the Magician - interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 141 - Mazirian the Magician - [Dying Earth] - (1950) - short story by Jack Vance
• 160 - Shadows in Zamboula - interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 161 - Shadows in Zamboula - [Conan] - (1935) - novelette by Robert E. Howard

Picture a wizard. Go ahead, close your eyes. There he is, see? Skinny old guy with a long straggly beard. No doubt he's wearing iridescent silk robes that couldn't protect his frail body from a light breeze. The hat's a must, too, right? Big, floppy thing, covered in esoteric symbols that would instantly show every other mage where this one gets his magic? Wouldn't want a simple steel helmet or something that might, you know, protect the part of him most needed for conjuring magical forces from being bashed in with a mace (or pretty much any household object).

Now open your eyes and let me show you what a real war mage looks like... but be warned: you're probably not going to like it, because we're violent, angry, dangerously broken people who sell our skills to the highest bidder and be damned to any moral or ethical considerations.

At least, until such irritating concepts as friendship and the end of the world get in the way.

My name is Cade Ombra, and though I currently make my living as a mercenary wonderist, I used to have a far more noble-sounding job title - until I discovered the people I worked for weren't quite as noble as I'd believed. Now I'm on the run and my only friend, a homicidal thunder mage, has invited me to join him on a suicide mission against the seven deadliest mages on the continent.

Time to recruit some very bad people to help us on this job...

Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it ? how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens? This third perspective on myself is disconcerting. The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known?where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader's mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader's imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Love in Vein (1994), edited by Poppy Z. Brite and Martin H. Greenberg. The story is included in the collection Caliban and Other Tales (2002).

THE PAST NEVER STAYS BURIED

Karin has had enough of her abusive husband, Danny, so one day she kills him. With the aid of her attorney/lover she stays out of jail. The perfect crime and now she is free to live her life. But when she accidentally brings Danny back to life, her past is going to catch up to her.

Now Danny is a walking corpse and being undead has caused his worst desires to come out. Karin thought he was evil before, but she has no idea how much worse it's going to get.

From Robert Devereaux (Slaughterhouse High, Santa Steps Out) comes a splatterpunk novel of outrageous gore and vicious sex.

Masters of Everon, announces the brass plate on the door of the original Everon colonists' corporate headquarters. But somehow Everon resisted all their efforts; it was as if the planet itself fought against human efforts to establish a foothold. Some settlers want to return the favour, wrecking Everon's ecology in revenge, but Jef Roboni loves the great cat-like maolots of Everon, and the planet itself; he believes that settlers and planet can coexist.

Now time is running out - and even the hints that Jef has uncovered are not enough to prepare him for the incomprehensible strangeness and wonder of the true Masters of Everon.

The ancient starship La Chasse Gallerie is found drifting perilously in space. Despite heavy damage from alien Laagi warships, incredibly the ship is till intact and the voice of its pilot, Raoul Penard, comes through loud and clear.

But Petard died over one hundred years ago.

On Earth, frantic investigation reveals that Petard may be dead but his mind is very much alive, merged with the ship itself. The staggering potential of this evolutionary breakthrough compels the scientists to embark on a technological journey of astonishing discovery.

The dark and violent SKREEMER tells the post-apocalyptic tale of a young boy's ascension from brutal assassin to the most powerful gangster in the world. With America decimated by a plague, ganglord "Presidents" have used their control of a life-saving serum to become the rulers of the land. Recruited as a child to be a mob hit man, Veto Skreemer rises through the crime family ranks by eliminating all of his brethren until he becomes the most influential "President" in the country. But now as the balance of power shifts, Veto must devise a way to retain control or watch as his empire crumbles.

Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks.

The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream.

In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands.

For now, survival means staying hidden... but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.

Praise God, never the wind

1996 - Luca Saracino is thirteen and has been completely blind for eight months when his parents move to a Southern Italian farmhouse they dream of turning into a hotel. With his brother dropping out of university and the family reeling from Luca's diagnosis, they are chasing dreams of rebirth and reinvention.

As Luca tells his story without sight - experiencing the world solely through hearing, smell, taste and touch - he meets the dauntless Ada Guadalupi, who takes him out to explore the rocky fields and empty beaches. But Luca and Ada find they can't escape the grudges that have lasted between their families for generations, or the gossiping of the town. And Luca is preyed upon by the feral Wanderer, who walks the vineyards of his home.

As Luca's family starts to crack at the seams, Luca and Ada have to navigate new lands and old rivalries to uncover the truths spoken as whispers on the wind.

The stories brought together in this collection introduce for the first time in English the dazzling speculative imaginings of Djuna, one of South Korea's most provocative SF writers. Whether describing a future society light years away or satirizing Confucian patriarchy, these stories evoke a universe at once familiar and clearly fantastical. Also collected here for the first time are all six stories set in the Linker Universe, where a mutating virus sends human beings reeling through the galaxy into a dizzying array of fracturing realities.

Blending influences ranging from genre fiction (zombie, vampire, SF, you name it) to golden-age cinema to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Djuna's stories together form a brilliantly intertextual, mordantly funny critique of the human condition as it evolves into less and more than what it once was.

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whatever.

The whateverpocalypse. That's what Touré, a twenty-something Cambridge coder, calls it after waking up one morning to find himself seemingly the only person left in the city. Once he finds Robbie and Carol, two equally disoriented Harvard freshmen, he realizes he isn't alone, but the name sticks: Whateverpocalypse. But it doesn't explain where everyone went. It doesn't explain how the city became overgrown with vegetation in the space of a night. Or how wild animals with no fear of humans came to roam the streets.

Add freakish weather to the mix, swings of temperature that spawn tornadoes one minute and snowstorms the next, and it seems things can't get much weirder. Yet even as a handful of new survivors appear--Paul, a preacher as quick with a gun as a Bible verse; Win, a young professional with a horse; Bethany, a thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent; and Ananda, an MIT astrophysics adjunct--life in Cambridge, Massachusetts gets stranger and stranger.

The self-styled Apocalypse Seven are tired of questions with no answers. Tired of being hunted by things seen and unseen. Now, armed with curiosity, desperation, a shotgun, and a bow, they become the hunters. And that's when things truly get weird.

A town is taken over by an evil force manifesting itself as a large impenetrable dome. Within the dome, anarchy reigns and corpses litter its grey interior. But four characters attempt to escape by heading for a mysterious central light source which they hope will offer a refuge.

Never At Home is L. Timmel Duchamp's second collection. It includes stories previously published in the acclaimed Bending the Landscape and Paraspheres series and in Asimov's SF, as well as one hundred pages of previously unpublished work, all of them emotionally intense explorations of the difficulties of belonging.

Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club, writes: "L. Timmel Duchamp has become a major voice as an editor, publisher, and critic. Her new collection Never at Home confirms her importance as a writer as well. The stories within are strange and heady, original and surprising. In them, the Duchamp heroine often finds herself pulled into some fascinating new world. The Duchamp reader is in the same position, though much happier to be there. Highly recommended."

Table of Contents"

• Explanations Are Clear - (2001) - novelette
• The Tears of Niobe - (2006) - novelette
• The Nones of Quintilis, Somewhere on the Southwest Slope of Monte Albano - (2011) - novelette
• A Question of Grammar - (1998) - novella
• The World and Alice - (2006) - novelette
• Sadness Ineffable, Desire Ineluctable - (2011) - novella
• And I Must Baffle at the Hint - (1995) - novelette

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Cern Zoo (2009), edited by D. F. Lewis. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Two (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow, and The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2011), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

In 'The Ossuary' and nineteen other stories, Steve Duffy evokes the Golden Age of the ghost story with practised ease. Set mainly in the period between the Wars, the stories in THE NIGHT COMES ON are consciously 'Jamesian' in style and setting. They feature libraries and academics and great old country houses, colleges and branch railway-stations and cathedrals; and, of course, any number of things less easily defined which lie in wait for the foolish, the unwary, or the unlucky.

Table of Contents:

• ix - Introduction (The Night Comes On)
• 3 - The Night Comes On
• 24 - Out of Water, Out of the Earth
• 40 - The Close at Chadminster
• 53 - The Last of the Scarisfields
• 68 - The Hunter and His Quarry
• 85 - The Ossuary
• 98 - Running Dogs
• 112 - One Over
• 129 - Figures on a Hillside
• 145 - Ex Libris
• 166 - The Story of a Malediction
• 183 - The Vicar of Wryde St. Luke
• 200 - The Marsh Warden
• 216 - The Return Journey
• 229 - Nigredo
• 244 - Tidesend
• 270 - Notes on the Stories

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Blood and Other Cravings (2011), edited by Ellen Datlow.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally apeared in the anthology Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2007), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the Nebula Award Showcase 2009, edited by Ellen Datlow, and the collections The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories (2012) and An Agent of Utopia (2018).

Read the full story for free at Nightshade Books (pdf), or listen to a podcast of this story at Drabblecast.

Connor and Ines have traveled back to Earth on a preservation project to find the human R "jacks" that sacrificed their bodies to prop up the United States's failing infrastructure. But the jacks hold a secret, one Connor would rather keep hidden than risk the truth being made public.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

HellSans is set in a fictional UK, where HellSans is a ubiquitous typeface, enforced by the government in all communications and in all public spaces. It is the ultimate control device. The majority of the population experience bliss when they see the typeface, but there's a minority who are allergic to it. The HellSans Allergic (HSAs) are persecuted, and live on the streets or in a ghetto on the outskirts of the capital city.

Jane Ward, CEO of the company that manufactures the Inex (a cyborg doll-like creature that has replaced the smart phone as the essential aid and accessory) has everything: fame and fortune, until she falls ill with the allergy and becomes embroiled in the government's internal power struggles. She loses her job and her wealth, ending up in the ghetto until she is rescued by Dr Icho Smith.

Icho is a scientist who has developed a cure for the allergy, but she is on the run from the government and the Seraphs (the ghetto 'terrorist' group), who all have their own agenda for the cure. Jane and Icho work together, aiming to expose government corruption and bring the cure to the HSAs.

HellSans is written in three parts. Parts one and two can be read in either order which provides a unique approach to the perspectives of the haves and have-nots in the run-up to the revolutionary conclusion.

Over half a century before the rise of the great Queens of Crime , Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, Amelia B. Edwards was an expert practitioner of crime fiction and murder mysteries, of which the best dozen are included in this volume. These gripping tales range from ingenious whodunnits to encounters with homicidal lunatics to clairvoyant visions preventing disaster or imminent murder to ghost stories in which supernatural visitations explain earlier crimes and murders. These tales, many of which have been long out of print, are an ideal read for those who like their mystery stories tinged with a touch of the supernatural.

Table of Contents

• "The Four-Fifteen Express"
• "Cain"
• "Number Three"
• "In the Confessional"
• "The Tragedy in the Palazzo Bardello"
• "A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest"
• "Sister Johanna's Story"
• "A Railway Panic"
• "The Guard-Ship at the Aire"
• "The Professor's Story"
• "Was it an Illusion?"
• "All Saints' Eve"

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1989. The story can also be found in the anthology What Might Have Been? Volume 1: Alternate Empires (1989), edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg. It is included in the collection Live! from Planet Earth (2005).

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1984. The story can also be found in the anthologies The 1985 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha, Best SF of the Year #14 (1985), edited by Terry Carr, Nebula Awards 20 (1985), edited by George Zebrowski, The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 40th Anniversary Anthology (1989), edited by Edward L. Ferman and Alien Contact (2012), edited by Marty Halpern. It is included in the collections The Old Funny Stuff (1989) and Live! from Planet Earth (2005).

This short story orginally appeared Technology Review, Nov/Dec 2007. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Oceanic (2009) and Crystal Nights and Other Stories (2009).

Read the full story for free at Technology Review.

The novel is set after an atomic war and the world is run by Polynesians. The hero discovers a plot to turn the earth on its axis in order to create an Antarctic utopia.

Tikanu, land of laws and patterns, magic and wild mint, is not found behind hidden doors. It passes across borders and takes root wherever its people settle. This collection of seven commentaries reveals a world waiting patiently at the edges of vision, that welcomes all who are willing to do the work of building it.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Bastian embarks on a wild adventure when he enters the magical world of Fantastica, a doomed land filled with dragons, giants, and monsters, and risks his life to save Fantastica by going on a very dangerous quest.

Amnesiascope edges Los Angeles up against the next millennium and into a vortex of fire. Anarchic, relentlessly eroticized, and ravaged by cataclysm, it is an ecstatic landscape of floating time zones and time-capsule cemeteries, beachside bunkers and ghost airports, Persian domes and towering telescopes that refract memory - a landscape overrun by abducted strippers, nomadic artists, reluctant pornographers, subversive newspaper columnists, alienated movie critics, teenage hookers afraid of the rain, and legendary film-makers who may or may not exist.

"I love the ashes," writes the narrator. "I love driving across one black ring after another all the way to the sea, through the charred palisades. In this particular epoch, when sex is the last subversive act, I'm a guerilla, spending my conscience in a white stream that douses no fires but its own."

Our Ecstatic Days begins as the memoir of a young mother desperate to forget a single act, committed out of love and fear, that has changed forever the world around her.

In the waning days of summer, a lake appears, almost overnight, in the middle of Los Angeles. In an instant of either madness or revelation, convinced that the lake means to take her small son from her, Kristin becomes determined to stop it. Three thousand miles away, on the eve of a momentous event, another young woman - with a bond to Kristin that she can't even know - meets a mysterious figure who announces in the dark, "The Age of Chaos is here."

Against a forbidden landscape that shimmers with destiny and yearning, Our Ecstatic Days finally takes place on the terrain of a defiant heart. Human connections multiply into astonishing twists of fate - by which the wrongs of an obsolete century may be set right - and parallel lives spin faster toward the possibility that they will once again unite, electrifying a vision of the century to come.

In a dystopian Los Angeles, Cale is a newly released political prisoner under surveillance. Beset by dark visions and relegated to working in a desolate library, he's told, without explanation, that he's "the one everyone's looking for." For Catherine, a mysterious South American beauty, the crossing is no less extreme: Leaving her tribal life, she undergoes various confinements and escapes before winding up at the door of a Hollywood screenwriter. Finally Jack Mick Lake, possessed by numerology, must negotiate a river all his own.

When the Twin Towers suddenly reappear in the Badlands of South Dakota twenty years after their fall, nobody can explain their return. To the hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands drawn tothe "American Stonehenge"--including Parker and Zema, siblings on their way from L.A. to visit their mother in Michigan--the Towers seem to sing, even as everybody hears a different song. A rumor overtakes the throng that someone can be seen in the high windows of the southern structure.

On the ninety-third floor, Jesse Presley--the stillborn twin of the most famous singer who ever lived--suddenly awakes, driven mad over the hours and days tocome by a voice in his head that sounds like his but isn't, and by the memory of a country where he survived in his brother's place. Meanwhile, Parker and Zema cross a possessed landscape by a mysterious detour no one knows, charted on a map that no one has seen.

Haunting, audacious, and undaunted, Shadowbahn is a winding and reckless ride through intersections of danger, destiny, and the conjoined halves of a ruptured nation.

In the final seconds of the old millennium, 1,999 women and children march off the edge of a cliff in Northern California, urged on by a cult of silent men in white robes. Kristin was meant to be the two-thousandth to fall. But when at the last moment she flees, she exchanges one dark destiny for a future that will unravel the present.

Answering a cryptic personals ad for a woman "at the end of her rope," Kristin finds temporary haven in the Hollywood Hills with an older, unnamed man as obsessed as he is spiritually ravaged. In a locked room at the bottom of his house, he labors over his life's work: a massive blue calendar the size of a tsunami that measures modern time by the events of chaos and pinpoints the true beginning of the new millenium as not midnight December 31, 1999, but the early hours of one May morning in 1968. This calendar is shot through with the threads of other lives-those searching for a small measure of redemption and an answer to the question, "What's missing from the world?"

From a ritual sacrifice in the name of salvation to a ritual sacrifice in the name of pleasure, from an ancient haunted Celtic tower in Brittany to the revolving memory hotels of Tokyo, from a cinematic hoax in Manhattan that costs five women their lives to a mysterious bloodstained set of coordinates tacked to the wall of an abandoned San Francisco penthouse, The Sea Came at Midnight is a breathtaking literary dance of fate and coincidence. And, unknown even to her, at the center of that dance is the seventeen-year-old.

Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world's most evil man. In a Vienna window, he glimpses the face of a lost erotic dream, and from there travels to the Twentieth Century's darkest corner to confront its shocked and secret conscience. One of Steve Erickson's most acclaimed novels, Tours of the Black Clock crosses the intersections of passion and power and gazes into a clock with no face, where memory is the gravity of time and all the numbers fall like rain.

The Masters had ruled all space with an unconquerable iron fist. But the Masters were gone. And this new, young race who came now to take their place -- could they hope to defeat the ancient Enemy of All?

The Carver family are out in space, traveling to new worlds to check them out for colonization. But, when Mr. Carver has an accident, and remains out of commission for the trip, his sons, Jon and Jak, step up and take over their trip. The boys use their different talents to make their journey a successful one!

Praise for Brian Evenson:

"Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe."--Jonathan Lethem

"One of the most provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today."--The Believer

"There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson."--George Saunders

"Packed with enough atrocities to give Thomas Harris pause.... Not many writers have the imagination or the audacity to transform what looks like salvation into an utterly original outpost of hell."--Bookforum

A stuffed bear's heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby; Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive; and in a mine on another planet, the dust won't stop seeping in. In these stories, Brian Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary--the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.

Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,"Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and is the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel, and one of Time Out New York's top books.

A post-human civilization of synthetic beings, fixated on the concept of children, grapples with the meaning of life... after all life ceases to exist.

This story was originally published on Tor.com on 21 June 2023. Read it for free at Tor.com

This shot story originally appeared in the anthology ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction: Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories (2006) edited by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Best American Fantasy (2007).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Mapping a literary space uniquely his own, Evenson's CONTAGION AND OTHER STORIES pursues to a new level the crepescular and delirious exploration begun in his acclaimed and controversial ALTMANN'S TONGUE. In the O'Henry Award winning "Two Brothers," a minister breaks his leg while his sons watch then refuses to call an ambulance, remaining convinced even unto death that God will arrive to lift him up and make him whole. The self-acclaimed language specialist of "The Polygamy of Language" indiscriminately blends linguistics with murder. "Contagion" is a skewed retelling of the early history of barbed wire, which interweaves metaphysics and the Western genre. "Watson's Boy" shows a boy endlessly wandering the human equivalent of a conditioned response box while the protagonist of "By Halves" finds himself trapped in a relationship that may not exist. Throughout, Evenson's immaculate prose draws us mercilessly up to confront troubled and troubling lives that, astoundingly, are no less human than our own.

Provost Eldon Fochs may be a sexual criminal. His therapist isn't sure, and his church is determined to protect its reputation. Father of Lies is Brian Evenson's fable of power, paranoia, and the dangers of blind obedience, and a terrifying vision of how far institutions will go to protect themselves against the innocents who may be their victims.

Illustrated by graphic novelist Zak Sally, Brian Evenson's hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime's imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified Messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, the mind-bending world of this modern-day Edgar Allan Poe exposes the horror contained within our daily lives.

"Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up another person. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up not a person at all."

From the "master of literary horror" (GQ) comes a collection of new stories tracing the limits and consequences of artificial intelligence and "post-human" relationships. Populated by twins stepping into worlds of absence, bears who lick their cubs into creation, and artificial beings haunted by their less-than-human nature, each page sketches a world where our all-too-real feelings of isolation and ecological dread take on an otherworldly tinge.

In Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson deftly weaves ethical dilemmas, maternal warmth, and echoes of apocalypse into his most tender, disquieting book yet.

When you open your eyes things already seem to be happening without you. You don't know who you are and you don't remember where you've been. You know the world has changed, that a catastrophe has destroyed what used to exist before, but you can't remember exactly what did exist before. And you're paralyzed from the waist down apparently, but you don't remember that either.

A man claiming to be your friend tells you your services are required. Something crucial has been stolen, but what he tells you about it doesn't quite add up. You've got to get it back or something bad is going to happen. And you've got to get it back fast, so they can freeze you again before your own time runs out.

Before you know it, you're being carried through a ruined landscape on the backs of two men in hazard suits who don't seem anything like you at all, heading toward something you don't understand that may well end up being the death of you.

Welcome to the life of Josef Horkai....

Intense and profoundly unsettling, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult.

The story follows Kline, a brutally dismembered detective forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside the cult. As Kline becomes more deeply involved with the group, he begins to realize the stakes are higher than he previously thought. Attempting to find his way through a maze of lies, threats, and misinformation, Kline discovers that his survival depends on an act of sheer will.

Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Other Aliens (2016), edited by Bradford Morrow and Elizabeth Hand. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, edited by Charles Yu and John Joseph Adams.

As climate change wreaks havoc on the earth and the fate of humanity grows dire, a scientist makes a plan to save humanity that would shame the devil.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

A newborn's absent face appears on the back of someone else's head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he's after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses--whether we know it or not.

A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men: of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson's award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.

Table of Contents:

• Leg - (2020) - short story
• In Dreams - short story
• Myling Kommer - (2020) - short story
• Come Up - (2017) - short story
• Palisade - (2018) - short fiction
• Curator - (2019) - short story
• To Breathe the Air - (2020) - short story
• The Barrow-Men - short story
• The Shimmering Wall - (2021) - short story
• Grauer in the Snow - (2019) - short story
• Justle - (2019) - short story
• The Devil's Hand - (2020) - short story
• Nameless Citizen - (2017) - short story
• The Coldness of His Eye - (2019) - short story
• Daylight Come - short story
• Elo Havel - (2020) - short story
• His Haunting - (2019) - short story
• Haver - (2018) - short story
• The Extrication - short story
• A Bad Patch - (2019) - short story
• Hospice - short story
• The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell - (2020) - short story

When Rudd, a troubled teenager, embarks on a school research project, he runs across the secret Mormon ritual of blood sacrifice, and its role in a 1902 murder committed by the grandson of Brigham Young. Along with his newly discovered half-brother, Rudd becomes swept up in the psychological and atavistic effects of this violent, antique ritual.

X doesn't have a name. He thought he had one--or many--but that might be the result of the failing memories of the personalities imprinted within him. Or maybe he really is called X.

He's also not as human as he believes himself to be.

But when he discovers the existence of another--above ground, outside the protection of the Warren--X must learn what it means to be human, or face the destruction of their two species.

A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king's servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own. The characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.

Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York's Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for the title story in "Windeye," Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Department.

Table of Contents:

• Windeye - (2009)
• The Second Boy - (2012)
• The Process - (2012)
• A History of the Human Voice - (2012)
• Dapplegrim - (2010)
• Angel of Death - (2012)
• The Dismal Mirror - (2009)
• Legion - (2012)
• The Moldau Case - (2012)
• The Sladen Suit - (2012)
• Hurlock's Law - (2012)
• Discrepancy - (2012)
• Knowledge - (2012)
• Baby or Doll - (2012)
• The Tunnel - (2012)
• South of the Beast - (2012)
• The Absent Eye - (2011)
• Grottor
• Bon Scott: The Choir Years - (2012)
• Tapadera - (2012)
• The Other Ear - (2012)
• They - (2012)
• The Oxygen Protocol - (2012)
• The Drownable Species - (2012)
• Anskan House - (2012)

Mrs. H.D. Everett was the last in a long line of gifted Victorian novelists who knew how to grip the reader through the invasion of everyday life by the abnormal and dramatic, leaving the facts to produce their special thrills without piling on the agony. 'I always know', says one of her characters, 'how to distinguish a true ghost story from a faked one. The true ghost story never has any point and the faked one dare not leave it out.' From the chilling horror of 'The Death Mask' to the shocking violence of 'The Crimson Blind,' from the creeping menace of 'Parson Clench' to the mounting suspense of 'The Pipers of Mallory,' these thrilling stories were enthusiastically received by readers and critics when they first appeared, and are sure to delight and terrify the modern reader in equal measure.

• The Death Mask
• Parson Clench
• The Wind of Dunowe
• Nevill Nugent's Legacy
• The Crimson Blind
• Fingers of a Hand
• The Next Heir
• Anne's Little Ghost
• Over the Wires
• Water Witch
• The Lonely Road
• A Girl in White
• A Perplexing Case
• The Pipers Of Mallory
• Beyond the Pale
• The Whispering Wall

In the star system ThreeSys, three members of the elite human "Meshed" caste have used their great gifts for evil purposes -- enslaving the lower orders in the addictive dreams of a powerful narcotic. Now hunted by those seeking bloody retribution, Corey, Annmarie, and Eve-along with Eve's lower caste lover, Naverdi -- must flee to Paradise, the first world in ThreeSys to know the curse of human habitation. But something is waiting for them on the now abandoned planet -- a sinister being that can turn their own powers against them, an entity that has broken down all barriers between virtual and real; a creature that has chosen Naverdi to bear its offspring into the world.

Nebula Award winning short story. It was originally published on Sci Fiction, June 22, 2000. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Gardner Dozois, and the Nebula Awards Showcase 2003, edited by Nancy Kress.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It first appeared in the anthology Black Heart, Ivory Bones (2000), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It can also be found in the collection The Cure for Everything (2013).

IN THE SHADOWS OF WAR AND HISTORY, THE MIRROR BETWEEN MAN AND MONSTER BREAKS... From the haunted hills of Roman Britain to the sewers of occupied Warsaw... in the bloodied streets of Revolutionary Paris, and the anarchy World War II Shanghai... out of the wilds of America, India, Africa and Europe... down the long savage darkness of the centuries, monsters have fed upon us. They are shapeshifters, vampires, sorcerers and spirits--things named only in myth, and things for which we have no name. They are our demons, our reflections, our desires and our nightmares. And all too often, they are... only human.

In this second collection from Gemma Files--featuring the award-winning 'The Emperor's Old Bones' (winner of the 1999 International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction), and five never-before-published stories--we tour the overlooked intersections between wilderness and civilization where secret dances of fear and pain are performed and hunters and hunted change roles.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Nancy Kilpatrick
• Nigredo
• Ring of Fire - (1995)
• The Guided Tour - (1996)
• Year Zero - (2001)
• Flare - (1994)
• Bottle of Smoke - (1998)
• Fly-by-Night - (1993)
• In the Poor Girl Taken by Surprise - (2004)
• A Single Shadow Make - (1994)
• The Land Beyond the Forest - (1994)
• Sent Down - (2004)
• The Kindly Ones
• By the Mark
• The Emperor's Old Bones - (1999)
• The Narrow World - (2001)
• Afterword - interview of Gemma Files

"He flicked the coin onto the table and it spun lazily, resting on tails. An eagle, squatting on a cactus, snake held aloft in its beak. Cinco pesos, the worn script read..."

Within these covers, you will find murderous dropbears, zombie kangaroos and undead camels. Poignant endings to the world mash-up with muscle car battles, featuring feral killers that make Mad Max look like the Disney channel.

Everything is a Graveyard delves into the fantastic, the horrifying, the sad and the just plain weird.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy (2011), edited by Ellen Datlow, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, January 2017. It is included in the collection Crackpot Palace (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2018. It can also be found in the anthologies Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution (2012), edited by Ann VanderMeer, and Deserts of Fire: Speculative Fiction and the Modern War (2016), edited by Douglas Lain. The story is included in the collection Crackpot Palace (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Young Alex is a slave. But recognized for his potential as an Animist, he is bought by his college and begins rigorous training. Now, Alex must begin his quest for his Anim-the animal with whom he will bond.

Alex hopes it will be an extraordinary creature that will help him earn the money he needs to buy his freedom. Unfortunately, his Anim turns out to be... well, not nearly what he had hoped. But as Alex finds himself caught in one misadventure after another, he will learn-and learn to appreciate-that there is more to his Anim than meets the eye.

Proving that even in Utopia some people are oppressed, the leftover "bad guys" from the triumph of Good and Light--thieves, a black knight, a vengeful, man-eating sorceress--attempt to save the world from the terrible fate of boredom.

Nobody could get in. Nobody could get out. But somebody did.

The theft of three shipments of priceless pharmaceuticals from the Braun-Ives corporation has left the local police dumbfounded. Enter Broderick Manz, the highly paid and highly resourceful Adjuster from the Insurance Division. With the help of the irresistible Vyra, whose charms are truly out of this world, the irrepressible humaniform Moses, and the irreverent Minder, an artificial intelligence, Manz soon finds himself in the heart of the criminal underworld. And it really is a jungle out there.

Hearts will race and anti-grav boots will fly in this scifi rom-com...

Ruth Johnson and her sister Jules have been small-time hustlers on the interstellar cruise lines for years. But then Jules fell in love with one of their targets, Esteban Mendez-Yuki, sole heir to the family insurance fortune. Esteban seemed to love her too, until she told him who she really was, at which point he fled without a word.

Now Ruth is set on revenge: disguised as provincial debutante Evelyn Ojukwu and set for the swanky satellite New Monte, she's going to make Esteban fall in love with her, then break his heart and take half his fortune. At least, that's the plan. But Ruth hadn't accounted for his older sister, Sol, a brilliant mind in a dashing suit... and much harder to fool.

Sol is hot on Ruth's tail, and as the two women learn each other's tricks, Ruth must decide between going after the money and going after her heart.

Mifuyu is a high school student living with a large collection of books left by her great-grandfather--the vast library known as Mikura Hall. Although her father is the current caretaker, Mifuyu herself doesn't share her family's passion for literature. But when several books are stolen from the library, triggering an ancient curse, the town is transformed according to the various stories--and the only way to put things right is for Mifuyu to catch the thief. With the help of a mysterious girl named Mashiro, Mifuyu sets out on an adventure through the different story worlds!

Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. His small act of kindness propels him into a world he never dreamed existed. There are people who fall through the cracks, and Richard has become one of them. And he must learn to survive in this city of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, murderers and angels, if he is ever to return to the London that he knew.

From the author of The Mothers comes a propulsive family drama that explores the possibilities and dangers of designing the perfect child.

In 2027, Emily is deciding whether to take advantage of a new health service that promises a healthier, stronger baby through gene editing. There's plenty in her family tree that she would like to protect her unborn child against.

But not everybody loves the so-called designer baby technology.

Decades later, Adelaide is an ambitious political staffer trying to make a difference. Adelaide and her husband are working towards a goal they've called The Cyprus Project, but their plans risk being derailed when an unexpected threat looms.

Told across two generations, and two continents, Inheritance is about the legacies we leave our children, the bonds between mothers and daughters, and how it's never too late to fix our mistakes.

Steampunk Anthology

Contains:

• Steampunch by James LovegroveStatic by Marly Youmans
• Speed, Spped the Cable by Kage Baker
• Elementals by Ian R. MAcLeod
• Machine Maid by Margo Lanagan
• Lady Witherspoon's Solution by James Morrow
• Hannah by Keith Brooke
• Petrolpunk by Adam Roberts
• American Cheetah by Robert Reed
• Fixing Hanover by James VanderMeer
• The Lollygang Save the World on Accident by Jay Lake
• The Dream of Reason by Jeffrey Ford
  
  

Among the brilliant visionary scenarios in Extrasolar: military antagonists meet in the atmosphere of a gas giant; gifted children hijack a starship to search out a new home; a superjovian world yields mysterious and much-coveted gemstones; aliens find our solar system disconcertingly paradoxical; a feminist SF writer of the Seventies crafts liberating exoplanetary dreams; the habitats aboard a gargantuan spaceship cater to the needs of truly exotic aliens; and scientists eagerly seeking exoplanets confront a devastating truth. And then there are songs of home and far away and bitter exile; intelligence calling to intelligence across light years and species barriers; utterly immersive dives into perilous planetary atmospheres; brave responses to enigmatic messages from the stars; a machine embracing a Gothic destiny; and a truly different kind of space opera.

Table of Contents:

• Holdfast - Alastair Reynolds
• Shadows of Eternity - Gregory Benford
• A Game of Three Generals - Aliette de Bodard
• The Bartered Planet - Paul Di Filippo
• Come Home - Terry Dowling
• The Residue of Fire - Robert Reed
• Thunderstone - Matthew Hughes
• Journey to the Anomaly - Ian Watson
• Canoe - Nancy Kress
• The Planet Woman By M.V. Crawford - Lavie Tidhar
• Arcturean Nocturne - Jack McDevitt
• Life Signs - Paul McAuley
• The Fall of the House of Kepler - Ian R. MacLeod
• The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse - Kathleen Ann Goonan

Seventeen all-new stories illuminate the steampunk world of fog and fear!

Modern masters of the supernatural weave their magic to revitalize the chilling Victorian and Edwardian ghostly tale: here are haunted houses, arcane inventions, spirits reaching across the centuries, ghosts in the machine, fateful revelations, gaslit streets scarcely keeping the dark at bay, and other twisted variations on the immortal classics that frighten us still.

Beyond our skies... and imaginations.

Are we alone in the universe, and if not, who else-or what else-is out there? Here are thought-provoking stories that explore such questions as: Do intelligent species invariably destroy themselves by nuclear war or ecological collapse? Are the sentient aliens that do exist just too far away? Do they exist in forms beyond our comprehension? Are they among us, but undetectable? These are just some of the possibilities explored by a stellar lineup of contributors.

Contents:

• Introduction: Here Comes Everyone - essay by Paul J. McAuley
• The Word He Was Looking for Was Hello - short story by Alexander C. Irvine
• Residue - short story by Michael Arsenault
• Good News from Antares - short story by Yves Meynard
• Report from the Field - short story by Lezli Robyn and Mike Resnick
• Permanent Fatal Errors - short story by Jay Lake
• Galaxy of Mirrors - short story by Paul Di Filippo
• Where Two or Three - short story by Sheila Finch
• Graffiti in the Library of Babel - short story by David Langford
• The Dark Man - short story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• One Big Monkey - short story by Ray Vukcevich
• The Taste of Night - short story by Pat Cadigan
• Timmy, Come Home - short story by Matthew Hughes
• A Waterfall of Lights - short story by Ian Watson
• Rare Earth - short story by Felicity Shoulders and Leslie What
• The Vampires of Paradox - short story by James Morrow
• About the Authors - essay by uncredited
• About the Editors - essay by uncredited

Eleven original stories about the different paths our world might've taken...

Alternate history explores the many possible directions our world could follow if certain key events didn't occur at all or were changed in some crucial way. Is our Earth the only Earth, our reality the only one that exists? Or are there many parallel worlds and societies, some very similar to ours, some barely recognizable?

What if...
Lincoln had never become president, and the Civil War had never taken place?
Columbus never discovered America, and the Inca developed a massive, technologically advanced empire?
Magic was real and a half-faery queen ruled England?
Hitler and Germany won the war because America never got involved?
Many of the world's religions were totally commercialized, their temples run like casinos, religions deisgned purely for profit?
An author discovered a book written by an alternate version of himself?

These are just some of the possible pathways that you can take to explore the Other Earths that may be waiting just one event away...

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake
• This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe - novelette by Robert Charles Wilson
• The Goat Variations - short story by Jeff VanderMeer
• The Unblinking Eye - short story by Stephen Baxter
• Csilla's Story - novelette by Theodora Goss
• Winterborn - short story by Liz Williams
• Donovan Sent Us - short story by Gene Wolfe
• The Holy City and Em's Reptile Farm - short story by Greg van Eekhout
• The Receivers - novelette by Alastair Reynolds
• A Family History - short story by Paul Park
• Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life - novella by Lucius Shepard
• Nine Alternate Alternate Histories - short story by Benjamin Rosenbaum

To dream is to enter inner worlds of terror and revelation, to look the collective unconscious in the face. In this ground-breaking anthology, five modern masters of the fantastic conjure especially potent encounters with the stuff of the sleeping mind, unveiling dark hints about who (or what) we truly are, about our uncertain relationships with the waking world. The stories in The Book of Dreams are bold ventures into the kingdom of Morpheus, upon which individual destinies crucially depend--or perhaps the destiny of the entire human species.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - The Prisoner - novelette by Robert Silverberg
• 29 - Dream Burgers at the Mouth of Hell - novelette by Lucius Shepard
• 59 - Testaments - short story by Jay Lake
• 85 - Rex Nemorensis - short story by Kage Baker
• 105 - 86 Deathdick Road - short story by Jeffrey Ford

The fair comes every year with its wild music, boys, and rides, but Maybelle and Enid are far more interested in the rumored return of the Labyrinth, which hasn't been seen in several years...

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

A wildly successful innovator to rival Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, Vivian Liao is prone to radical thinking, quick decision-making, and reckless action. On the eve of her greatest achievement, she tries to outrun people who are trying to steal her success.

In the chilly darkness of a Boston server farm, Viv sets her ultimate plan into motion. A terrifying instant later, Vivian Liao is catapulted through space and time to a far future where she confronts a destiny stranger and more deadly than she could ever imagine.

The end of time is ruled by an ancient, powerful Empress who blesses or blasts entire planets with a single thought. Rebellion is literally impossible to consider--until Vivian Liao arrives. Trapped between the Pride--a ravening horde of sentient machines--and a fanatical sect of warrior monks who call themselves the Mirrorfaith, Viv must rally a strange group of allies to confront the Empress and find a way back to the world and life she left behind.

Oddny and Gunnhild meet as children in tenth century Norway, and they could not be more different: Oddny hopes for a quiet life, while Gunnhild burns for power and longs to escape her cruel mother. But after a visiting wisewoman makes an ominous prophecy that involves Oddny, her sister Signy, and Gunnhild, the three girls take a blood oath to help one another always.

When Oddny's farm is destroyed and Signy is kidnapped by Viking raiders, Oddny is set adrift from the life she imagined--but she's determined to save her sister no matter the cost, even as she finds herself irresistibly drawn to one of the raiders who participated in the attack. And in the far north, Gunnhild, who fled her home years ago to learn the ways of a witch, is surprised to find her destiny seems to be linked with that of the formidable King Eirik, heir apparent to the ruler of all Norway.

But the bonds--both enchanted and emotional--that hold the two women together are strong, and when they find their way back to each other, these bonds will be tested in ways they never could have foreseen in this deeply moving novel of magic, history, and sworn sisterhood.

When a banished witch falls in love with the legendary trickster Loki, she risks the wrath of the gods in this moving, subversive national bestselling debut novel that reimagines Norse mythology.

Angrboda's story begins where most witches' tales end: with a burning. A punishment from Odin for refusing to provide him with knowledge of the future, the fire leaves Angrboda injured and powerless, and she flees into the farthest reaches of a remote forest. There she is found by a man who reveals himself to be Loki, and her initial distrust of him transforms into a deep and abiding love.

Their union produces three unusual children, each with a secret destiny, who Angrboda is keen to raise at the edge of the world, safely hidden from Odin's all-seeing eye. But as Angrboda slowly recovers her prophetic powers, she learns that her blissful life--and possibly all of existence--is in danger.

With help from the fierce huntress Skadi, with whom she shares a growing bond, Angrboda must choose whether she'll accept the fate that she's foreseen for her beloved family...or rise to remake their future. From the most ancient of tales this novel forges a story of love, loss, and hope for the modern age.

In the world where hundreds of millions of people have been displaced from their homes by the Deluge--a hundred-foot-rise in sea level from melting ice caps--Partricia Beenan is lucky. She is still an American citizen with the right to live on the continent, unlike so many "wetfoots" whose homes lie deep under the waves or the refugees from nations now completely under water.

But Patricia's father chose to live on a floating city of New Galveston, instead of following his congresswoman wife to Washington, and go into the underwater salvage business. Now, several years after his death, it's Patricia's business and her city. She's a wealthy woman, on the city council, well known to local INS commander and the New Galveston police.

But none of that will help Patricia when she stumbles across a recently sunken freighter that has dozens of bodies chained up in its hold and clear evidence that it has been fired upon by an INS ship.

Patricia's evidence of a rogue operation within the INS brings her together with Thomas Beckett, a government investigator assigned to the case. Romance blossoms while they pursue and are pursued by the killers, into the heart of the conspiracy.

Griffin has a secret. It's a secret that he's sworn to his parents to keep, and never tell. Griffin is a Jumper: a person who can teleport to any place he has ever been. The first time was when he was five, and his parents crossed an ocean to protect the secret. The most important time was when he was nine. That was the day that the men came to his house and murdered his parents. Griffin knows that the men were looking for him, and he must never let them find him.

Griffin grows up with only two goals: to survive, and to kill the people who want him dead. And a Jumper bent on revenge is not going to let anything stand in his way.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, February 1988. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection (1989), The 1989 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha and New Skies: An Anthology of Today's Science Fiction (2003) edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, April 1984. There are no other known publications available at this time.

Forget the lottery.

Teenager Charlie Newell has just discovered something that will make him and his friends billionaires. What if a world existed in which no humans ever evolved? No cities. No pollution. No laws. A fantastic world filled with unimaginable riches in which everything - everything - was yours just for the taking?

Charlie has found that world. And he plans to use it to make him and his friends rich.

There is a problem: How do you keep something this big a secret?

Edward Venn-Thomas lives in the twentieth century but has been mysteriously transported to the future, and the apparently idyllic society of New Create, where there is no hunger, no war and no dissatisfaction. However Venn-Thomas is starting to find life among the New Cretans rather dull. He comes to realize that their perfect existence, inspired by the poets and magicians of their strange occultic religion, lacks one fundamental thing - evil. So Venn-Thomas sees it as nothing less than his duty to introduce them to the darker side of life. First published in 1949 and also known as Watch the North Wind Rise, Graves's novel is a thrilling blend of utopian fantasy, science fiction and mythology.

This is a combined edition of

The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction: Science fiction stories deal with the themes of sloth, lust, envy, pride, anger, gluttony, avarice, and covetousness.

The Seven Cardinal Virtues of Science Fiction: Science fiction stories center on the themes of temperance, justice, faith, prudence, fortitude, hope, charity, and love.

Contents:

• Introduction (The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction) (1980) - essay by Martin H. Greenberg
• Sail 25 (1962) - novelette by Jack Vance (variant of Gateway to Strangeness)
• Peeping Tom (1954) - novelette by Judith Merril
• The Invisible Man Murder Case (1958) - novelette by Henry Slesar
• Galley Slave [Susan Calvin] (1957) - novelette by Isaac Asimov
• Divine Madness (1966) - short story by Roger Zelazny
• The Midas Plague (1954) - novella by Frederik Pohl
• The Man Who Ate the World (1956) - novelette by Frederik Pohl
• Margin of Profit [Nicholas Van Rijn] (1956) - novelette by Poul Anderson
• The Hook, the Eye and the Whip [The Peninsula] (1974) - novelette by Michael G. Coney
• Introduction (The Seven Cardinal Virtues of Science Fiction) (1981) - essay by Martin H. Greenberg
• Superiority (1951) - short story by Arthur C. Clarke
• Whosawhatsa? (1967) - novelette by Jack Wodhams
• Riding the Torch (1974) - novella by Norman Spinrad
• The Nail and the Oracle (1965) - novelette by Theodore Sturgeon
• Jean Duprès (1970) - novelette by Gordon R. Dickson
• Nuisance Value (1957) - novella by Eric Frank Russell
• The Sons of Prometheus (1966) - novelette by Alexei Panshin
• The Ugly Little Boy (1958) - novelette by Isaac Asimov (variant of Lastborn)

This short story originally appeared in The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016), edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

In 1933, nine-year-old Stella is left in the care of her grandmother, Motty, in the backwoods of Tennessee. The mountains are home to dangerous secrets, and soon after she arrives, Stella wanders into a dark cavern where she encounters the family's personal god, an entity known as the Ghostdaddy.

Years later, after a tragic incident that caused her to flee, Stella--now a professional bootlegger--returns for Motty's funeral, and to check on the mysterious ten-year-old girl named Sunny that Motty adopted. Sunny appears innocent enough, but she is more powerful than Stella could imagine--and she's a direct link to Stella's buried past and her family's destructive faith.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep: The Best New Science Fiction from Sweden (2015), edited by Peter Öberg, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, May 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Eric Sanderson wakes up in a place he doesn't recognise, unable to remember who he is. Attacked by a force he cannot see and confronted with memories he cannot ignore, Eric discovers he is being hunted by a psychic predator, a shark. This creature may exist only in his mind, but it soon starts making some very real appearances in his world. Loaded with letters from his past self, each signed 'With regret and also hope, The First Eric Sanderson', Eric embarks on a quest to recover his life.

A love story; an adventure; a psychological drama - this wild, touching, modern tale is cut through with an understated humour and warmth. The depths of love, language, memory and the inevitability of loss have never been plumbed with such deep-hearted imagination. It isn't all coming back to me. I don't know any of this at all. I felt that pricking horror, the one that comes when you realise the extent of something bad - if you're dangerously lost or you've made some terrible mistake - the reality of the situation creeping in through the back of your head like some pantomime Dracula. I did not know who I was. I did not know where I was. That simple. That frightening.

In 1998 Peter F. Hamilton, the master of space opera and top ten bestselling author, published his first collection of short stories in A Second Chance at Eden. Manhattan in Reverse is his return to short fiction. This includes 'Manhattan in Reverse,' an original story featuring Hamilton's popular detective Paula Myo, from his bestselling Commonwealth series.

From 'Watching Trees Grow' and a murder mystery set in an alternative Oxford in the 1800s, to 'The Forever Kitten' and the questions of eternal youth and the sacrifice required to pursue this, these stories deal with intricate themes and sociological issues. They take an intriguing look at what it is it that makes us enduringly human.

With all his usual wonderfully imagined futuristic technology, complex characters and brilliantly conceived storytelling, Peter F. Hamilton shows yet again what makes him Britain's number one science fiction writer.

This fabulous collection contains a total of seven short stories:

• Watching Trees Grow
• Footvote
• If at First...
• The Forever Kitten
• Blessed by an Angel
• The Demon Trap
• Manhattan in Reverse

This short story originally appeared in Nature, July 28, 2005. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 11 (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Manhattan in Reverse (2011).

Read the full story for free at Nature.

Ursula K. LeGuin meets The Road in a post-apocalyptic modern classic of female friendship and intimacy.

Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl--the fortieth prisoner--sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

Over the last thirty years, M. John Harrison has been inspiring readers and writers alike across the world. His return to science fiction in 2002 with the magnificent space opera LIGHT was a monumental triumph, shortlisted for every major award in the genre. He combines brilliant storytelling with complex plots and evocative, mesmerising writing. THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPEN is M. John Harrison's definitive collection of short fiction, twenty-four dazzling stories of science fiction and fantasy; the perfect introduction to one of Britain's most brilliant writers.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Limits of Vision(aries) - (2002) - essay by China Miéville
• Author's Introduction - (2002) - essay
• Settling the World - (1975) - short story
• Running Down - (1975) - novelette
• The Incalling - (1978) - novelette
• The Ice Monkey - (1980) - short story
• Egnaro - (1981) - novelette
• The New Rays - (1982) - short story
• Old Women - (1984) - short story
• The Quarry - (1983) - short story
• A Young Man's Journey to London - (1985) - novelette
• The Great God Pan - (1988) - novelette
• Small Heirlooms - (1987) - short story
• The Gift - (1988) - novelette
• Suicide Coast - (1999) - short story
• The Neon Heart Murders - (2000) - short story
• Black Houses - (1998) - short story
• Science & The Arts - (1999) - short story
• The East - (1996) - short story
• The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It and Be Changed by It Forever - (1989) - short story
• Gifco - (1992) - novelette
• Empty - (1995) - novelette
• Seven Guesses of the Heart - (1996) - short story
• I Did It - (1996) - short story
• Anima - (1992) - short story
• Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring - (1994) - novelette
• Story Notes - (2002) - essay

Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai'po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear--and even follow you home.

These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples' survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.

Featuring stories by:

Norris Black • Amber Blaeser-Wardzala • Phoenix Boudreau • Cherie Dimaline • Carson Faust • Kelli Jo Ford • Kate Hart • Shane Hawk • Brandon Hobson • Darcie Little Badger • Conley Lyons • Nick Medina • Tiffany Morris • Tommy Orange • Mona Susan Power • Marcie R. Rendon • Waubgeshig Rice • Rebecca Roanhorse • Andrea L. Rogers • Morgan Talty • D.H. Trujillo • Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. • Richard Van Camp • David Heska Wanbli Weiden • Royce Young Wolf • Mathilda Zeller

This short story originally appeared Lightspeed Magazine, September 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Thirteen (2019), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

The master creator of finely crosshatched illustrations and sinisterly amusing tales, Edward Gorey (American, 1925-2000) got his start in publishing by designing book covers for such New York houses as Doubleday, Grosset & Dunlap, Vintage Books, and later Random House. Today, his prodigious output of hundreds of dust jackets and paperback covers evidences his distinctive flair for design and his extraordinary ability to portray the essence of the books that came his way. Edward Gorey: His Book Cover Art & Design features a broad selection of his work, created from 1953 to 2000.

In his essay, Steven Heller offers an insightful overview of Gorey's book cover art and design. He writes, "Successful cover design requires the expertise of an artist, typographer, poster designer, and logo maker. Many book design specialists were incapable of designing a cover or jacket with the same Gorey aplomb, even if they tried."

This short story originally appeared in The Fortean Bureau, March 2005. It can also be found in the anthology Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition, edited by Rich Horton.

Listen to the full story for free at PodCastle.

David Herter's first novel, Ceres Storm, was recently published to widespread acclaim. "Distinctive and imaginative, Herter's tale moves to its own disconcerting logic: a debut of immense promise," said Kirkus Reviews. Now Herter moves from SF to contemporary fantasy and to a more literary mode of storytelling.

Evening's Empire is set on the Oregon coast, in Evening, a small town famous for its cheeses. Russell Kent, an opera composer from Massachusetts, lost his beloved wife there a year ago to a freak accident, and returns now to confront his ghosts.

Kent has been commissioned to write an opera based upon Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, whose story fills his dreams, and only in Evening does he feel himself able to return to work. There he also discovers many strange things (even beyond the cheese sculptures), finds new love and new friendship, and is initiated into a fantastic secret the whole populace is hiding in a cavern beneath the town.

In some ways reminiscent of the Newford stories of Charles de Lint, this is an ambitious fantasy by an important new talent from the Pacific Northwest.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, April 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, October 2014.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Nora Silk doesn't really fit in on Hemlock Street, where every house looks the same. She's divorced. She wears a charm bracelet and high heels and red toreador pants. And the way she raises her kids is a scandal. But as time passes, the neighbors start having second thoughts about Nora. The women's apprehension evolves into admiration. The men's lust evolves into awe. The children are drawn to her in ways they can't explain. And everyone on this little street in 1959 Long Island seems to sense the possibilities and perils of a different kind of future when they look at Nora Silk.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Three, March-April 2015.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

Determined to unlock the deadly secrets of illegal biotech research, Lucy finds herself with a new identity on a planet on the brink of rebellion, stalked by a mysterious assassin known only by the name Scorpianne.

When their evil mentors, The Three, force Sally and her telekinetic companions to help them in their quest for a true Olympus, Sally prepares an elaborate defense that takes them all through space and time.

Once upon a time, everything was fine. Humpty Dumpty sat on his wall, Jack and Jill went about their lawful business, the Big Bad Wolf did what big bad wolves do, and the wicked queen plotted murder most foul. But the humans hacked, cried havoc, shut down the wicked queen's system, and corrupted her database-and suddenly everything was not fine at all. But at least we know that they'll all live happily ever after. Don't we?

Table of Contents:

• 11 - The World Beyond - essay by Robert Hoskins
• 17 - An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street - novelette by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
• 43 - The Rat That Could Speak - short story by Charles Dickens
• 49 - An Inhabitant of Carcosa - short story by Ambrose Bierce
• 55 - Lost Hearts - short story by M. R. James
• 68 - The Yellow Sign - novelette by Robert W. Chambers
• 92 - The Sealman - short story by John Masefield
• 97 - A Night in Malnéant - short story by Clark Ashton Smith
• 105 - Werewoman - novelette by C. L. Moore
• 135 - Shottle Bop - novelette by Theodore Sturgeon
• 167 - Armageddon - short story by Fredric Brown
• 174 - The Cheaters - novelette by Robert Bloch
• 198 - Legal Rites - novelette by Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl
• 233 - O Ugly Bird! - short story by Manly Wade Wellman
• 252 - Journeys End - short story by Poul Anderson
• 265 - The Man Who Liked - short story by Robert Hoskins
• 270 - Nightmare Gang - short story by Dean R. Koontz
• 281 - Elephants - short story by Barry N. Malzberg

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, January 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Mike Jerome, a likable young TV writer, visits Professor Smitt, a physicist, who gives him an idea for a TV script: using some source of light, perhaps a laser beam, one could reduce the human structure to a form that could be transmitted into the future as electrical pulses - and thus create time travel.

On the way home Mike is hit by a taxi, and when he recovers he finds the date is 1979 - ten years in the future. This is but the beginning of a series of bewildering, fascinating ten year jumps. Mike is living the time change himself! Jumps to 1989, 1999 and so on, take Mike into such far-reaching places as London, the Northern Territory of Australia, California and the Italian Alps, for a rousing series of adventures in all sorts of bizarre circumstances.

The political chess game between the shogunate and the empress has a new piece--a self-aware, autonomous entity named Eve.

A mighty shogunate ruling the land from Tempu Castle. An imperial line of strict female succession. Caught between these two immense powers, the sprawling city of Tempu is home to many wonders--not least a superhuman technological achievement in the form of a beautiful automaton known as Eve. When a secret that threatens to shake the imperial line intersects with the mystery of Eve's creation, events are set in motion that soon race toward a shocking conclusion. A new, astonishingly inventive science fantasy masterpiece of historic proportions.

This novelette originally appeared in Subterranean Online, Summer 2009. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.

Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but its only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Women Fiction, England Fiction, Cloning Fiction, Organ donors Fiction, Donation of organs, tissues, etc, Fiction

Though sometimes overshadowed by his contemporaries like H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, Carl Jacobi (1908-1997) was one of the finest American writers of pulp horror tales of the first half of the 20th century. Revelations in Black, originally published by the legendary Arkham House as a limited edition in 1947 and long out of print, contains 21 of his best stories, originally published in pulp magazines like Weird Tales.

As a bonus, this new edition features an additional seldom-seen Jacobi tale, "Rails of the Yellow Skull", and a new introduction by Luigi Musolino.

Contents:

• 3 - Revelations in Black - (1933) - novelette
• 24 - Phantom Brass - (1934) - short story
• 32 - The Cane - (1934) - short story
• 46 - The Coach on the Ring - (1931) - short story (variant of The Haunted Ring)
• 56 - The Kite - (1937) - short story
• 66 - Canal - (1944) - short story
• 81 - The Satanic Piano - (1934) - novelette
• 103 - The Last Drive - (1933) - short story
• 108 - The Spectral Pistol - short story (variant of The Phantom Pistol 1941)
• 122 - Sagasta's Last - (1939) - short story
• 131 - The Tomb from Beyond - (1932) - short story
• 149 - The Digging at Pistol Key - (1947) - short story
• 164 - Moss Island - (1930) - short story
• 173 - Carnaby's Fish - (1945) - short story
• 185 - The King and the Knave - (1938) - short story
• 193 - Cosmic Teletype - (1938) - short story
• 208 - A Pair of Swords - (1933) - short story
• 212 - A Study in Darkness - (1939) - short story
• 228 - Mive - (1928) - short story
• 234 - Writing on the Wall - (1944) - short story
• 250 - The Face in the Wind - (1936) - novelette

In this debut collection of body-horror fairy tales and mid-apocalyptic Catholic cyberpunk, memory and myth, loss and age, these are the tools of storyteller Jarboe, a talent in the field of queer fabulism. Bodily autonomy and transformation, the importance of negative emotions, unhealthy relationships, and bad situations amidst the staggering and urgent question of how build and nurture meaning, love, and safety in a larger world/society that might not be "fixable."

Table of Contents:

• The Marks of Aegis
• Here You Are, Near Me
• Self Care
• The Nothing Spots Where Nobody Wants to Stay
• The Heavy Things
• The Seed and The Stone
• We Did Not Know We Were Giants
• The Android That Designed Itself
• As Tender Feet of Cretan Girls Danced Once Around an Altar of Love
• Estranged Children of Storybook Houses
• My Noise Will Keep The Record
• Wake Word
• Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel
• First Contact, Communion
• I Am a Beautiful Bug!
• The Thing in Us We Fear Just Wants Our Love

Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn't seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though - almost a lifetime ago - and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature.

A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel's isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water - a canal thief? - swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.

Daisy Johnson's debut novel turns classical myth on its head and takes readers to a modern-day England unfamiliar to most. As daring as it is moving, Everything Under is a story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging that leaves you unsettled and unstrung.

Black Herran was a dread demonologist, and the most ruthless general in all Essoran. She assembled the six most fearsome warriors to captain her armies: a necromancer, a vampire lord, a demigod, an orcish warleader, a pirate queen, and a twisted alchemist. Together they brought the whole continent to its knees... Until the day she abandoned her army, on the eve of total victory.

40 years later, she must bring her former captains back together for one final stand, in the small town of Tarnbrooke - the last bastion against a fanatical new enemy tearing through the land, intent on finishing the job Black Herran started years before.

Seven bloodthirsty monsters. One town. Their last hope.

A twisted cabal with the power to destroy a person's mind.

A gifted intellectual who isn't part of the club.

When their destinies clash, can she retain her sanity?

Kerri Dale-Townsend is determined to carry on family tradition. But though she is a proud member of the Academic caste, the ambitious twenty-something knows her lack of a Sponsor will make obtaining her graduate degree nearly impossible. And when her books and papers go missing, appointments with advisors are changed without notice, and her home is invaded, she realizes she's the target of a dark, covert academic society.

Able to sense supernatural forces bending reality around her, Kerri tries to protect herself by veiling her thoughts with a mental barrier. Yet as snubs, sabotage, and strange maladies multiply, the focused young woman never knows whether her first misstep will be her last.

Can she expose the evil core of the university without making a fatal mistake?

A collection published by the New England Science Fiction Association to mark Diana's appearance as Guest of Honour at the 1995 Boskone SF convention. The introduction is by fantasy author Patricia Wrede.

Contents:

• Everard's Ride
• Nad and Dan and Quaffy
• The Shape of the Narrative in The Lord of the Rings (essay)
• No One
• Dragon Reserve, Home Eight
• The Master
• The Plague of Peacocks
• The True State of Affairs

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1995) - essay by Gwyneth Jones
• The Snow Apples - (1987) - short story
• Laiken Langstrand - (1988) - short story
• The Lovers - (1989) - short story
• The Princess, The Thief and the Cartesian Circle - (1993) - short story
• The Grass Princess - (1995) - short story
• Diamond Hand and the Rock Maid - (1995) - novelette
• Felicia - (1975) - novelette
• The Spider and the Fly - (1995) - short story

The Pacific Ocean is a big thing to steal, and Quietly's roommate Imani never does anything small. But then Imani goes and dies, and Quietly is left to travel to the Under-Ath (the underworld beneath Athens, Georgia), with angry gods at her heels, to clean up the mess Imani left behind and try to rescue her friend.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #64 January 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Six (2014).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a searing satire set amid the mayhem of the Sri Lankan civil war...

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida--war photographer, gambler, and closet queen--has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka.

Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York--based public relations firm has been uploaded into the company's internal Slack channels--at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it's an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from home policy, but now that Gerald's productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from... wherever he says he is.

Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his co-worker Pradeep to help him escape, and to find out what happened to his body. But the longer Gerald stays in the void, the more alluring and absurd his reality becomes.

Meanwhile, Gerald's colleagues have PR catastrophes of their own to handle in the real world. Their biggest client, a high-end dog food company, is in the midst of recalling a bad batch of food that's allegedly poisoning Pomeranians nationwide. And their CEO suspects someone is sabotaging his office furniture. And if Gerald gets to work from home all the time, why can't everyone? Is true love possible between two people, when one is just a line of text in an app? And what in the hell does the :dusty-stick: emoji mean?

In a time when office paranoia and politics have followed us home, Calvin Kasulke is here to capture the surprising, absurd, and fully-relatable factors attacking our collective sanity... and give us hope that we can still find a human connection.

Full title of the story is: A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc; or, A Lullaby.

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in two parts on Strange Horizons, 1 June 2009 and 8 June 2009.

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons: part 1, part 2.

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Six, September/October 2015. It can also be found in the anthology Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, December 2013.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Nebula-nominated Novella

Mysterious aliens have landed on Earth, but nobody can figure out what they want. Enter Liz Cobble, a frustrated professor of sapientology who finds herself swept up in a madcap romantic adventure with an eccentric billionaire and an architect who designs flying buildings.

This story was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1999, self-published by the authors in 2011, and included in The Collected Kessel (2012).

Hugo-nominated Short Story

The last man on Earth is depressed, and the robots charged with his care are at a loss as to how to shake him out of it. They concoct an elaborate scheme to have Christmas in May. After all, at the end of history, who cares if the dates are a little off?

This story was originally published by Sci Fiction, May 26, 2004, later anthologized in Science Fiction: The Best of 2004 (2005) and Season of Wonder (2012), and collected in The Wreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories (2008).

Read this story online for free at the Sci Fiction archive.

Distilled through the occluded lens of weird fiction, Michael Kelly's third collection of strange tales is a timely and cogent examination of grief, love, identity, abandonment, homelessness, and illness. All cut through with a curious, quiet menace and uncanny melancholy.

Table of Contents:

• Six Haiku - poem
• These White Sorrows - short fiction
• One Final Breath - short fiction
• The Face That Looks Back at You - (2010) - short story
• The Wounded Bird - (2011) - short story
• Bait - (2013) - short fiction
• A Crack in the Ceiling of the World - (2011) - short fiction
• October Dreams - (2012) - short story
• Desert of Sharp Sorrows - (2007) - short story by Jonathan William Hodges and Michael Kelly
• Blink - (2012) - short story
• Midnight Carousel - (2002) - poem
• Some Other You - (2013) - short fiction
• Hark at the Wind - (2011) - short story
• Other Summers - (2013) - short fiction
• Another Knife-Grey Day - (2015) - poem
• Absolution - (2013) - short fiction
• All the Things We Never See - (2009) - short fiction
• Eight Untitled Haiku - (2002) - poem
• Different Skins - (2009) - short story
• Tears from an Eyeless Face - (2015) - short story
• The White-Face at Dawn - (2012) - short story
• Turn the Page - (2013) - short fiction
• A Guttering of Flickers - (2011) - short story
• Hungry, the Rain-God Wakens - (2015) - poem
• Conversations with the Dead - (2012) - short story
• The Beach - (2013) - short fiction
• Down the Rabbit Hole - (2009) - short fiction
• This Red Night - (2013) - short story
• Pieces of Blackness - (2013) - short fiction
• A Quiet Axe - (2015) - short story
• The Woods - (2009) - short story

100 fathoms below...

The depth at which sunlight no longer penetrates the ocean.

1983. The US nuclear submarine USS Roanoke embarks on a classified spy mission into Soviet waters. Their goal: to find evidence of a new, faster, and deadlier Soviet submarine that could tip the balance of the Cold War. But the Roanoke crew isn't alone. Something is on board with them. Something cunning and malevolent.

Trapped in enemy territory and hunted by Soviet submarines, tensions escalate and crew members turn on each other. When the lights go out and horror fills the corridors, it will take everything the crew has to survive the menace coming from outside and inside the submarine.

In the dark.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The New Space Opera 2 (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, #124, January 2017. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 1998. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (2004), edited by F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan, and Tails of Wonder and Imagination (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow. It is included in the collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (2008).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Does a renewed world still have a place for those who only know how to destroy? While defending a tea-growing commune in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, one person seeks an answer.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 49, May 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton.

Lucky Linderman didn't ask for his life. He didn't ask his grandfather not to come home from the Vietnam War. He didn't ask for a father who never got over it. He didn't ask for a mother who keeps pretending their dysfunctional family is fine. And he didn't ask to be the target of Nader McMillan's relentless bullying, which has finally gone too far.

But Lucky has a secret--one that helps him wade through the daily mundane torture of his life. In his dreams, Lucky escapes to the war-ridden jungles of Laos--the prison his grandfather couldn't escape--where Lucky can be a real man, an adventurer, and a hero. It's dangerous and wild, and it's a place where his life just might be worth living. But how long can Lucky keep hiding in his dreams before reality forces its way inside?

Michael L. Printz Honor recipient A.S. King's smart, funny and boldly original writing shines in this powerful novel about learning to cope with the shrapnel life throws at you and taking a stand against it

The first collection of stories Stephen King has published since Nightmares & Dreamscapes nine years ago, Everything's Eventual includes one O. Henry Prize winner, two other award winners, four stories published by The New Yorker, and "Riding the Bullet," King's original e-book, which attracted over half a million online readers and became the most famous short story of the decade.

"Riding the Bullet," published here on paper for the first time, is the story of Alan Parker, who's hitchhiking to see his dying mother but takes the wrong ride, farther than he ever intended. In "Lunch at the Gotham Café," a sparring couple's contentious lunch turns very, very bloody when the maître d' gets out of sorts. "1408," the audio story in print for the first time, is about a successful writer whose specialty is "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards" or "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses," and though Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel doesn't kill him, he won't be writing about ghosts anymore. And in "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French," terror is déjà vu at 16,000 feet.

Whether writing about encounters with the dead, the near dead, or about the mundane dreads of life, from quitting smoking to yard sales, Stephen King is at the top of his form in the fourteen dark tales assembled in Everything's Eventual. Intense, eerie, and instantly com-pelling, they announce the stunningly fertile imagination of perhaps the greatest storyteller of our time.

Table of Contents:

• "Autopsy Room Four"
• "The Man in the Black Suit"
• "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away"
• "The Death of Jack Hamilton"
• "In the Deathroom"
• "The Little Sisters of Eluria"
• "Everything's Eventual"
• "L. T.'s Theory of Pets"
• "The Road Virus Heads North"
• "Lunch at the Gotham Café"
• "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French"
• "1408"
• "Riding the Bullet"
• "Luckey Quarter

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1965 and can aslo be found in the anthology 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F (1966), edited by Judith Merril.

When an old Carnegie library is closed, its seven librarians refuse to abandon their home. They lock the doors, and the forest grows around them like a cloak, sheltering them from the rest of the world. But their lives are changed when a book of fairy tales is found in the Book Drop, very, very overdue. The payment? A first-born child.

In the House of the Seven Librarians is a timeless tale for anyone who spent a childhood in the refuge of the public library, or who believes that a world full of books is a truly magical place.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Firebirds Rising: An Anthology of Original Science Fiction and Fantasy (2006), edited by Sharyn November, and was reprinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Three, March-April 2015. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One (2007), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link, and Ex Libris: Stories of Librarians, Libraries & Lore (2017), edited by Paula Guran. It is included in the collection Portable Childhoods (2007). A chapbook edition is also available.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

The Seven Sexes is almost entirely dedicated to the cynicism of nature's prime conman, homo sapiens, in such a variety of stories that it is difficult to believe they all derive from the same source, capped by a hilarious piece of nonsense in which a has-been producer cons the seven variable sexes of Venus into starring in a "typical" Hollywood love epic - with results that defy description.

Contents:

• Child's Play - (1947)
• The Malted Milk Monster - (1959)
• Errand Boy - (1947)
• The House Dutiful - (1948)
• Mistress Sary - (1947)
• Sanctuary - (1957)
• Venus and the Seven Sexes - (1949)
• Bernie the Faust - (1963)

WFA nominated novelette.

The Events at Poroth Farm is a horror novella written by T.E.D Klein, in which Jeremy, a college lecturer, takes a summer vacation in Gilead, New Jersey, to prepare for a course on Gothic literature he'll be teaching in the upcoming semester. He rents an outbuilding from Mennonite couple Sarr and Deborah Poroth, and at first his holiday is happy and productive, but then odd things begin to happen...

It originally appeared in From Beyond the Dark Gateway, December 1972. The story can also be found in the anthologie:

• The Year's Best Horror Stories No. 3 (1973), edited by Richard Davis
• The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II (1974), edited by Richard Davis
• First World Fantasy Awards (1977), edited by Gahan Wilson
• Return to Lovecraft Country (1997), edited by Scott David Aniolowski
• Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture (1998), edited by Jim Turner
• American Supernatural Tales (2007), edited by S. T. Joshi
• American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's to Now (2009), edited by Peter Straub

The story was expanded to the full novel The Ceremonies (1984). A version of the story can be found in the collection Reassuring Tales (2006).

Once Upon A Time... in the faraway land of Story, a Hugo-winning Editor realized that no one had collected together the fairy tales of the age, and that doorstop-thick anthologies of modern fairy tales were sorely lacking...

And so the Editor ventured forth, wandering the land of Story from shore to shore, climbing massive mountains of books and delving deep into lush, literary forests, gathering together thirty-three of the best re-tellings of fairy tales he could find. Not just any fairy tales, mind you, but tantalizing tales from some of the biggest names in today's fantastic fiction, authors like Gregory Maguire, Susanna Clarke, Charles de Lint, Holly Black, Alethea Kontis, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman, Patricia Briggs, Paul Di Filippo, Gregory Frost, and Nancy Kress. But these stories alone weren't enough to satisfy the Editor, so the Editor ventured further, into the dangerous cave of the fearsome Bill Willingham, and emerged intact with a magnificent introduction, to tie the collection together.

And the inhabitants of Story--from the Kings and Queens relaxing in their castles to the peasants toiling in the fields, from the fey folk flitting about the forests to the trolls lurking under bridges and the giants in the hills--read the anthology, and enjoyed it. And they all lived... Happily Ever After.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Bill Willingham
• A Night in the Lonesome November - short fiction by Bill Willingham
• The Seven Stage a Comeback - (2000) - poem by Gregory Maguire
• And In Their Glad Rags - short fiction by Genevieve Valentine
• The Sawing Boys - (1994) - novelette by Howard Waldrop
• Bear It Away - (2000) - short story by Michael Cadnum
• Mr. Simonelli or the Fairy Widower - (2000) - novella by Susanna Clarke
• The Black Fairy's Curse - (1997) - short story by Karen Joy Fowler
• My Life as a Bird - (1996) - novelette by Charles de Lint
• The Night Market - (2004) - short story by Holly Black
• The Rose in Twelve Petals - (2002) - short story by Theodora Goss
• The Red Path - short fiction by Jim C. Hines
• Blood & Water - (2008) - short story by Alethea Kontis
• Hansel's Eyes - (2000) - short story by Garth Nix
• He Died That Day, in Thirty Years - (2002) - novelette by Wil McCarthy
• Snow in Summer - (2000) - short story by Jane Yolen
• The Rose Garden - (2004) - novelette by Michelle West
• The Little Magic Shop - (1987) - short story by Bruce Sterling
• Black Feather - (2007) - short story by K. Tempest Bradford
• Fifi's Tail - short fiction by Alan Rodgers
• The Faery Handbag - (2004) - novelette by Kelly Link
• Ashputtle - (1994) - novelette by Peter Straub
• The Emperor's New (and Improved) Clothes - (1999) - short story by Leslie What
• Pinocchio's Diary - short fiction by Robert J. Howe
• Little Red - (1993) - short story by Wendy Wheeler
• The Troll Bridge - short fiction by Neil Gaiman
• The Price - (1999) - short story by Patricia Briggs
• Ailoura - (2002) - novelette by Paul Di Filippo
• The Farmer's Cat - (2005) - short story by Jeff VanderMeer
• The Root of the Matter - (1993) - novelette by Gregory Frost
• Like a Red, Red Rose - (1993) - novelette by Susan Wade
• Chasing America - (2006) - novelette by Josh Rountree
• Stalking Beans - (1993) - short story by Nancy Kress
• Big Hair - (2000) - short story by Esther M. Friesner
• The Return of the Dark Children - (2002) - short fiction by Robert Coover

The Catholic Church controls the state and promotes re-population of a post-apocalyptic earth.

Amy Redwing recklessly risks everything in her chosen field of dog rescue. When she confronts a violent drunk in order to rescue Nickie, a beautiful golden retriever, Amy has no misgivings. Dogs always do their best, and so will she. Whatever it takes.

Riding shotgun nervously is her friend and lover, Brian, an architect who would marry her if only she were not so committed to these crazy... heroics! He blames her work for her refusal to marry him. But everything is due to change in the Redwing household.

Someone is trying to destroy Amy. Subtle intrusions escalate into terrifying assaults on everything she holds dear. Amy believes her attacker is Wes Greeley, just released after an eighteen-month stretch, thanks to Amy's testimony, for egregious animal cruelty. But if Greeley is the culprit, it's clear he's not working alone.

At last Amy understands her need of Brian, and a lot more from her troubled past that has been hidden by her passion. Unable to turn to any authority, Amy and Brian are pressed to the edge of a precipice.

A runaway boy's quest for an ancient Jewish mystic text introduces him to a fascinating cast of characters, including a renowned smuggler, an albino Rastafarian, and a treacherous double agent.

It began with the agency and their experiments. When their covert operations went beyond what even the United States government was willing to accept, that should have been the end of it. But the Agency had taken on a life of its own, and had found an extremely wealthy new master. And so the experiments continued. Some people had been a willing part of the studies, some unsuspecting victims. None knew what the ultimate goal was, nor did anyone suspect what had happened to the failures.

Inevitably there were subjects who escaped from - or were released from - the Agency's control. And there were their children...

At seventeen, Allison Boyles life was turned upside down. For months she'd been suffering the agony of sudden incapacitating headaches. The doctors hadn't found any cause, her mother seemed to be in a state of denial, and as if that weren't enough, Allie was positive she was being stalked by Chuck Wilson. To make matters worse, whenever Chuck got too close, disasters seemed to happen.

But the biggest disaster of all was that Chuck himself was being stalked by the Agency. And inadvertently he led them straight to Allie...

This short story originally appeaed in Omni, Winter 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), and The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction (2019), both edited by Neil Clarke.

WHAT LIES BEYOND THE ELEVENTH GATE...

Despite economic and territorial tensions, no one wants the city-states of the Eight Worlds to repeat the Terran Collapse by going to war. But when war accidentally happens, everyone seeks ways to exploit it for gain. The Landry and Peregoy ruling dynasties see opportunities to grab territory, increase profits, and settle old scores. Exploited underclasses use war to fuel rebellion. Ambitious heirs can finally topple their elders' regimes--or try to.

But the unexpected key to either victory or peace lies with two persons uninterested in conquest, profits, or power. Philip Anderson seeks only the transcendent meaning of the physics underlying the universe. Tara Landry, spoiled and defiant youngest granddaughter of dynasty head Rachel Landry, accidentally discovers an eleventh star-jump gate, with a fabulous find on the planet behind it. Her discovery, and Philip's use of it, alter everything for the Eight Worlds.

A debut novel from one of Australia's most internationally celebrated playwrights, The End and Everything Before It is a kaleidoscopic story about the way love and loss shape a community.

Emma watched her mother's kayak disappear among icebergs in the Arctic Sea. Six years later, her brother, who had not spoken since their mother was lost, warns Emma of the curse of death that she brought to anyone who looked on her face-before tragedy befalls him too.

Emma consigns herself to a solitary life at sea, where she can do no more harm. After years alone, she is mysteriously drawn to land. And she docks at an island, afraid of what her arrival might mean for the welcoming man and his daughter waving from the jetty.

But who knows where our stories begin and end or how they are entwined? Who knows whether now, on the island, she begins a new tale-or takes a role in a story that began generations ago with a feast in the forest, or a chest of gold coins plunged into the sea, or an orphan in a bookshop beguiled by an elusive and troubled woman?

Finegan Kruckemeyer's astonishing debut, The End and Everything Before It, is a sweeping, joyous novel about love, loss and the power of stories-an uplifting journey into our deepest humanity.

Eurydice is dead, and hell is a school. She has to learn Hauntings, Baking Disasters, Threads of Fate, and all the other classes a newly dead soul needs to master before they're ready for what comes next.

Eurydice is still processing the disastrous relationship that sent her into the land of the dead almost as soon as she was married to the brilliant love of her life, Orpheus. She'll tell you how he swept her off her feet, and how their polyamourous group swept each other up in music and art and art theory and a life of creation from destruction, but mostly just destruction. But, this isn't their story.

Eurydice is dead, and failing all her classes, and she knows Orpheus is coming to get her out. Not that he cares, but that's not what she wants. And, she's the only one who truly knows how Orpheus and Eurydice's story ends.

Nottingham, 1906

Marietta Stelle longs to be a ballerina but, as Christmas draws nearer, her dancing days are numbered -- she must marry and take up her place in society in the New Year. But, when a mysterious toymaker, Dr Drosselmeier, purchases a neighbouring townhouse, it heralds the arrival of magic and wonder in Marietta's life.

After Drosselmeier constructs an elaborate theatrical set for her final ballet performance on Christmas Eve, Marietta discovers it carries a magic all of its own -- a magic darker than anyone could imagine. As the clock chimes midnight, Marietta finds herself transported from her family's ballroom to a frozen sugar palace, silent with secrets, in a forest of snow-topped fir trees. She must find a way to return home before she's trapped in Everwood's enchanting grip forever.

In the darkness of night, magic awaits and you will never forget what you find here...

This novelette originally appeared in Flurb: A Webzine of Astonishing Tales, Issue #3, Spring-Summer, 2007. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July-August 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

A two-person crew embark on a mind-bending deep space mission inside a living wormship capable of burrowing through space. What lies on the other end is unknown--as is what they will do once they get there.

Originally published on 8 February 2023, read it for free at Tor.com

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1967. The story can also be found in the collections The Day Before Forever and Thunderhead (1968) and Future Imperfect (2003).

Table of Contents:

• The Day Before Forever - (1967) - novella
• Thunderhead - (1967) - novelette

The Sherwood house has been deserted since the horrific killing of a local family in the sleepy town of Ashburg. When invitations to a mysterious party to be held there are sent out, nobody is particularly surprised - after all, everyone wants to party in a house of death on Allhallow's Eve.

A provocative and unforgettable debut that is both a blood-soaked love letter to Los Angeles and a gleeful send-up to iconic horror villains, Maeve Fly will thrill fans of slashers and the macabre.

By day, Maeve Fly works at the happiest place in the world as every child’s favorite ice princess.

By the neon night glow of the Sunset Strip, Maeve haunts the dive bars with a drink in one hand and a book in the other, imitating her misanthropic literary heroes.

But when Gideon Green - her best friend’s brother - moves to town, he awakens something dangerous within her, and the world she knows suddenly shifts beneath her feet.

Untethered, Maeve ditches her discontented act and tries on a new persona. A bolder, bloodier one, inspired by the pages of American Psycho. Step aside Patrick Bateman, it’s Maeve’s turn with the knife.

Dr. Harry Wolper, an aging Noble Prize-winning biologist, is attempting to create life-specifically, to re-create his adored late wife by implanting her clone in a loving but reluctant 19-year-old nymphomaniac, and do it before his conventional son can have him committed to an asylum.

Creator is a love story, a comedy, a zany account of science running amok, and a moving and tragic account of our biological and imaginative limitations and the struggle we wage against them.

Alas, poor Satan. He's not happy. No one seems to like or understand him; people have got him all wrong. And his relationship with God is a hostile one. Unloved and misunderstood, he's come back to Earth in search of a psychotherapist; he's prepared-- if cured-- to deliver the all-important Great Answer.

In Jeremy Leven's wildly original comic novel, we follow the Prince of Darkness through his seven amazing therapy sessions. And we watch him grow increasingly well adjusted while his therapist, the unfortunate Dr. Kassler, descends deeper and deeper into hell.

In Jews vs Aliens, editors Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene have gathered together brand new stories from the light-hearted to the profound, with authors ranging from Orange Prize winner Naomi Alderman to Big Bang Theory writer/producer Eric Kaplan, all asking, for the first time, the question you didn't even know you wanted answered -- what happens when the aliens arrive, only to encounter... Jews?

Contents:

• Introduction (Jews vs Aliens) - essay by Lavie Tidhar
• Antaius Floating in the Heavens Among the Stars - short fiction by Andrea Phillips
• The Matter of Meroz - short fiction by Rosanne Rabinowitz
• Alien Thoughts - short fiction by Eric Kaplan
• The Reluctant Jew - short fiction by Rachel Swirsky
• To Serve... Breakfast - short fiction by Jay Caselberg
• The Farm - short story by Elana Gomel
• Don't Blink - short fiction by Gon Ben Ari
• Nameless and Shameless - short fiction by Lois H. Gresh
• The Ghetto - short fiction by Matthue Roth
• Excision - short fiction by Naomi Alderman

In Jews vs Zombies, editors Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene have gathered together brand new stories from the light-hearted to the profound, with authors ranging from BSFA Award winner Adam Roberts to best-selling author Sarah Lotz, all asking, for the first time, the question you didn't even know you wanted answered -- what happens when the Chosen People meet the Living Dead?

Contents:

• Rise - short fiction by Rena Rossner
• The Scapegoat Factory - short fiction by Ofir Touché Gafla
• Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith - novelette by Shimon Adaf
• Ten for Sodom - short fiction by Daniel Polansky
• The Friday People - short fiction by Sarah Lotz
• Tractate Metim 28A - short fiction by Benjamin Rosenbaum
• Wiseman's Terror Tales - short fiction by Anna Tambour
• Zayinim - short story by Adam Roberts

How do you kill a god?

As her father's chosen heir, eighteen-year-old Rasmira has trained her whole life to become a warrior and lead her village. But when her coming-of-age trial is sabotaged and she fails the test, her father banishes her to the monster-filled wilderness with an impossible quest: To win back her honor, she must kill the oppressive god who claims tribute from the villages each year or die trying.

Every day a different body. Every day a different life. Every day in love with the same girl.

Every morning, A wakes in a different person's body, a different person's life. There's never any warning about where it will be or who it will be. A has made peace with that, even established guidelines by which to live: Never get too attached. Avoid being noticed. Do not interfere.

It's all fine until the morning that A wakes up in the body of Justin and meets Justin's girlfriend, Rhiannon. From that moment, the rules by which A has been living no longer apply. Because finally, A has found someone he wants to be with--day in, day out, day after day.

With his new novel, David Levithan has pushed himself to new creative heights. He has written a captivating story that will fascinate listeners as they begin to comprehend the complexities of life and love in A's world, as A and Rhiannon seek to discover if you can truly love someone who is destined to change every day.

Once upon a time the anxious Prince Althelstan went in search of a bride...

His restless cousin, Lady Vevila, went in search of adventure...

His friend Mazigian, proud graduate of the Recondite University, went in search of employment...

And each found what they were looking for--by following a folktale to a remote castle buried in thorns and briars. Behind its foreboding walls, one princess and three identical princes are cursed to eternal sleep. And it's going to take a mysterious dwarf named Rumplestiltskin, an enchanted toad, a wicked stepmother, and one even more wicked miracle to wake them. All it takes is one kiss, give or take a few, and a fairy tale really can come true.

Strange things are happening in the small town of Randall, Arizona.

The local minister vanishes, his church defiled by blasphemous obscenities scrawled in blood... A crazed old woman in her eighties becomes pregnant...Herds of animals are discovered butchered in a field... And one by one, the good folks in town are falling victim to the same unspeakable fate... Now, an itinerant preacher has arrived spreading a gospel of cataclysmic fury.

Darkness is falling on Randall, Arizona. The smell of fear lingers in the air. And stranger things are yet to come...

Seven Birthdays originally appeared in the anthology Bridging Infinity (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It is also included in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 11 (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Ken Liu's "Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon," tells the story of Jing and Yuan, a pair of young women in love for the first time in their lives, who're about to be parted by circumstances beyond their control. On Qixi, the Festival of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl, the legendary lovers give the young women some help and advice.

The story was originally published in the anthology Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories (2014), edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

KALIAN PENDEK SHALL NEVER DIE!

Hunters Associated was the simple name of the organization. Who was behind it, what its ultimate purpose was, was never told to its agents. All they needed to know was that they covered the galaxy, that their real identities had been buried, that once in Hunters they could be anybody.

He was Seven. That was all. Identity Seven. He had a new assignment. Identity Six had just been slain - lasered down on a far world by enemies unknown. But the death had been kept secret long enough for Seven to be sent to take his place.

To take his place, to take his features, to take his task - and to be a target to slay once again. If he failed, there would be an Identity Eight to step into his burned-out shoes... and a Nine and a Ten.

But Seven was determined to see that the progression stopped with him - even if he had to go to the bottom of an alien sea and hobnob with horror.

Everything about the worlds of Ein, three habitable planets in this strange hyperspace, gave the appearance of magic; yet beneath this Arabian Nights culture was a technology far in advance of Earth. And when Laird Dondyke, fugitive, arrived on Speewry, he found himself caught up in an intricate webwork of intrigue, whose purpose was to funnel vital scientific information back to Earth.

But that was only the smallest part of it, for while the theocratic culture on all three planets was the same, each maintained that it, and it alone, was the world of the true prophet of Ein, and the other two worlds were creations of evil. And each of the planets actually possessed the means to destroy the other two worlds completely--when Ein willed!

Dondyke found himself caught up in this maze when he saw a vision and a ghost within a few minutes of each other on the streets of Einwill, capital of Speewry. The vision was a golden-haired girl and the ghost a red-haired youth the image of Dondyke's brother, Bruce--the brother for whose untimely death Laird Dondyke felt guilt-ridden. He would have to help Tom Corey in whatever way he could, wherever this led him.He was an Unbeliever, as were many Earthmen who had come here to settle on these worlds, but some had become converts to the fantastic religion that permeated every atom of this culture, and Dondyke learned that faith raised an impenetrable barrier between him and Alanna. But when he accepted conversion, he discovered that his troubles had only begun.

Here is an ironic tale of adventure and romance in a strange world of super-science, where everything came down to a matter of faith.

So they're telling me I need to talk about what I talked about in all these pages which had my bestest cover ever with green crayon and blue crayon because they're the only ones Glora Feeb hasn't eaten yet and bits of bark and moss and a dragonfly water beetle which is what they are before they crawl out and unwrap their wings, but it's only the shell because the dragonflies climb out through a hole in the beetle's back and then they dry up, which is what I'm going to do when I dry up too, climb out through the hole, I mean. And that's what was on the cover using LePage's glue, the white stuff that tastes like toothpaste without the mint or chili pepper if it's my sister's toothpaste when she's not looking because she's too busy staring at her new phone all the time, probably because it doesn't work, it's got no cord! But that cover's gone I don't know where maybe to the Smithsonian and I'd tied strings through the holes to keep all those pages in order, especially since I forgot to number them, only it's not real string it's five lb test monofilament fishing line that says 8 lb on the box but it's old and Grandma Matchie says fishing line that's old doesn't weigh as much as when it's new, not that I can tell the difference can you? Besides it's not like pages weigh a lot or fight back much. Anyway the pages I'm supposed to talk about got numbers now because grown-ups are obsessed with putting things in order but I'm not good at taking orders which is where all the trouble started so I'll stop now. the end.

This story is included in the anthology Best Short Novels: 2006, edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the collection The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (2012).

An alien AI has been sent to the solar system as representative of three advanced species. Its mission is to save the Earth's ecosystem - and the biggest threat to that is humanity. But we are also part of the system, so the AI must make a choice. Should it save mankind or wipe it out? Are we worth it?

The AI is all-powerful, and might as well be a god. So it sets up some conditions. Violence is now impossible. Large-scale destruction of natural resources is impossible. Food and water will be provided for those who really, truly need them. You can't even bully someone on the internet any more. The old way of doing things is gone. But a certain thin-skinned US president, among others, is still wedded to late-stage capitalism. Can we adapt? Can we prove ourselves worthy? And are we prepared to give up free will for a world without violence?

And above it all, on a hidden spaceship, one woman watches. A science fiction writer, she was abducted from the middle of the street in broad daylight. She is the only person the AI will talk to. And she must make a decision.

Steven Erikson has carved a name for himself among the pantheon of great fantasy writers. But his masterful storytelling and prose style go beyond the awe-inspiring Malazan world. In The Devil Delivered and Other Tales, Erikson tells three different, but captivating stories:

"The Devil Delivered" tells a story set within the near future, where the land owned by the great Lakota Nation blisters beneath an ozone hole the size of the Great Plains. As the natural world falls victim to its wrath, and scientists scramble to understand it, a lone anthropologist wanders the deadlands, recording observations that threaten to bring the entire world to its knees.

"Revolvo" takes place in an alternate Earth where evolution took an interesting turn and the arts scene is ruled by technocrats who thrive in a secret, nepotistic society of granting agencies, bursaries, and peer-review boards, all designed to permit self-proclaimed artists to survive without an audience.

"Fishin' with Grandma Matchie" is told in the voice a nine-year-old boy, writing the story of his summer vacation. What starts as a typical recount of a trip to see Grandma quickly becomes a stunning fantastical journey into imagination and perception in the wild world that Grandma Matchie inhabits.

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine: her work, watching movies with her boyfriend, avoiding thoughts of her recently deceased Chinese immigrant parents. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps the world.

Candace joins a small group of survivors, led by the power-hungry Bob, on their way to the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Severance is a moving family story, a deadpan satire and a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Dying for It: More Erotic Tales of Unearthly Love (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois, and was reprinted in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 1998, and in Clarkesworld Magazine, #95 August 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (2002), also edited by Dozois
• Beyond Flesh (2002), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

The story is included in the collections Past Magic (2006) and Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod (2013).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The New and Perfect Man (Postscripts #24/25) (2011), edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #98 November 2014. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 1999. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 5 (2000), edited by David G. Hartwell.

Welcome to the People's Republic of Everything?of course, you've been here for a long time already. Make yourself at home alongside a hitman who always tells the truth, no matter how reality has to twist itself to suit; electric matchstick girls who have teamed up with Friedrich Engels; a telepathic boy and his father's homemade nuclear bomb; a very bad date that births an unforgettable meme; and a dog who simply won't stop howling on social media.

The People's Republic of Everything features a decade's worth of crimes, fantasies, original fiction, and the author's preferred text of the acclaimed short novel Under My Roof.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Jeffrey Ford
• Walking with a Ghost
• Arbeitskraft
• The People's Republic of Everywhere and Everything
• Tom Silex, Spirit-Smasher
• The Great Armored Train
• The Phylactery
• Slice of Life
• North Shore Friday
• The Glottal Stop
• The Spook School
• A Howling Dog
• Lab Rat
• Dreamer of the Day
• We Never Sleep
• Under My Roof

An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, from the author of three highly-acclaimed previous novels.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as The Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

Possession is an addiction.

Sydney's spent years burying her past and building a better life for herself and her young son. A respectable marketing job, a house with reclaimed and sustainable furniture, and a boyfriend who loves her son and accepts her, flaws and all.

But when she opens her front door, and a masked intruder knocks her briefly unconscious, everything begins to unravel.

She wakes in the hospital and tells a harrowing story of escape. Of dashing out a broken window. Of running into her neighbors' yard and calling the police.

The cops tell her a different story. Because the intruder is now lying dead in her guest room--murdered in a way that looks intimately personal.

Sydney can't remember killing the man. No one believes her.

Back home, as horrific memories surface, an unnatural darkness begins whispering in her ear. Urging her back to old addictions and a past she's buried to build a better life for herself and her son. As Sydney searches for truth among the wreckage of a past that won't stay buried for long, the unquiet darkness begins to grow. To change into something unimaginable.

To reveal terrible cravings of its own.

Melissa Marr returns to faery in a dramatic story of the precarious space between two worlds--and the people who must thrive there. The combination of ethereal fae powers, tumultuous romance, and a bloodthirsty faery queen will have longtime fans and new readers alike at the edge of their seats.

Lilywhite Abernathy is a criminal--she's half human, half fae, and since the time before she was born her very blood has been illegal. A war has been raging between humans and faeries, and the Queen of Blood and Rage, ruler of the fae courts, wants to avenge the tragic death of her heir due to the actions of reckless humans.

Lily's father has always shielded her from the truth, but when she's sent to the prestigious St. Columba's school, she's delivered straight into the arms of a fae Sleeper cell--the Black Diamonds. The Diamonds are planted in the human world as the sons and daughters of the most influential families, and tasked with destroying it from within. Against her will, Lilywhite's been chosen to join them... and even the romantic attention of the fae rock singer Creed Morrison isn't enough to keep Lily from wanting to run back to the familiar world she knows.

The Emperor is dead. Long live the Empire.

General Bordan has a lifetime of duty and sacrifice behind him in the service of the Empire. But with rebellion brewing in the countryside, and assassins, thieves and politicians vying for power in the city, it is all Bordan can do to protect the heir to the throne.

Apprentice Magician Kyron is assigned to the late Emperor's honour guard escorting his body on the long road back to the capital. Mistrusted and feared by his own people, even a magician's power may fail when enemies emerge from the forests, for whoever is in control of the Emperor's body, controls the succession.

Seven lives and seven deaths to seal the fate of the Empire.

Gravesend, or, Everyday Life in the Anthropocene by Paul McAuley was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, March-April 2023.

Rose is discharged from the army after an encounter with a psych bomb leaves her with lasting trauma and occasional intrusive hallucinations. She washes up in a commune of almost hippie-ish "oldsters," who are making a living in a hot and humid marsh near the mouth of the now-flooded River Thames. Rose is attracted by rumors of "soul chips" and a man who inherited his séance-giving aunt's house who might be looking for them. She meets him and that sets off an unexpected path of investigation -- he doesn't particularly care about them, but someone does, enough to steal ones from his house whenever his aunt's projection system for the housed AI "souls" is turned on. Rose dreams of finding someone to buy the remaining stash and get enough money for treatment at a clinic in the Czech Republic rumored to be able to actually cure people with her kind of trauma. But is that the way of life in the Anthropocene?

Read the full story for free here.

Set between 1891 and 1922, The White Body of Evening is a compelling and thought-provoking debut novel. It focuses on the exploits of a family of true eccentrics--the Walters--as they come to grips with all the horror and hilarity of life. They roam the alleyways and arcades of old Melbourne--a Gothic labyrinth teeming with brothels, magic shops, fortune tellers, poets and predators--and even flee to the war-torn Europe, all the while trying to make sense of what it means to be urban and Australian. For beyond the respectable facades, beyond the rituals of nation-building and middle-class propriety lies another darker world--one of obsession, derangement, dissipation and crime--and it is this world into which the Walters are drawn. From Melbourne to Vienna and back again, nothing is quite what it seems--the lure of the perverse is potent and can only climax in one disastrous way...

This is an exceptional novel, a work of intricacy, magic and squalor, at once confronting and entertaining, ribald and elegant. Written with an historian's eye for detail and a painter's love of beauty, it heralds an important new voice in Australian fiction.

A brooding, Goth-historical tale from an outstanding new talent.

Nebula Award nominated short story. Originally appeared in Artemis #5, Summer 2001. It can also be found in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2004, edited by Vonda N. McIntyre, and the collections Outbound (2006) and Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (2009).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

When physicist Michael Shelborne mysteriously vanishes, his son Shel discovers that he had constructed a time travel device. Fearing his father may be stranded in time-or worse-Shel enlists the aid of Dave MacElroy, a linguist, to accompany him on the rescue mission.

Their journey through history takes them from the enlightenment of Renaissance Italy through the American Wild West to the civil-rights upheavals of the 20th century. Along the way, they encounter a diverse cast of historical greats, sometimes in unexpected situations. Yet the elder Shelborne remains elusive.

And then Shel violates his agreement with Dave not to visit the future. There he makes a devastating discovery that sends him fleeing back through the ages, and changes his life forever.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, May 1996. The story can also be found in the anthologis Time Machines: The Greatest Time Travel Stories Ever Written (1997), edited by Bill Adler, Jr. and The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time (2003), edited by Barry N. Malzberg. It is included in the collections Standard Candles (1996) and Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (2009). It was expanded to the full novel Time Travelers Never Die in 2009.

Tiptree nominated short story originally published on Strange Horizons, 4 October 2010, where it can still be read for free. Later anthologized in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Five (2011), and Neil Clarke's More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity (2017).

2046 A.D.: Seven years ago an experimental space vessel disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Now the ship has been found orbiting Neptune. When a salvage team is sent to investigate, they encounter the ultimate horror that lurks behind the Event Horizon.

Novelization of the movie.

Valdar, heir to the throne of Dhulon, was in the fabled city-state of Schaerisa to pay his kingdom's respects to the recently deceased co-emperor. But then he ran into his old mentor, the sorcerer Nyrthim-who was supposed to be dead. The sorcerer's death had been faked so that he could be free to investigate tales that demons, once banished, were returning to the world. And unfortunately, the tales understated the danger.

Once demons ranging from deadly imps to evil demigods had ruled the world. They had been cast out and confined to the nether world only with powerful sorcery, using spells long lost. Now someone is trying to summon the most powerful-and unspeakably dangerous-of these accursed creatures back to the world of men, hoping to conquer it through them.

And unless Valdar and his companions at arms can thwart the plan, creatures evil beyond all human conception will return to rule the world. And this time, nothing will drive them back into the darkness. Instead darkness will rule the world forever...

When Derek Secrest was suddenly pulled out of the Naval Academy to take part in a top secret government project involving telepathy-because tests showed that he had a strong latent talent for psi powers-he thought things couldn't get more weird. He was wrong. Soon he was contacted by a mysterious woman who could open portals at will through spacetime. Her powers seemed godlike, and they were.

Millennia ago, extra-dimensional beings with great powers had come to earth and taken on human form, to be later remembered in legends as gods and goddesses-and titans, the ancient enemies of the gods. The godlike beings had driven off the titans, but now they are returning, with a new plan to use humans with psionic abilities to rule the Earth, and not be driven from it this time. And the titans always did have a fondness for human sacrifice and other anti-social activities.

Unless Derek and a handful of other telepaths can join forces with the ancient gods to defeat the titans, the world will be plunged into a new dark age of terror and death. But, judging from mythology, just how much can you really trust a god...?

In an alternate future where the British empire never crumbled, the space ships of Her Majesty's Navy work to keep the spaceways safe. Commander Robert Rogers of the Royal Space Navy is a defense intelligence officer known for his unconventional ways. Rogers is American born-and-raised, a loyal citizen of the Viceroyalty of North America. He's a descendant of the founder of the highly effective, pro-British Rogers' Rangers during the Colonial unpleasantries of 1776, and he's inherited his ancestor's intelligence and drive in spades.

But there are those among the stars who are not so happy being subjects of the British Empire. In the Tau Ceti system, a cauldron of trouble brews as a terrorist faction of the rebellious Sons of Arnold attacks the empire from within, and warships of the theocratic Caliphate enters the system, prepared to do their worse to destroy the hated empire head on. Yet standing against the coming anarchy and tyranny is one intrepid spy prepared to risk all for queen and empire:

In a strange alternate universe, Ponce de León's quest for the fountain of youth has unexpected results, the Spanish Armada destroys the English fleet with high-tech weapons using beams of fiery light, and the queen flees to the New World, accompanied by her sorcerer advisor Dr. Dee and William Shakespeare, where they find a gateway to an alien world.

Private investigator Bob Devaney searches for a traitor selling secrets to an interstellar mafia called the Tonkuztra among the members of the top-secret Prometheus Project, a group whose mission is to fool the aliens who rule the galaxy into believing that Earth possesses a technology comparable to that of the galactic rulers in order to protect the planet from conquest.

Tony Prosdocimi lives in the bustling Metropolis of San Ventura – a city gripped in fear, a city under siege by the hooded supervillain, The Cowl.

When Tony develops super-powers and acts to take down The Cowl, however, he finds that the local superhero team Seven Wonders aren't as grateful as he assumed they'd be...

This novelette originally appeared in Lightspeed, April 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

In this fast-moving tale, we meet James Kirkham, an adventurer/explorer who is kidnapped off the streets of downtown Manhattan by the minions of Satan, a crime lord/supervillain/evil genius. Kirkham is forced to play a game in Satan's lair, during which he is made to tread on seven glowing footprints, four of which are "fortunate" and three "unfortunate." Depending on the steps he lands on, he will either be killed, serve Satan for a year, or be given a fantastic fortune.

Kirkham winds up a bond servant to Satan, and is compelled to commit various fantastic crimes while in his service. He is housed in Satan's mazelike chateau with dozens of others, and falls in love with a fellow prisoner, Eve.

Nico Storm and his father, Willem, drive a truck filled with essential supplies through a desolate land. They are among the few in the world, as far as they know, to have survived a devastating virus that has swept over the planet. Their lives turned upside down, Nico realizes that his superb marksmanship and cool head mean he is destined to be his father's protector, even though he is still only a boy.

Willem Storm, though not a fighter, is both a thinker and a leader, a wise and compassionate man with a vision for a new community that survivors will rebuild from the ruins. And so Amanzi is founded, drawing Storm's "homeless and tempest-tost"--starting with Melinda Swanevelder, whom they rescue from brutal thugs; Hennie Fly, with his vital Cessna plane; Beryl Fortuin and her ragtag group of orphans; and Domingo, the man with the tattooed hand, whom Nico immediately recognizes as someone you want on your side. And then Sofia Bergman arrives, the most beautiful girl Nico has ever seen, who changes everything.

So the community grows, and with each step forward, as resources increase, so do the challenges they must face--not just from the attacks of biker brigands, but also from within. Nico undergoes an extraordinary rite of passage in this brand new world, testing his loyalty to the limits. Looking back later in life, he recounts the traumatic events that led to the greatest rupture of all--the murder of the person he loves most.

Propulsively readable, Fever is a gripping epic of humanity striving for a noble vision against its basest impulses.

Locus Award winning and World Fantasy Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (2004), edited by Michael Chabon. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2005), edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. The story is included in Looking for Jake: Stories (2005).

Two children receive messages in an old mailbox in a vacant lot and are plunged into the strangest week of their lives.

Meanwhile, on another side of the Universe. . .

Meet Gem ser'Edreth, a wizard with electronics -- and a freelance thief. Deliberately solitary, unencumbered by family or friends, he immerses himself in his profession, rising to a pinnacle of skill so exalted that the planetary crime boss seeks him out with a commission to steal. Refusing the commission, of course, is his first mistake.

Gem's hidden past proves an unexpected liability and his plants to leave the planet go catastrophically awry. Suddenly embroiled in interplanetary politics, a potential interstellar war, and in possession of an ancient object of power an an unwanted cousin, Gem discovers that the mysterious Witness for the Telios may hold the key to his salvation -- or his undoing.

Thirteen darkly comic stories, Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journey that stretches the boundaries of the ordinary world.

Table of Contents:

• Cat 'n' Mouse - (2004) - short story
• The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman - (1999) - short story
• The Room in the Attic - (2004) - novelette
• Dangerous Laughter - (2003) - short story
• History of a Disturbance - (2007) - short story
• The Dome - (2006) - short story
• In the Reign of Harad IV - (2006) - short story
• The Other Town - (2006) - short story
• The Tower - (2007) - short story
• Here at the Historical Society - (2008) - short story
• A Change in Fashion - (2006) - short story
• A Precursor of the Cinema - (2004) - novelette
• The Wizard of West Orange - (2007) - novelette

World Fantasy Award winning short story. It originally appeared under the title The Illusionist in Esquire, December 1989. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection (1990), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is included in the collections The Barnum Museum (1990) and We Others: New and Selected Stories (2011).

A film loosely based on this story, The Illusionist, was released in 2006.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler comes a stunningly original new book set in a Connecticut town over one incredible summer night. The delicious cast of characters includes a band of teenage girls who break into homes and simply leave notes reading "We Are Your Daughters," a young woman who meets a phantom lover on the tree swing in her back yard, a beautiful mannequin who steps down from her department store window, and all the dolls "no longer believed in," left abandoned in the attic, who magically come to life.

With each new book, Steven Millhauser radically stretches not only the limits of fiction but also of his seemingly limitless abilities. Enchanted Night is a remarkable piece of fiction, a compact tale of loneliness and desire that is as hypnotic and rich as the language Millhauser uses to weave it.

The Knife Thrower introduces a series of distinctively Millhauserian worlds: tiny, fabulous, self-enclosed, like Fabergé eggs or like the short-story genre itself. Flying carpets; subterranean amusement parks; a band of teenage girls who meet secretly in the night in order to do "nothing at all"; a store with departments of Moorish courtyards, volcanoes, and Aztec temples: these are Millhauser's stock-in-trade as a storyteller, and he employs them to characteristically magical effect. As in Millhauser's other books, including Edwin Mullhouse and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler, his subject is nothing less than the faculty of imagination itself. Here, however, the flights of fancy are unencumbered by Martin Dressler's wealth of period detail, and the result is fun-house prose whose pleasures and terrors are equally gossamer. Millhauser possesses the unique ability to render the quotidian strange, so that, emerging from his stories, the reader often feels the world itself an unfamiliar place--as do the shoppers at his department store, that marketplace of skillful illusion: "As we hurry along the sidewalk, we have the absurd sensation that we have entered still another department, composed of ingeniously lifelike streets with artful shadows and reflections--that our destinations lie in a far corner of the same department--that we are condemned to hurry forever through these artificial halls, bright with late afternoon light, in search of the way out."

Table of Contents:

• The Knife Thrower - (1997)
• A Visit - (1997)
• The Sisterhood of Night - (1994)
• The Way Out - (1991)
• Flying Carpets - (1997)
• The New Automaton Theatre - (1998)
• Clair de Lune - (1998)
• The Dream of the Consortium - (1993)
• Balloon Flight, 1870 - (1997)
• Paradise Park - (1993)
• Kaspar Hauser Speaks - (1998)
• Beneath the Cellars of Our Town - (1998)

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in Harper's Magazine. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighth Annual Collection (1995), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is included in the collection The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998).

From the Pulitzer and Story Prize winner: sixteen new stories--provocative, funny, disturbing, enchanting--that delve into the secret lives and desires of ordinary people, alongside retellings of myths and legends that highlight the aspirations of the human spirit.

Beloved for the lens of the strange he places on small town life, Steven Millhauser further reveals in Voices in the Night the darkest parts of our inner selves to brilliant and dazzling effect. Here are stories of wondrously imaginative hyperrealism, stories that pose unforgettably unsettling what-ifs, or that find barely perceivable evils within the safe boundaries of our towns, homes, and even within our bodies.

Here, too, are stories culled from religion and fables: Samuel, who hears the voice of God calling him in the night; a young, pre-enlightenment Buddha, who searches for his purpose in life; Rapunzel and her Prince, who struggle to fit the real world to their dream.

Heightened by magic, the divine, and the uncanny, shot through with sly and winning humor, Voices in the Night seamlessly combines the whimsy and surprise of the familiar with intoxicating fantasies that take us beyond our daily lives, all done with the hallmark sleight of hand and astonishing virtuosity of one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.

Table of Contents:

• 3 - Miracle Polish - (2011) - short story
• 20 - Phantoms - (2010) - novelette>
• 45 - Sons and Mothers - (2012) - short story
• 62 - Mermaid Fever - (2009) - short story
• 76 - The Wife and the Thief - short story
• 86 - A Report on Our Recent Troubles - (2007) - short story
• 98 - Coming Soon - (2013) - short story
• 110 - Rapunzel - (2011) - novelette
• 135 - Elsewhere - short story
• 150 - Thirteen Wives - (2013) - short story
• 165 - Arcadia - (2013) - short story
• 183 - The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama - novelette
• 226 - The Place - novelette
• 249 - Home Run - (2013) - short story
• 253 - American Tall Tale - (2012) - short story
• 270 - A Voice in the Night - (2012) - novelette

Memory explores the nature of oppression, genetic engineering, non-binary relationships, and--you guessed it--memory, on a colony on a terraformed Mars.

I was all very simple...well, sort of. All Howard Hart had to do was to go back in time and make sure that Mark Twain's literary career fizzled out.

Why? Because Howard is the last living descendant of the obscure novelist Brette Harte, and he's convinced that with just a little help Harte and not Twain will become wealthy and respected. And that would leave Howard heir to literary immortality.

But along the way, Howard encounters some problems. The Civil War, the Gold Rush, and a ravishing young lady of pleasure--to name a few. And suddenly, time traveling isn't what it used to be... and neither is history.