30 powerful stories from around the world to benefit two children's charities: PROTECT: The National Association to Protect Children and Children 1st Scotland.Stories by David Ackley, Kevin Aldrich, David Barber, Lynn Beighley, Seamus Bellamy, Paul D. Brazill, Sif Dal, James Lloyd Davis, Roberto C. Garcia, Susan Gibb, Nancy A. Hansen, K.V. Hardy, Gill Hoffs, Fiona "McDroll" Johnson, J.F. Juzwik, MaryAnne Kolton, Benoit Lelievre, Veronica Marie Lewis-Shaw, Vinod Narayan, Paula Pahnk...

Bringing together 34 flash fiction stories from 14 authors, SPARK offers a host of stories to thrill, move, and challenge fans of short-short fiction. A woman physically at war with her mother's legacy inside her own body, a young girl given a vision of a utopic past at the end of the world, a man psychically bonded to the living weapon for which he is the failsafe, a harem of "female" androids newly capable of questioning their subservient status—these are a few of the characters you'll m...

A cool spring evening in Virginia is interrupted by the arrival of strange dog and on its heels even stranger events. Will one man be enough to fend off a pack of wild hounds in order to save his family?Man's best friend has long been used as the subject for conditioning experiments. What of man? Has mankind been so conditioned as to not recognize the imminent threat from his best friend?Man's best friend is his worst enemy.Woof

What Endures is a story of powerful love. It is a story that will break your heart. Inspired by true events, it tells of the incredible bond between a mother and daughter, and with gut-wrenching poignancy reminds us of the little things that make life worth living.“Holdstock’s writing manages to be both heartbreakingly poetic and densely detailed … sad passages, ghostlike recollections, written almost from the vantage point of the present, establish the book as a great wor...

An eclipse is a rare and unusual event, when the world is transformed and the sky becomes a dark eldritch thing. It's a time when anything could happen, when any kind of story just might be true. That sense of the strange and wonderful guides Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, the first volume in an exciting new annual anthology series edited by acclaimed anthologist Jonathan Strahan.Set to become a major event on the science fiction and fantasy calendar,Eclipse: New Science ...

The acclaimed author "assembles a stellar collection of twenty stories that create their own worlds in twenty pages or less" ( USA Today ).Tom Perrotta explains in his introduction that "all of [these stories] took me somewhere I didn't expect to go, and jolted me into that state of heightened awareness and emotional receptivity that's one of the great rewards of reading good fiction."In Nathan Englander s What We ...

Everyone loves their grandma but these three are just a little...different. They have certain skills in war and strategy developed over forty years through military training and discipline. They are the definition of "never judge a book by its cover." They now work as contractors for the extra money. Follow the hapless Clem as he is hired to drive the three on their latest mission of destruction.

The fourth volume of the annual Unidentified Funny Objects series features the theme of dark humor.What happens when you ask some of the genre's masters to interpret this theme? The enclosed twenty-three darkly humorous tales range from black comedy to biting satire to morbid irony and everything in between.Inside this book you'll find Faustian bargains gone awry, time-traveling ghosts, flawed supervillains, talking hamsters, and much more.Featuring stories by:

This sophisticated, scary anthology collects the best horror fiction published between 1984 and 2005, one of horror’s most innovative eras. These exceptionally diverse stories, hand-picked by horror-expert editor Ellen Datlow, are tales of the subtly psychological, the unpredictably mischievous, and the disturbingly visceral.Here are classics, such as horror master Stephen King’s Chattery Teeth,” the tautly drawn account of a traveling salesman who unwisely picks up yet another hi...

Forty-six very short science fiction, fantasy and horror stories. Perfect for reading while commuting, standing in line while waiting to renew your driver's licence, waiting for that friend who is always running late for drinks or other situations where you just don't have time to spend on a longer story.  Travel to fantasy worlds, fly with super heroes and tremble in the face of unkind mysteries and horrible horrors.  There are 46 stories. That's about 2 cents pe...

A doctor makes a late-night emergency call to an exclusive California riding school; a professor inherits a mysterious vase... and a strange little man; a struggling youth discovers canine horrors lurking beneath the streets of Albany; a sheriff ruthlessly deals with monstrosities plaguing his rural town; a pair of animal researchers makes a frightening discovery at a remote site; a sweet little girl entertains herself... by torturing faeries; a group of horror aficionados attempts to trac...

Liz is determined to carve out some alone time to spend with her husband, Jimmy. But fate and the kids seem destined to interfere. And worse, her attempts to find a happy balance between responsibility and romance may prove more a comedy of errors than the night, well—fifteen minutes—of hot sex she's hoping for. Or will it?