Throughout Minnesota, from Austin to International Falls, people flock every year to more festivals--county fairs, arts and craft shows, ice-fishing contests, and music festivals--than you can shake a stick at. Most come for the food and fun, but a few festival-goers have more devious intentions in mind.In this diverse collection of short stories, members of Twin Cities Sisters in Crime reveal the chilly underside of dog-sled races, gang rivalries at a Cinco de Mayo festivals, erra...

Historical Society President Murdered, Lexie Starr Investigates in The Extinguished Guest, A Cozy Mystery by Jeanne GlidewellAt the Grand Opening of Stone Van Patten's new B&B, the local Historical Society's soon-to-be inaugurated new president, Horatio Prescott III, is found murdered in the inn's grandest suite.Much to Van Patten's chagrin, Lexie, a widowed library assistant, decides to aid in the investigation.Despite several foiled attem...

Nightmares come in many forms. Some rend the veil of sleep with heart-stopping madness. Others defy sanity to leave a helpless corner of your mind twitching for release. Sometimes, hours after waking, a nightmare drifts across your memory, tainting your day with wisps of discomfort. NIGHTMARES UNHINGED reveals horror in all its mutable forms—abject to absurd—through twenty tales of terror.Contributors include Mario Acevedo, Edward Bryant, Dustin Carpenter, Sean Eads, Keith Ferrell,...

This captivating digital original story set in the world of Lauren Oliver's New York Times bestselling Delirium series focuses on Alex, Lena's first love.When Alex sacrificed himself to save Lena, he thought he was committing himself to certain death, but what he got was almost worse. Imprisoned and tortured by the guards, his mind forces him to relive a past he would rather forget. But in the dark he grows stronger. Both hopeful and terrified, he fights t...

All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses—places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, while parole is just another state of being. Christmas dinners become battlegrounds; truck cabs and bathroom stalls transform into warped confessiona...

A collection of short stories from the contemporary American master whom the New York Times declared "the most compassionate fiction writer working today."Suffused with Russell Banks’s trademark lyricism and reckless humor, the twelve stories in A Permanent Member of the Family examine the myriad ways we try—and sometimes fail—to connect with one another, as we seek a home in the world.In the title story, a father looks back on the legend ...

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 ...

Chicken Soup for the Soul: Loving Our Cats will delight readers with its heartwarming, amusing, inspirational, and occasionally tearful stories about our best friends and faithful companions -- our cats.We are all crazy about our mysterious cats. Sometimes they are our best friends; sometimes they are aloof. They are fun to watch and often surprise us. These true stories, the best from Chicken Soup for the Soul’s library, will make readers appreciate their...

Despite all his disaster planning, and the bomb shelter he built under his shed, Mario Scietto was not prepared for the apocalypse that hit Monument, Colorado. A series of escalating disasters, beginning with a monster hailstorm and ending with a terrible chemical weapons spill that affects people differently depending on blood type, has torn the world as he knows it apart. "What Mario Says" is set in the world of Emmy Laybourne's Monument 14.This short story was acquired ...

From the hilarious Booker-shortlisted author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour'He reflected in future retrospect on the evening and foretold every gesture, every word. "I can't do it," he said. "I can predict everything that will happen from the moment they arrive to the little kiss on the cheek goodbye and I just can't goddamn do it."'The Dinner Party immerses us in the comic and strange realities of modern life, as we journey th...

Crime is common ground for the twenty-one women writers in this extraordinary collection of contemporary mystery fiction, introduced and edited by Sara ParetskyThe voices here include professional crime solvers who take you from the mean streets of V.I. Warshawski’s Chicago in a case of music and murder . . . to the California freeway where Kinsey Millhone's beloved VW skids into a shooting . . . to the gang-held turf of Sharon McCone’s San Francisco, where an eye ...

Part 2 of the heart-pounding new thriller from the co-author of five No. 1 James Patterson bestsellers including Judge and Jury and Lifeguard, and the Sunday Times bestsellers The Blue Zone and Reckless.WHEN YOU HAVE EVERYTHING TO LOSEYOU STOP PLAYING BY THE RULESHilary Cantor’s life is falling apart. She has lost her job, is about to lose her house, and is running out of money to care for her young son with Asperger’s syndrome.But when Hilary is first on the...