The whole season came down to one weekend, and my coach and I bet everything on it.Dana Boyd is forty-one, owns the box, out-lifts every man in it, and spent twenty years training herself out of wanting one thing. Me. A baby. Both at once.The night before I qualified, in a hotel two miles from the floor, she stopped counting the risk and told me to make it take. So I did.Then her co-owner came for us with a tape and a grudge, a funded gym tried to buy me out from un...

EARTH'S MIGHTIEST SUPERHERO HORROR SERIES ASSEMBLES! The planet's most extraordinary superhero creators pack a grim-twisted punch in this new anthology collection! Join your favorite host, The Creep as you're guided through thirteen skin-crawling, gut-wrenching stories, all with a superhero twist. Killer talent behind your favorite superheroes - including RYAN NORTH, KIERON GILLEN, JAMES HARREN, MARV WOLFMAN, and more - will have you screaming for help and more CREEPSHOW! Collects SUPER CR...

I blew out my knee and lost the only future I had. Then I walked into Foundry before dawn, and Dana Boyd put her hands on my hips, fixed my lift, and told me to give her one more.She is forty-one. She owns the box. She was the real thing once, an elite competitor, before her own knee ended it, and she runs the place like the drill nobody argues with. She coaches me on trade because I cannot pay, which means she owns my mornings, my job, and every rep I take.She is the one w...

I was nineteen when I got hired onto the landscaping crew and moved into the room over the garage for the summer. Vanessa Marsh was forty, married eight years to a man three decades older who'd had a vasectomy at a clinic before he ever proposed, and never told her. She found out from a bill in the mail. The nursery upstairs had sat closed under a dust sheet ever since.She started it. She was the one who crossed the gravel to my door when Richard was away, the one who pulled me int...

I spent the summer on the Marsh estate to save for trade school. Fix the pumps, edge the beds, stay invisible. Then the boss's wife started watching me work.Vanessa is forty, all silk and diamonds, married to a man thirty years older who keeps her like something he bought and stopped wanting. She's the one who had me moved in over the garage. She's the one who locks the door.He's away half the week. When he is, she takes me into his house, into his bed, and stops pretending...

Lizzie has a bike that's her favorite color, complete with streamers. There's just one problem: Lizzie does NOT want to ride it. What if she wobbles? What if she falls? What if her feet forget what pedals are even for? Lizzie's stuffie thinks she can do it. Her parents think she can do it. But Lizzie isn't sure.A sweet, funny, big-feelings-and-all story for every kid who's ever stood next to their bike and thought, not today. (Spoiler: today might just be the day.)Once a he...

The affair was the best-kept secret in the box. Bare, after hours, on her own gym floor. Dana Boyd, forty-one, the coach who owns the place and out-lifts every man in it, coming apart the way she lets no one see.Then I started winning. Eyes turned my way, a bigger box came calling, and the thing that could make my career was the thing that could burn hers down. So she put the coach-wall back up and pushed me out first, for both our sakes.I went back to a girl my own age. Da...

I tested into Professor Keller's seminar to learn how to write. I didn't expect to find her secret on a drive she lent me... a filthy, brilliant older-woman/younger-man novel under a name that wasn't hers, with a student in it who was clearly me.She's forty-three, up for tenure, composed as a locked door. I'm twenty. And I'd already read the ending she was too afraid to write.So I gave it to her. Behind the locked office door. In her bed with the world shut out. Anywhere sh...

By August I knew the Marsh estate better than the family that owned it. Which doors locked, when the housekeeper left, exactly how long I had before the boss came home.Long enough for his wife.Vanessa is forty, kept in silk and diamonds by a husband who stopped wanting her and won't give her the one thing she asks for. Now she takes me into his bed, on his side of it, and doesn't pretend it's an accident. Bare, every time. She tells me not to pull out. She tells me to stay....

The estate sold in six weeks. Richard booked two seats to Milan and called it his wife's new life.She had other plans, and every one of them ran through me.Vanessa is forty. Her husband had himself fixed years ago so she would never get the one thing she actually wants. I am the nineteen-year-old on his payroll who can still give it to her, and in the last weeks before the sale she stopped telling me to be careful. Bare, every time. Deep, and told to stay.Then his s...

My professor writes about being taken by a younger man. I know, because I read it... and now she lets me do it.Nora Keller is forty-three, all silk blouses and rationed praise until the door locks. Then she comes apart. She takes me bare, every time. My hand spread low on her belly while she rides me and tells me not to stop, not to pull out.A woman her age. Nothing between us. She knows the risk and she wants it... wants to feel me fill her and do it again before she has c...

What makes literature ‘literary’? Some theories argue it is a certain degree of ungraspability – openness, vagueness, or ambiguity that invites readers’ active participation in constructing meaning. This book examines five canonical twentieth-century Italian novels (by Tozzi, Landolfi, Vittorini, Gadda, and Ortese) that have consistently been described by critics as particularly “indeterminate” or “ungraspable.” Through these case studies, spanning fifty years of Italian literature, the bo...