The Summer 2017 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year’s three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles; the Winter issue is staff-edited.Distinguished writer Stewart O’Nan guest-edits this issue. As O’Nan writes in his introduction, “I want to feel moral confusion, because nothing in this world is simple. As a writer reading, I also admire the ...

The Year's Best Crime & Mystery Stories contains the best crime and mystery stories that were originally published in 2015 in either print or electronic format as selected by editors Kristine Kathryn Rusch and John Helfers.Reading through thousands of titles and carefully narrowing their favorite reads down to the ultimate list that is presented in this volume, the editors chose their top picks of notable works from hundreds of anthologie...

This story of a slacker who sets out to take the book-publishing world by storm is "a hilarious send-up of literary pretensions and celebrity culture." ( USA Today).Pete Tarslaw wants some fame and fortune and, perhaps most importantly, the chance to get back at his ex-girlfriend at her upcoming wedding. After listening to a vapid author prattling on during an interview, while nubile young women watch adoringly, he figures becoming a lite...

The second graphic novel adventure featuring Dean Koontz’s hugely popular character Odd Thomas.It’s almost Halloween in Pico Mundo, and that means time for the annual Safe Halloween Party, hosted by Police Chief Porter. All seems perfectly normal – until Odd catches sight of the ghost of a young girl who seems to be trying to join in the festivities.Odd’s next clue that something threatens his peaceful town is the appearance of a swarm of bodachs – supernatural beings who h...

Seen Reading is the exciting debut collection of microfictions from Canada’s pre-eminent literary voyeur, Julie Wilson. Based on the beloved online movement of the same name, Seen Reading collects more than a hundred stories inspired by sightings of people reading on Toronto transit, each reader re-invented in a poetic piece of short fiction. Tender, poignant, and fun, Seen Reading offers readers an inspired fictional map while charting an urban centre’s cultural...

Twenty of the best American short stories of 2011, chosen by the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Chord.The twenty tightly crafted stories collected here by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks are full of deftly drawn characters, universal truths, and often surprising humor. Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall" is a comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life. In the satirical "The Sleep," Caitlin...

A tale from the world of Steven Brust and Skyler White's novel The IncrementalistsThe Incrementalists are a secret society of two hundred people with an unbroken lineage reaching back forty thousand years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, communicate with one another across nations and time, and have a very modest mission: to make the world better, a little bit at a time."Fireworks in the Rain" tells an original story not found in the no...

From the New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Horns comes this e-short story-from Joe Hills award-winning collection 20th Century Ghosts.Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945. . . .Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting ...

A beautiful story about Art; a living, breathing boy in all respects - who happens to be made of inflatable plastic. POP ART is an exceptional, must-read of a short story.Joe Hill is the New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2, Horns, and Heart-Shaped Box, and the prize-winning story collection 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the co-author, with Stephen King, of In the Tall Grass.

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriterArguably the most imitated and influential American poet of the previous half-century, Charles Bukowski remains a counter-culture icon more than a decade after his death. The Continual Condition is a collection of never-before-published poems by the inimitable Bukowski—raw, tough, odes to alcohol, women, work, and despair by a r...

A clear voice of her generation, Sierra DeMulder’s writing offers a gritty, sincere perspective on the subtle joys and modern pains of living. Her debut collection The Bones Below delicately carries the reader to a place of brutal, beautiful honesty. DeMulder’s personal revelations complete a touching portrait of the young artist and her fearless exploration of the human experience, bare in its rawest and most tender forms. DeMulder possesses the most important quality a young writer can h...

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories range in setting from Japan at the outset of World War II to a remote cabin in the woods of Wyoming, and the characters that inhabit them range from a misanthropic survivor of an apocalyptic flood to a unicorn hidden in a suburban house. Whether fantastical or realistic, gothic or lyrical, the stories here are uniformly ...