Lucy Corin's "eye popping, enlightening read" ( Publishers Weekly), now in paperback.At the heart of Lucy Corin's dazzling collection are one hundred apocalypses: visions of loss and destruction, vexation and crisis, revelation and revolution, sometimes only a few lines long. In these haunting and wickedly funny stories, an apocalypse might come in the form of the end of a relationship or the end of the world, but they all expose the tricky landscape of our...

A stunningly ambitious, prescient novel about madness, generational trauma, and cultural breakdownAt the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dependable, dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously waits to hear news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing—again. Em’s days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house (bought with a “responsible, salary-backed, fixed-rate mortgage”) and her dreary of...

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 ...

In Everyday Psychokillers spectacular violence is the idiom of everyday life, a lurid extravaganza in which all those around the narrator seem vicarious participants. And at its center are the interchangeable young girls, thrilling to know themselves the object of so much desire and terror.

At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously awaits news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing—again. Confronted by unfathomable loss and recovery, Em beginsto see how madness permeates everything around her.Em’s story is layered with other perspectives and voices. There is Frank, the failing manager at her office; Jack, the man Frank has loved for decades; Em and Ad’s eccentric parents who ...

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...

A masterful twist on the serial killer novel from the award-winning author Lauren Beukes: the girl who wouldn't die hunts the killer who shouldn't exist.Harper Curtis is a killer who stepped out of the past. Kirby Mazrachi is the girl who was never meant to have a future. Kirby is the last shining girl, one of the bright young women, burning with potential, whose lives Harper is destined to snuff out after he stumbles on a House in Depression-era Chicago that opens...

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...

These 23 stories take us on a twisted fun ride into some future times and parallel universes where characters as diverse as a one-legged International Actuarial Forensics specialist, a pharmaceutical guinea pig, and a far-sighted fetus engage in their own games of the survival of the fittest. From a new short story by William Gibson in which a teen disassociated from his body haunts his neighborhood through the decades, to Douglas Coupland’s balls-out satire of a slightly futuristic Surviv...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the national bestselling author of The River and The Dog Stars comes a "carefully composed story about one man’s downward turning life in the American West” (The Boston Globe).After having shot a man in a Santa Fe bar, the famous artist Jim Stegner served his time and has since struggled to manage the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. Now he lives a quiet life ... until the day that he comes across a hu...

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...