"Make Something Up is a compilation of 21 stories and one novella (some previously published, some not) that will disturb and delight. The absurdity of both life and death are on full display: In "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In "Knock, Knock," a son hopes to tell one last off-color joke to a father in his final moments,...

Bizarre tales of a teenager going to the school dance with a robot, a Thanksgiving dinner interrupted by turkeys looking for revenge, and other strange short stories.

Meet the women of American Housewife: they wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it's cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. They pump the salad spinner like it's a CPR dummy. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven. These twelve irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation...

A series of stories which each explore some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town while each advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another in a complex structure which slowly explicates its own background even as it painstakingly erects a town which is one of the most detailed literary creations of the period. In this book, O. Henry coined the term "banana republic".

First published in 1925, "Carry On, Jeeves" is P. G. Wodehouse's third collection of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster stories. All of the stories included in this volume first appeared in periodicals like the "Saturday Evening Post" including some that are reworked versions of stories that appeared in the 1919 collection "My Man Jeeves". In this volume, readers will find some of Wodehouse's most famous tales of the hapless and wealthy Bertie, his equally...

"A collection of six stories, each one featuring an explosion of some sort"--

Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and... no qualms about a little murder. This funny, irreverent story collection by Helene Tursten, author of the Irene Huss investigations, features two-never-before translated stories that will keep you laughing all the way to the retirement home. Ever since her darling father's untimely death when she was only eighteen, Maud has lived in the family's spacious apartment in...

Humorous and unapologetically fierce, other stories shine an interrogating light on the adage that “history likes to lie about women”? as the subjects of “You Won't Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women” (it's true, you won't) will attest. Sparks employs her vast knowledge of the morbid and macabre in “The Eyes of Saint Lucy,” in which a young girl creates elaborately violent dioramas of famous saints with her mother. And in...

"These stories depict ordinary moments--a visit to the doctor's office or a married couple's hundredth dance together--but within the quotidian, Williams delivers a lifetime of insecurities, lusts, rejections, and revelations, making her work equally discomfiting and amusing. With unmatched wit in every sentence, Williams captures whole universes in a story, delivering visionary insights into what it means to be human."--jacket.

"Two murderous pirates find a child stowaway on board and attempt to balance pillaging with co-parenting. A woman raised by wolves prepares for her parents' annual Thanksgiving visit. An aging mutant superhero is forced to learn humility when the mayor kicks him upstairs to a desk job. And in the hard-boiled caper--The Big Nap--a weary two-year-old detective struggles to make sense of a world gone mad. Equal parts silly and sincere, New Teeth is an...