Presents a collection of stories featuring such characters as a deranged male birth doula, an aerobics instructor trying to save her soul, and a doomsday hustler.

A brilliant, inventive debut story collection in the vein of Kevin Wilson and Wells Tower.

Frederik Pohl, the bestselling author of The Boy Who Would Live Forever, is famous for his novels, but first and foremost, he is a master of the science fiction short story. For more than fifty years he has been writing incisive, entertaining SF stories, several hundred in all. Even while writing his bestselling triple-crown (Hugo, Nebula, Campbell Award) novel Gateway and the other Heechee Saga novels, he has always written short fiction. Now,...

Simone has always liked the room she sleeps in when she visits her great-aunt Glory, but this time the curtains remind her of an octopus reaching for her, and when she wakes her kitten has disappeared--and that is only one of the stories in this collection of chilling tales.

"Jez Burrows opened the New Oxford American Dictionary and sat, mystified. Instead of the definition of "study" he was looking for, he found himself drawn to the strangely conspicuous, curiously melodramatic sentence that followed it: "He perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery." It read like a tiny piece of fiction on the lam and hiding out in the dictionary--and it wasn't alone. Was it possible to reunite these fugitive fictions?...

A collection of fifteen horror stories centering on Black girls who battle monsters, both human and supernatural, face down death, and survive.

Prince Fulsa's light is fading.

Struck by a mysterious illness, Fulsa watches helplessly as the aura which marks him as a prince seeps slowly from his skin. His only comfort is his best friend, Phaios, a lightless slave who also represents everything Fulsa stands to lose.

When his illness takes a turn for the worse, Fulsa seizes on a last, desperate chance: a celestial chariot race with the power to restore his light—or swallow

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"The Works of Rudyard Kipling: One Volume Edition" is an extensive collection that showcases the early works of the celebrated British author, Rudyard Kipling. Best known for iconic creations like "The Jungle Book," "Kim," and the "Just So Stories," Kipling's broader oeuvre, often overshadowed, is rich with detailed depictions of colonial India and acute observations of the British Empire's complex social and political fabric. This anthology...

Carson McCullers—novelist, dramatist, poet—was at the peak of her powers as a writer of short fiction. Here are nineteen stories that explore her signature themes: wounded adolescence, loneliness in marriage, and the tragicomedy of life in the South. Here too are "The Member of the Wedding" and "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," novellas that Tennessee Williams judged to be "assuredly among the masterpieces of our language." (A Mariner Reissue)

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First published in 2014, this tenth-anniversary edition of the award-winning collection includes three new stories.A young mother intrudes in the life of an older woman, thinking she knows what's best. An academic becomes convinced that he is haunted by his double. Two children spy on their supposedly criminal neighbours. A man enables his cousin's predatory impulses out of loyalty, and a circus performer dreams of a perfect wedding. These characters...