"Spanning Gaiman's career to date, The Neil Gaiman Reader: Selected Fiction is a ... collection from one of the world's most beloved writers, chosen by those who know his work best: his devoted readers. A ... representation of Gaiman's ... imaginative fiction, this ... volume includes excerpts from each of his five novels for adults--Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane--and nearly fifty of his short...

"A collection of twelve powerful and moving new stories from one of Ireland's most celebrated writers. Tinged with melancholy but rooted in resiliency, the exquisite stories of Bernard MacLaverty's Blank Pages display the perseverance of the human spirit.In "A Love Picture," a middle-aged woman, already no stranger to loss, consults a WWII news reel to determine the fate of her son. The harrowing but transcendent "The End of Days" imagines life in...

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited...

"A gentle Eastern European immigrant arrives in New York City after his family and his life have been torn apart by his country's civil war. A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game--and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN's newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves. An eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant...

A collection of short stories, one set in the same world as Shade's Children, and another story set in the world of A Confusion of Princes.

A collection of stories, written over a twenty-year period, examines the Vietnamese experience in America as well as questions of home, family, and identity.

Ray Bradbury is, indisputably, one of America's greatest storytellers. The recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he ranks among the most beloved — and widely read — of American authors. In The Cat's Pajamas, this "latter-day O. Henry" (Booklist) takes us on an amazing walk through his six-decade career, presenting twenty-two tales — some old, some new,

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Stephen King introduces each of these short stories with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it. There are connections between stories -- themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. "I made them especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth."

Features pairings by twenty-three best-selling suspense writers, including John Sandford, F. Paul Wilson, and R. L. Stine, who in short high-action stories pit their most popular characters against one another.

Welcome to the sublime circus of Mark Mayer's Michener-Copernicus-winning debut, Aerialists, a fiercely inventive collection of nine stories in which classic carnival characters become ordinary misfits seeking grandeur in a lonely world. Under the luminous tent of Mayer's prose, we see P.T. Barnum's caravan remade: A young misogynist finds a confidante in a cable-TV strongwoman. A realtor for the one percent invokes his inner murder clown. A skin-and-bones...