A collection of ten short stories with a measure of the fantastic in each. Includes the following: The weaver's daughter: A fairy tale about making friends with the monsters next door. What Jack found: When your son finds a fairy in the garden do you release him to potentially hostile forces, or risk your family to keep him safe? Awakening Iorwen: A sleeping beauty re-telling set against the consolidation of Roman rule in Wales. A lakeside meeting: Bernard is on the run from the hybrid butterflies he developed to interface with your brain. In the box: Two students find a mysterious growing box in their office. We need to talk: How can Damian absolve his guilt over the accident that crippled his sister? Spook school: There's something different about the school next door, but it's not what Josephine expects. The husband test: An unexpected package ruins everything. The Halloween dare: Nothing is as it seems when exploring the house at the top of the hill. Bargaining with a demon: An unexpected visitor gives Charlie an opportunity of a lifetime, but does she dare to take advantage of it?

A collection of ten short stories with a measure of the fantastic in each. Includes the following: The weaver's daughter: A fairy tale about making friends with the monsters next door. What Jack found: When your son finds a fairy in the garden do you release him to potentially hostile forces, or risk your family to keep him safe? Awakening Iorwen: A sleeping beauty re-telling set against the consolidation of Roman rule in Wales. A lakeside meeting: Bernard is on the run from the hybrid butterflies he developed to interface with your brain. In the box: Two students find a mysterious growing box in their office. We need to talk: How can Damian absolve his guilt over the accident that crippled his sister? Spook school: There's something different about the school next door, but it's not what Josephine expects. The husband test: An unexpected package ruins everything. The Halloween dare: Nothing is as it seems when exploring the house at the top of the hill. Bargaining with a demon: An unexpected visitor gives Charlie an opportunity of a lifetime, but does she dare to take advantage of it?

A little science fiction, a bit of fantasy, plenty of humor, and some really shocking horror. These are tales to suit any mood. All stories in this book were previously published in on-line or print publications. The author is re-issuing the stories since an editor somewhere liked them enough to publish them in the first place.

Since the 1990s, the short story has re-emerged in the German-speaking world as a vibrant literary genre, serving as a medium for both literary experimentation and popular forms. Authors like Judith Hermann and Peter Stamm have had a significant impact on German-language literary culture and, in translation, on literary culture in the UK and USA. This volume analyzes German-language short-story writing in the twenty-first century, aiming to establish a framework for further research into individual authors as well as key themes and formal concerns. An introduction discusses theories of the short-story form and literary-aesthetic questions. A combination of thematic and author-focused chapters then discuss key developments in the contemporary German-language context, examining performance and performativity, Berlin and crime stories, and the openendness, fragmentation, liminality, and formal experimentations that characterize short stories in the twenty-first century. Together the chapters present the rich field of short-story writing in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, offering a variety of theoretical approaches to individual stories and collections, as well as exploring connections with storytelling, modernist short prose, and the novella. The volume concludes with a survey of broad trends, and three original translations exemplifying the breadth of contemporary German-language short-story writing.

A spine-tingling new collection of stories from the acclaimed author of Thrill Me and The Dark Net Benjamin Percy is a versatile and propulsive storyteller whose genre-busting novels and story collections have ranged from literary to thriller to postapocalyptic. In his essay collection, Thrill Me, he laid bare for readers how and why he channels disparate influences in his work. Now, in his first story collection since the acclaimed Refresh, Refresh, Percy brings his page-turning skills to bear in Suicide Woods, a potent brew of horror, crime, and weird happenings in the woods. A boy in his uncle’s care falls through the ice on a pond and emerges in a frozen, uncanny state. A group of people in therapy for suicidal ideation undergoes a drastic session in the woods with fatal consequences. A body found on a train and a blood-soaked carpet in an empty house are clues to a puzzling crime in a small town. And in a pulse-quickening novella, thrill seekers on a mapping expedition into the “Bermuda Triangle” of remote Alaska are stranded on a sinister island that seems to want them dead. In story after story, which have appeared in magazines ranging from the Virginia Quarterly Review and Orion Magazine to McSweeney’s and Ploughshares, Percy delivers haunting and chilling narratives that will have readers hanging on every word. A master class in suspense and horror, Suicide Woods is a dark, inventive collection packed to the gills with eerie, can’t-miss tales.

Collects fantasy, horror, fairy tales, and gothic stories chosen from the past year, including works by Ursula K. LeGuin, Neil Gaiman, and Bill Lewis.