A Ghostly Fantasy Story (and more to come.....) 12 year-old Simon de Bruin suddenly finds himself dead, in a college full of mad ghosts, and pursued by the evil sea-witch Halbizia. A ghost story like no other, packed with colourful characters (Fi a Pirate Princess) and delicious humour. Read it if you dare...

A look inside the world of forensics examines the use of human cadavers in a wide range of endeavors, including research into new surgical procedures, space exploration, and a Tennessee human decay research facility.

Beloved, best-selling science writer Mary Roach’s “acutely entertaining, morbidly fascinating” (Susan Adams, Forbes) classic, now with a new epilogue. For two thousand years, cadavers – some willingly, some unwittingly – have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. “Delightful—though never disrespectful” (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should we do after we die? “This quirky, funny read offers perspective and insight about life, death and the medical profession. . . . You can close this book with an appreciation of the miracle that the human body really is.” —Tara Parker-Pope, Wall Street Journal “Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting.” —Entertainment Weekly

For fans of Karen Russell or Hannah Tinti, a debut collection of stories inspired by science, medicine, and the power of healing with a magical twist.

True Tales of the ridiculous, the silly, and the just plain weird cases doctors face—lampooning the medical bureaucracy that makes practicing medicine and getting medical care such a headache. Doctors have a sick sense of humor. This is the deep, dark, and hilarious secret of the medical profession revealed by the irreverent Dr. Douglas Farrago in his popular satirical magazine, Placebo Journal—affectionately known by its thousands of fanatic readers as “Mad magazine for doctors” and called, by U.S. News.com, “raunchy, adolescent, and very funny.” Now, in The Placebo Chronicles, Dr. Farrago has compiled the best of the most outrageous and uproarious true stories to come out of the ERs and examination rooms of doctors all over the country. Submitted by actual physicians, these are the stories they tell each other at cocktail parties and in doctors’ lounges, trading sidesplitting and truly unusual tales of their most embarrassing medical moments, the grossest things they’ve ever seen in medicine, their favorite Munchausen patients, and much more, including “The X-Ray Files”—mind-boggling anecdotes and images of the oddest foreign objects doctors have removed from patients. Not for the faint of heart, the humor in The Placebo Chronicles is brutally funny—just what the doctor ordered to guard against the ill effects of an M.D.’s worst enemies: the Medical Axis of Evil, a.k.a. drug companies, HMOs, and malpractice insurers. Fully illustrated with fake advertisements—for pseudopharmaceuticals like OxyCotton Candy and Indifferex (the mediocre antidepressant)—this refreshingly honest collection invites doctors and patients alike to share the laughter, a liberal dose of the very best medicine.

“Alisa Kwitney has an understanding of human foibles and follies and a light, intelligent touch that marks her as an author to watch and enjoy.” —#1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman Frankenstein meets Marissa Meyer’s Cinder in this tightly paced historical thriller packed with secrets, betrayal and steamy romance. When Elizabeth Lavenza enrolled at Ingold as its first female medical student, she knew she wouldn’t have an easy time. From class demands to being an outsider among her male cohorts, she’ll have to go above and beyond to prove herself. So when she stumbles across what appears to be a faulty Bio-Mechanical—one of the mechanized cadavers created to service the school—she jumps at the chance to fix it and get ahead in the program. Only this Bio-Mechanical isn’t like the others. This one seems to have thoughts, feelings…and self-awareness. Soon Elizabeth realizes that it is Victor Frankenstein—a former student who died under mysterious circumstances. Suddenly Elizabeth finds herself entwined in his dark secrets, ones he might have been murdered to keep buried. “Fiendishly clever and gorgeously romantic. Alisa Kwitney spins an electrifying tale of beautiful monsters and mad scientists that will keep your nerves tingling and your heart racing long into the night.” —Carol Goodman, New York Times bestselling author of The Metropolitans “Fans of Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles will enjoy this.” —Kirkus “In this inventive Victorian-era steampunk tale…Kwitney blends elements of murder mystery, classic science fiction, and gothic romance, all cleverly framed around a Beauty and the Beast take on Frankenstein.” —Booklist “A dark, thrilling and ingenious riff on the Frankenstein legend.” —M.R. Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts “Strikingly written and impeccably conjured.” —Gwenda Bond, author of the Lois Lane series “It swept me right away.” —Delia Sherman, author of The Great Detective

“You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.” —Epictetus “Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will follow.” —Matthew 24:28 Body Brokers is an audacious, disturbing, and compellingly written investigative exposé of the lucrative business of procuring, buying, and selling human cadavers and body parts. Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, these “body brokers” capitalize on the myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever: commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies and training courses; and U.S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000. As journalist Annie Cheney found while reporting on this subject over the course of three years, when there’s that much money to be made with no federal regulation, there are all sorts of shady (and fascinating) characters who are willing to employ questionable practices—from deception and outright theft—to acquire, market and distribute human bodies and parts. In Michigan and New York she discovers funeral directors who buy corpses from medical schools and supply the parts to surgical equipment companies and associations of surgeons. In California, she meets a crematorium owner who sold the body parts of people he was supposed to cremate, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits. In Florida, she attends a medical conference in a luxury hotel, where fresh torsos are delivered in Igloo coolers and displayed on gurneys in a room normally used for banquets. “That torso that you’re living in right now is just flesh and bones to me. To me, it’s a product,” says the New Jersey-based broker presiding over the torsos. Tracing the origins of body brokering from the “resurrectionists” of the nineteenth century to the entrepreneurs of today, Cheney chronicles how demand for cadavers has long driven unscrupulous funeral home, crematorium and medical school personnel to treat human bodies as commodities. Gripping, often chilling, and sure to cause a reexamination of the American way of death, Body Brokers is both a captivating work of first-person reportage and a surprising inside look at a little-known aspect of the “death care” world.