From the author of "Souls Raised from the Dead" and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award comes a collection of stories that showcases Betts at the top of her form: compassionate, witty, and unforgettable.

Hushpuppy lives with his Daddy and his ghost Mamma on the edge of the earth. Life is juicy and delicious until Hushpuppy’s dad gets sick, the world starts to fall apart, and prehistoric ice beasts begin to crawl out of the red Georgia clay. As Daddy gets weaker, the world becomes more fragile and nature itself begins to come unrendered. Hushpuppy and his friends must learn to care for each other while they battle the fearsome aurochs in this magical Southern fantasia that inspired the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Undead Ends is about how we imagine humanness and survival in the aftermath of disaster. This book frames modern British and American apocalypse films as sites of interpretive struggle. It asks what, exactly, is ending? Whose dreams of starting over take center stage, and why? And how do these films, sometimes in spite of themselves, make room to dream of new beginnings that don’t just reboot the world we know? Trimble argues that contemporary apocalypse films aren’t so much envisioning The End of the world as the end of a particular world; not The End of humanness but, rather, the end of Man. Through readings of The Road, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Children of Men, and Beasts of the Southern Wild, this book demonstrates that popular stories of apocalypse can trouble, rather than reproduce, Man’s story of humanness. With some creative re-reading, they can even unfold towards unexpected futures. Mainstream apocalypse films are, in short, an occasion to imagine a world After Man.

The author suggests that in this era following the postmodern we have entered a new, monist epoch in which aesthetically mediated belief replaces endless irony as the dominant force in culture. The book documents the "new monism" through an examination of popular films and novels such as American beauty, Life of Pi, and Middlesex as well as in the work of major architects and artists such as Sir Norman Foster, Andreas Gursky, and Vanessa Beecroft. --book cover.

James Wade, whose first two novels were praised as “rhapsodic” and “haunting,” delivers his most powerful work to date—a chilling parable about the impossible demands of hate and love, trauma and goodness, vividly set in the landscapes of Texas and Louisiana. Beasts of the Earth tells the story of Harlen LeBlanc, a dependable if quiet employee of the Carter Hills High School’s grounds department whose carefully maintained routine is overthrown by an act of violence. As the town searches for answers, LeBlanc strikes out on his own to exonerate a friend while drawing the eyes of the law to himself and fending off unwelcome voices that call for a sterner form of justice. Twenty years earlier, young Michael Fischer dreads the return of his father from prison. He spends his days stealing from trap lines in the Louisiana bayou to feed his fanatically religious mother and his cherished younger sister, Doreen. When his father eventually returns, an evil arrives in Michael’s life that sends him running from everything he has ever known. He is rescued by a dying poet and his lover, who extract from him a promise: to be a good man, whatever that may require. Beasts of the Earth deftly intertwines these stories, exploring themes of time, fate, and free will, to produce a revelatory conclusion that is both beautiful and heartbreaking.

Doris Betts returns to the forefront of American fiction with a novel of extraordinary power and poignancy. In a setting that recalls the small towns created by Faulkner, O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and other great Southern writers, Betts etches an indelible portrait of a family.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The #1 New York Times bestselling author of World War Z is back with “the Bigfoot thriller you didn’t know you needed in your life, and one of the greatest horror novels I’ve ever read” (Blake Crouch, author of Dark Matter and Recursion). FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD As the ash and chaos from Mount Rainier’s eruption swirled and finally settled, the story of the Greenloop massacre has passed unnoticed, unexamined . . . until now. The journals of resident Kate Holland, recovered from the town’s bloody wreckage, capture a tale too harrowing—and too earth-shattering in its implications—to be forgotten. In these pages, Max Brooks brings Kate’s extraordinary account to light for the first time, faithfully reproducing her words alongside his own extensive investigations into the massacre and the legendary beasts behind it. Kate’s is a tale of unexpected strength and resilience, of humanity’s defiance in the face of a terrible predator’s gaze, and, inevitably, of savagery and death. Yet it is also far more than that. Because if what Kate Holland saw in those days is real, then we must accept the impossible. We must accept that the creature known as Bigfoot walks among us—and that it is a beast of terrible strength and ferocity. Part survival narrative, part bloody horror tale, part scientific journey into the boundaries between truth and fiction, this is a Bigfoot story as only Max Brooks could chronicle it—and like none you’ve ever read before. Praise for Devolution “Delightful . . . [A] tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “The story is told in such a compelling manner that horror fans will want to believe and, perhaps, take the warning to heart.”—Booklist (starred review)

This complete collection of short fiction by Caroline Gordon captures the nuances of life in the American South, focusing on traditions, social habits and the land itself. Caroline Gordon(1895-1981) was the author of nine novels, two short story collections, and two works of criticism. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a winner of the O. Henry Award. Her Collected Stories was aNew York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Praise for Lincoln Michel: "Lincoln Michel is one of contemporary literary culture's greatest natural resources."—Justin Taylor, Vice Time passes unexpectedly or, perhaps, inexactly at the school. It's hard to remember what semester we are supposed to be in. Several of the clocks still operate, but they don't show the same time. The red bells, affixed in every room, erupt several times each day, yet the intervals between the disruptions wax and wane with an unknown algorithm. The windows are obscured by construction paper murals. Consequently, the sun rises and falls in complete ignorance of those of us attending the school. Many of us participated in the decorations in some lost point of childhood. A few of us still have dried glue under our fingernails. In the room I sit in now, the windows are covered with a glitter and glue reenactment of the colonization of Roanoke by Sir Walter Raleigh. Outside of the window, who knows? Children go to school long after all the teachers have disappeared, a man manages an apartment complex of attempted suicides, and a couple navigates their relationship in the midst of a zombie attack. In these short stories, we are the upright beasts, doing battle with our darker, weirder impulses as the world collapses around us. Lincoln Michel's work has appeared in BOMB, Oxford American, Tin House, the Believer, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. A founding editor of the literary magazine Gigantic, Michel also serves as an online editor for Electric Literature.

An examination of the relationship between faith in God and the concept of ecological care within a crisis of biodiversity