Feeling a little adventurous? Learn how to incorporate bright, decadent fabrics into your quilts without overwhelming your design. Add fresh, striking dimension and texture to traditional or contemporary quilts with Lisa O’Neill’s original “sliver piecing” technique. It’s easier than it looks, so you can make your classic or modern quilt blocks really snap with colorful fabric splinters! Lisa shows you how a folded piece of narrow fabric—the sliver—is inserted into a tuck in the background fabric. Then the raw edges of the sliver are encased in the tuck, while the folded edge of the sliver is revealed on the fabric surface. You’ll learn how to get perfect points or super slim strips without fusing or paper-piecing. “Sounds complicated, but we are assured by the author that it is easy and has many applications both with traditional blocks and in creating your own innovative pieces. This is an interesting idea with lots of potential, especially for the quilter who enjoys a little freedom of expression.” —Fabrications Quilting for You Magazine

The debut short-story collection from the acclaimed author of The Chalk Man, hailed as “Britain’s female Stephen King” (Daily Mail), featuring eleven bone-chilling and mind-bending tales “All hail the queen of scream. A Sliver of Darkness is C. J. Tudor at her spine-tingling, nightmare-inducing best. Read it if you dare.”—Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End Time slips. Doomsday scenarios. Killer butterflies. C. J. Tudor’s novels are widely acclaimed for their dark, twisty suspense plots, but with A Sliver of Darkness, she pulls us even further into her dizzying imagination. In “The Lion at the Gate,” a strange piece of graffiti leads to a terrifying encounter for four school friends. In “Final Course,” the world has descended into darkness, but a group of old friends make time for one last dinner party. In “Runaway Blues,” thwarted love, revenge, and something very nasty stowed in a hat box converge. In “Gloria,” a strange girl at a service station endears herself to a coldhearted killer, but can a leopard really change its spots? And in “I’m Not Ted,” a case of mistaken identity has unforeseen fatal consequences. Riveting, macabre, and explosively original, A Sliver of Darkness is C. J. Tudor at her most wicked and uninhibited.

No matter if you are broken-hearted or happy in life and no matter where you are, the lessons taught in this book offer a unique taste of contentment, solace and joy. Slivers of Life pieces together the puzzle of felicity, in a simple yet magnetic manner.

The canon of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the foremost writers of dark and atmospheric fiction and poetry, offers readers haunted shores teeming with various erudite men brooding in the waning light over their feelings for unobtainable women. Yet, whether the tales or verses are grotesque or sinister, Poe's narrators are Outsiders, dealing with emotions that so many LGBT individuals feel: isolation and abandonment as well as loneliness and lost love. In the Shirley Jackson Award nominated Where Thy Dark Eye Glances, editor Steve Berman has assembled a range of tales that queer the prose and poetry of the Poe, the man himself, as well as dark and eerie stories about reading Poe's work.

I See More Clearly in the Dark chronicles the experiences of a narrator referred to only as “I” as she wanders a dystopian near-future drained of life-sustaining darkness—the kind that Japanese novelist Juni'chirō Tanizaki imagines "beneath trees that stand deep in the forest." This ethical and ecological desecration is lived out simultaneously by a parallel “I”: an amorphous, prehistoric or posthuman body, living and dreaming in a lush and tenebrous wilderness. The government has decided to wipe out national forests to install brilliant, homogenous resorts in which citizens are obliged to live under conditions of total illumination, the forest's expansive darkness remaining only as a memory and haunting source of imagination. When her lover is relocated as part of this Resort Plan, “I” is left to mourn a present emptied of intimacy or future from her home in the city of P ♦ (based loosely on Paris, Ville Lumière)—before escaping to the edge of the forest to seek out the darkness that might remain. “Potent, damp, fecundly poetic, tapping ancient crawlspaces and communal future logics both with lean, trancey prose … a treatise on darkness as urgent, vital recalibration for the late capitalist surveillance show and its suite of ever-expanding horrors.” —Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals “This beautiful book … exercises a delicate muscle weak from habitual disuse, the ability to see while eliding the snare of being constantly on view.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun “A parable on the tyranny of visibility … Holyoak’s vivid, evocative prose confronts readers with a radically embodied subjectivity.” —John Miller, artist and writer “Damning and redemptive within its symbiotic apocalypse … a relic waiting to be born.” —Jon Wagner, poet, theorist, translator

A horror writer’s death leaves his daughter haunted by voices in this short story by the New York Times–bestselling author of Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six. Pip Duke’s life has descended into chaos following the death of her father, a bestselling horror writer. She now hears voices all the time, saying troubling things like: Your father’s friends and family are after his money, or you shouldinherit everything. The voices also say she killed her dad, and the police are after her. To silence these disturbing thoughts, Pip checks herself into an inpatient therapy center. However, the place is far from calming. She can’t trust the staff, and the voices in her head continue to say terrible things. There are those who want you released—only so they can continue to profit off your father’s name. A different voice says some wish to claim her inheritance by getting her declared insane . . . If Pip hopes to ever know peace again, she must explore the depths of her psyche, sort through her memories, and unravel the secret that will be her key to freedom. Praise for Lisa Unger “Our most inventive suspense author.” —J.T. Ellison, New York Times–bestselling author of Her Dark Lies “The premiere thriller writer.” —Megan Abbott, bestselling author of The Turnout “Lisa Unger writes with compassion and deep psychological insights.” —Luanne Rice, New York Times–bestselling author of The Shadow Box

The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain, an artist whose music, words, and images continue to move millions of fans worldwide. As the first academic study that provides a literary analysis of Cobain’s creative writings, Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin’s The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain’s Masochistic and Melancholic Persona approaches the journals and songs crafted by Nirvana’s iconic front man from the perspective of cultural theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics. Drawing on critiques and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory by feminist, queer, and antiracist scholars, Saint-Aubin considers the literary means by which Cobain creates the persona of a young, white, heterosexual man who expresses masochistic and melancholic behaviors. On the one hand, this individual welcomes pain and humiliation as atonement for unpardonable sins; on the other, he experiences a profound sense of loss and grief, seeking death as the ultimate act of pleasure. The first-person narrators and characters that populate Cobain’s texts underscore the political and aesthetic repercussions of his art. Cobain’s distinctive version of grunge, understood as a subculture, a literary genre, and a cultural practice, represents a specific performance of race and gender, one that facilitates an understanding of the self as part of a larger social order. Saint-Aubin approaches Cobain’s writings independently of the artist’s biography, positioning these texts within the tradition of postmodern representations of masculinity in twentieth-century American fiction, while also suggesting connections to European Romantic traditions from the nineteenth century that postulate a relation between melancholy (or depression) and creativity. In turn, through Saint-Aubin’s elegant analysis, Cobain’s creative writings illuminate contradictions and inconsistencies within psychoanalytic theory itself concerning the intersection of masculinity, masochism, melancholy, and the death drive. By foregrounding Cobain’s ability to challenge coextensive links between gender, sexuality, and race, The Pleasures of Death reveals how the cultural politics and aesthetics of this tragic icon’s works align with feminist strategies, invite queer readings, and perform antiracist critiques of American culture.

Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that "to care for anything is to invite disaster." Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each character's thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment. Compared to the works of James Joyce in its use of indigenous language and portrayal of consciousness, The Bone People captures the soul of New Zealand. After twenty years, it continues to astonish and enrich readers around the world.