Meetings, partings, loves and losses in rural France are dissected with compassion. The late wedding guest isn't your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isn't going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in summer and the sequins found between the pages of a borrowed novel will make your fortune. Pagano's stories weave together the mad, the mysterious and the dispossessed of a rural French community with honesty and humour. A superb, cumulative collection from a unique French voice. Why Peirene chose to publish this book: This is a spellbinding web of stories about people on the periphery. Pagano makes rural France her subject matter. She invokes the closeness of a local community and the links between the inhabitants' lives. But then she reminds us how little we know of each other. 'Devastatingly beautiful.' Le Soir, Belgium 'A treasure hunt that you can follow from title to title...fine-tipped drawings of little bits of the world that attach themselves to each other imperceptibly.' Xavier Houssin, Le Monde 'Pagano succeeds because of the range of her insight and the skill with which she shifts register: from wistfulness to blunt force, or from fantasy to naturalism.' Chris Power, The Guardian 'Endlessly beautiful and poignant.' Le Monde books of the year 2012 'With animal writing, Emmanuelle Pagano invites herself to the side of rebels and solitaries.' Marine Landrot, Télérama

Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marías's daring novel in three parts culminates triumphantly in this much-anticipated final volume.

A girl begins to question why she and her parents wear monstrous masks they have never, ever taken off, though she may have been better off not knowing. An insomniac spends every night watched by a dark, silent figure in the bedroom, and while this figure disappears by morning, he seems to be growing stronger and bolder. It turns out that when things go missing, spidery little creatures with the missions of disarray and madness, gathering and harvesting are to blame; humanity has deeply wronged them, and between their antics they’ve been planning a much more sinister revenge. These and several other horror stories await in Set Sytes’s new collection, which includes The Violet Dark, an unsettling, dreamy (or nightmare-y, rather) novella revolving around an addictive drink.

Final novel in EC Blake's dystopian fantasy trilogy, The Masks of Aygrima The Masks of Aygrima is set in a land where people are forced to wear spell-imbued Masks that reveal any traitorous thoughts they have about their ruler, the Autarch. Mara Holdfast is a young woman gifted with the ability to see and use all the colors of magic. Two other people share this talent: the Autarch, who draws upon the very life-force of his subjects to fuel his existence and retain his control over the kingdom; and the legendary Lady of Pain and Fire, the only person who has ever truly challenged the Autarch’s despotic reign. After a devastating battle that takes a dreadful toll on both the rebel unMasked Army and the forces of Prince Chell, their ally from across the sea, Mara and her fellow survivors have no one to turn to for help but the Lady of Pain and Fire. As the Lady leads them to her haven beyond the mountain borders of the kingdom, Mara feels that she has found the one person who truly understands her, a mentor who can teach her to control and use her power for the greater good. Together, they may be able to at last free Agryma from the Autarch’s rule. Living within the Lady’s castle, cut off from her friends in the village far below, Mara immerses herself in her training. Still, she can’t entirely escape from hearing dark hints about the Lady, rumors that the Lady may, in her own way, be as ruthless as the Autarch himself. Yet it is not until they begin their campaign against the Autarch that Mara discovers where the real danger lies. Driven by the Lady’s thirst for revenge, will Mara and all her friends fall victim in a duel to the death between two masters of magic?

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist, a powerful short story collection exploring the Haitian diaspora experience. In Ayiti, a married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A young woman procures a voodoo love potion to ensnare a childhood classmate. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood. Roxane Gay is an award-winning literary voice praised for her fearless and vivid prose, and her debut collection Ayiti exemplifies the raw talent that made her “one of the voices of our age” (National Post, Canada). Praise for Ayiti “Highly dimensioned characters and unforgettable moments. . . . Dismantling the glib misconceptions of her complex ancestral home, Gay cuts and thrills. Readers will find her powerful first book difficult to put down.” —Booklist “The themes explored in Gay’s nonfiction, such as the transactional nature of violence and the ways in which stereotypes of poverty add another layer of dehumanization, are just as potent here. Even her more lyrical mode is filtered through a keen sense of the lost promise of one country and the blinkered privilege of the other. It’s Gay’s unflinching directness—the sense that her characters are in the room with you, telling it like it is—that makes her irresistible.” —Vogue “A set of brief, tart stories mostly set amid the Haitian-American community and circling around themes of violation, abuse, and heartbreak . . . This book set the tone that still characterizes much of Gay’s writing: clean, unaffected, allowing the (often furious) emotions to rise naturally out of calm, declarative sentences. That gives her briefest stories a punch even when they come in at two pages or fewer, sketching out the challenges of assimilation in terms of accents, meals, or ‘What You Need to Know About a Haitian Woman’. . . . This debut amply contains the righteous energy that drives all her work.” —Kirkus Reviews

In Shadow Man, Cody McFadyen took the suspense thriller where other writers have feared to tread. He introduced readers to a heroine every bit as dark and edgy as the serial killers she hunts: Special Agent Smoky Barrett. Now, in his latest novel, McFadyen brings Agent Barrett back to track down a killer who breaks all the rules. “I want to talk to Smoky Barrett or I’ll kill myself.” The girl is sixteen, at the scene of a grisly triple homicide, and has a gun to her head. She claims “The Stranger” killed her adoptive family, that he’s been following her all her life, killing everyone she ever loved, and that no one believes her. No one has. Until now. Special Agent Smoky Barrett is head of the violent crimes unit in Los Angeles, the part of the FBI reserved for tracking down the worst of the worst. Her team has been handpicked from among the nation’s elite law enforcement specialists and they are as obsessed and relentless as the psychos they hunt; they’ll have to be to deal with this case. For another vicious double homicide reveals a killer embarked on a dark crusade of trauma and death: an “artist” who’s molding sixteen-year-old Sarah into the perfect victim—and the ultimate weapon. But Smoky Barrett has another, more personal reason for catching The Stranger—an adopted daughter and a new life that are worth protecting at any cost. This time Smoky is going to have to put it all on the line. Because The Stranger is all too real, all too close, and all too relentless. And when he finally shows his face, if she’s not ready to confront her worst fear, Smoky won’ t have time to do anything but die.

Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marías’s daring novel in three parts culminates triumphantly in this much-anticipated final volume. Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and and ever deeper forays into the mysteries of consciousness, brings to a stunning finale Marías’s three-part Your Face Tomorrow. Already this novel has been acclaimed “exquisite“ (Publishers Weekly), “gorgeous” (Kirkus), and “outstanding: another work of urgent originality” (London Independent). Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes our hero Jaime Deza—hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception—back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss, with a fluency on the subject of death that could make a stone weep.

Traditional horror has often portrayed female characters in direct relation to their sexual role according to men, such as the lascivious victim or innocent heroine; even vampy, powerful female villains, such as the classic noir “spider women,” use their sexual prowess to seduce and overwhelm married men. Fist of the Spider Woman is a revelatory anthology of horror stories by queer and transgressive women and others that disrupts reality as queer women know it, instilling both fear and arousal while turning traditional horror iconography on its head. In this collection, horror (including gothic, noir, and speculative writing) is defined as that which both titillates and terrorizes, forcing readers to confront who they are. Kristya Dunnion's "Homeland" reveals the horrors that lurk on your average night in a lesbian bar; Elizabeth Bachinsky’s “Postulation on the Violent Works of the Marquis de Sade” is a response to Sade from a feminist (yet kinky) perspective; and Amber Dawn’s “Here Lies the Last Lesbian Rental” is a paranormal fantasia about urban gentrification, set in a house rented by lesbians on the eve that it is sold to new owners. Subversive, witty, sexy—and scary—Fist of the Spider Woman poses two questions: “What do queer women fear the most?” and “What do queer women desire the most?” Amber Dawn is a writer, performance artist, and radical sex/gender activist who co-edited With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn.

Guided by the goddess of beauty, an ugly nobleman ventures to the Utter East in search of a cure for his facial deformities Atreus of Erlkazar has always been hidden from his powerful family's enemies, concealed behind the hideous mask of his own face. The result of a wayward spell that distorted his features, Atreus’ ugliness is a curse he has borne since he was just a child—and one he has spent his entire life trying to break. He is driven to find a way past his own flesh, into a soul torn between destiny and love. In an ironic twist of fate, he becomes an acolyte of Sune, the goddess of beauty. Under her command, he embarks on an impossible mission to the mysterious country of Langdarma, where the magical waters of the Fountain of Infinite Grace await him. Deep in these ancient valleys of the enigmatic Utter East, Atreus will finally look into . . . the faces of deception.