Romance weaves its captivating spell. In lands of fantasy, can they face down forbidden attraction and dangerous odds to win love? ALIVIA & KROW Elven Princess Alivia Olvun always obeys her father’s wishes. But when she unexpectedly falls head over heels for a charismatic orc, her old-fashioned father doesn’t approve and the entire kingdom—as well as her heart—could be crushed. A TAIL OF LOVE Cora will do anything to hide the truth of her mermaid heritage. But when she’s paired with a mesmerizing human on a project, she could lose more than her heart. MAGICIANS Eleanor desperately needs a job. But when she’s hired to run a vampire’s magic shop, her affection for the dashing vampire owner and his beguiling demon best friend could spell war. If you adore charming happily-ever-afters in faraway lands, then open your heart and embrace these three emotional and spellbinding tales. Buy the Fantastical Fantasy Tales collection today!

Cora Goode has woken up in a fairytale world where she can understand what birds are saying, men ride horses and have fluffy feathers in their hats and furniture zigs, zags and whirls in miracles of construction. The problem is, she thinks she's in a dream, but she's actually taken the place of the parallel universe Cora. Without realizing it, our Cora does something that starts a centuries-old curse that will sweep the land if she gets captured by the evil Minerva. At this point, her dream world becomes a nightmare. Luckily, hot guy, fantasyland Noctorno is there to save her from the clutches of the grotesque vickrants sent by Minerva to capture her. Unfortunately, hot guy, fantasyland Noctorno doesn't like the Cora of his world all that much (to say the least) and he thinks our Cora is her. And no matter what our Cora says or does to try to convince him, he won't be convinced. But Cora needs Tor to keep her safe and guide her through this fantastical world as she hopes one day to wake up in her not-so-great apartment in her not-so-great life in her world. The problem is, the more time she spends with the gorgeous warrior Tor, the faster she falls in love with him.

Angels. Dragons. Fairies. Oh My! HOPE'S ANGEL Hope’s ordinary flight sends her to an extraordinary world. When she meets a mysterious angel who promises to help her return home, she’s smitten. Will she go back? Or will she risk it all to stay with her gallant guardian angel? THE LAST DRAGON RIDERS Vin and Idris are rival dragon riders sworn to protect their doomed village. Will their fiery competitiveness destroy everything they hold dear, or can they come together to save their small town and embrace true love? SAMUEL AND THE GOLDEN TREE FAIRY Samuel’s routine and mind-numbing life is killing him. But when he meets a beautiful fairy in a faraway land, can her tenderness help him see the goodness in life before it’s too late? If you love sweet happily-ever-afters, these fantasy fairy tales will knock you off your feet and catch you like Prince Charming! Buy your copy of Fantastical Fantasy Tales 2 today!

Lawrence Venuti, winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Global Humanities Translation Prize, among many other awards, has translated into English these Italian Gothic tales of obsessive love, mysterious phobias, and the hellish curse of everlasting life. In this collection of nine eerie stories, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti switches effortlessly between the macabre and the breezily comical. Set in nineteenth-century Italy, his characters court spirits and blend in with the undead: passionate romances filled with jealousy and devotion are fueled by magic elixirs. Time becomes fluid as characters travel between centuries, chasing affairs that never quite prosper. First published by Mercury House in 1992.

In twenty-six essays, Codrescu turns his skeptical, amused gaze to such topics as Plato's effect on American sex, the cultural meaning of Ed McMahon, baseball's literary underpinnings, his own conception in a Romanian darkroom, an cuisine under the Ceausescu dictatorship, as well as to larger subjects, including the suicide of communism, American culture and politics, and his adopted city of New Orleans.

A “brilliant” novel of Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious sixteenth-century Hungarian aristocrat who bathed in the blood of virgins (St. Petersburg Times). Turmoil reigns in post-Soviet Hungary when journalist Drake Bathory-Kereshtur returns from America to grapple with his family history. He’s haunted by the legacy of his ancestor, the notorious sixteenth-century Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who is said to have murdered more than 650 young virgins and bathed in their blood to preserve her youth. Interweaving past and present, The Blood Countess tells the stories of Elizabeth’s debauched and murderous reign and Drake’s fascination with the eternal clashes of faith and power, violence and beauty. Codrescu traces the captivating origins of the countess’s obsessions in tandem with the emerging political fervor of the reporter, building the narratives into an unforgettable, bloody crescendo. Taut and intense, The Blood Countess is a riveting novel that deftly straddles the genres of historical fiction, thriller, horror, and family drama.

A Hole in the Flag is both a chronicle of the changes that have taken place in Romania over the past year, and a personal portrait of a man and his emotional attachment to his mother country--a poetic look at joy and disappointment.

The fourteen fantastical stories in Magic For Unlucky Girls take the familiar tropes of fairytales and twist them into new and surprising shapes. These unlucky girls, struggling against a society that all too often oppresses them, are forced to navigate strange worlds as they try to survive. From carnivorous husbands to a bath of lemons to whirling basements that drive people mad, these stories are about the demons that lurk in the corners and the women who refuse to submit to them, instead fighting back—sometimes with their wit, sometimes with their beauty, and sometimes with shotguns in the dead of night.

This sweeping study of fantasy literature offers “new and often surprising readings of works both familiar and obscure. A fine critical work” (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts). Transcending arguments over the definition of fantasy literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre. Drawing on nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy, author Farah Mendlesohn identifies four categories—portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal—that arise out of the relationship of the protagonist to the fantasy world. Using these sets, Mendlesohn argues that the author's stylistic decisions are then shaped by the inescapably political demands of the category in which they choose to write. Each chapter covers at least twenty books in detail, ranging from nineteenth-century fantasy and horror to some of the best works in the contemporary field. Mendlesohn discusses works by more than one hundred authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Miéville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams, and many others.

A collection of twenty-two fairy tales by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, most translated into English for the first time, show the influence of German Romanticism, psychoanalysis, and Eastern religion on his development as an author.