From A.A. Balaskovits, author of Magic for Unlucky Girls, this new collection of unusual, fabulist fiction leads you down strange paths for dark encounters with familiar fairy tales, odd people from history, and weirdos who may be living right next door. Among the characters in these bizarre stories, a starving beauty finds a beast who can save her village, a man eats everything in sight but is never full, a woman gives birth to bloody animal parts, and a daughter is forced to dance every night to the reenactment of her father's murder. These tales invite you to spend time with people who, in the maddest of circumstances, chew their way forward. With elements of psychological horror, sly humor, and the fantastic, these stories will burrow under your skin, haunt your dreams, and make you wonder what worlds lie just beyond that tiny hole in the wall.

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.

From the acclaimed author of Safe as Houses and The Abode of Bliss, ten wondrous tales of yesterday, today, and tomorrow--of our familiar world and others. An American teenager meets Adonis on a sailing cruise off the coast of Turkey. A merchant of the Silk Road encounters an odd dog--and a brother--from another world. An old lady on a distant planet attempts to help her great-grandson grow up in a world that will soon forget women ever existed. A Massachusetts boy refuses an offer to visit fairyland. Another American teenager on vacation encounters three fallen angels and is transformed. Alex Jeffers's first collection of fantastical stories is a treacherous box of delights.

Your favorite Queer as Folk characters take you along on their youthful journey of sexual self-discovery in a new line of books based on the record-breaking Showtime series hailed as "fiercely realistic" by The New York Times. USA Today raves, "There's never been anything else like it on TV." Never Tear Us Apart They've been to the prom and signed the yearbooks. Now Brian and Michael are apart for the first time since grade school. Brian's soccer scholarship takes him to Carnegie-Mellon where he finds that he's a fresh -- if not a small -- fish in a big new pond. Meanwhile Michael, Deb, and Uncle Vic embark on the annual Novotny family vacation in the Poconos, where Michael makes some "new" friends. When the trip is cut short because Vic doesn't feel well, Michael learns that his uncle has AIDS and that their family must come together more closely than ever. Soon classes begin for both boys, and new passions and adventures put their friendship to the test. Lindsay, a pretty, talented art major at Carnegie-Mellon, is quickly becoming a fixture in Brian's life, and Emmett, whom Michael met at Babylon, becomes a good friend outside the club too. As sex becomes more than experimentation for both, Brian and Michael struggle with jealousy, homophobia, the realities of HIV, and finding a place of their own as they find their way back to each other.

"Raw, dark, and surprisingly funny...there's so much precision and verve in these stories; I was captivated the entire way through." - Carmen Maria Machado The misfits and mavericks in this award-winning story collection shuffle their feet to a soundtrack of rumble strips and twangy AM radio. Here, the underdog is king and the outsiders are storming the gates. A plucky daughter defends her father by swinging a paint can like a mace, teenage renegades sow terror on the highway by throwing cups of root beer, and an out-of-work lawyer steamrolls his way through a recreational sports league. For these loners and screwballs, the path to redemption is often twisted, heartfelt, and humorous. These stories will take you from the karaoke bar to the natural foods co-op, from a city-league broomball game to a broken-down camper in the woods. In lush and lucid prose, Holt explores emotional landscapes that reflect the vast terrain of America's heartland. Woven throughout is a series of flash-fiction parables, which narrate a journey both exotic and existential. So pull up a seat among this motley crew of barflies, road workers, and art school dropouts, and you might later find yourself retelling their stories as your own.

In this book, the reader is immediately plunged into the horrific mind of one of the most brutally damaged and murderous killers the unnamed Detective Sergeant has ever faced: a deranged axe-murderer. But why the victim--the gentle Dora Suarez--was murdered at all becomes the Sergeant's obsession, especially as he digs deeper into a diary she left behind and learns she was already dying of AIDS. So why kill her?

A public restroom even more horrific than most, with a stained toilet that can swallow a man whole, sending him to a sewage-filled hell. A riverbank lined with swaying mops given faces and philosophies. A secondary school that seems to waver in and out of reality not only in dreams, but also upon wakeful visitation. An isolated grotto, home to trolls and the posthumous shadow form of Elvis Presley. These are all settings of peculiar, often unnerving events in How Not to Kill Yourself author Set Sytes’s collection of short bizarro fiction. It features the longer story “The School of Necromancy,” in which a school buried deep in the Catacombs of York teaches subjects much less innocent than math or language arts.