Ancient giants in a desolate land; a mysterious death in Academe; an ambush in a spooky glade; and surprising moral conundrums: facts and fabrications weave together unforgettably in this charming “mongrel mixture” of tales.

Paul Kennedy Mueller is the author of The Pandemonium Bar & Grill (and Other Stories), Pretty Bad Stories (An Unfortunate Collection of Troublesome Tales), Mostly True Tales (and Otherwise Preposterous Accounts), The Satisfaction of Revenge and Other Poems, and other works of fiction, journalism, and poetry. An Army brat and Vietnam veteran, he now works as a senior public information officer for the University of California at San Diego.

The poems in this collection travel from Thessaloniki to the orchards of the moon, and discover landscapes that surprise, enchant, challenge and amuse the literate reader.

These "troublesome tales" take place in territories where the familiar and the expected quickly evolve into quirky, humorous, and sometimes dark variations. From a John Doe who discovers a scrap of extraterrestrial clothing to a Godfrey Daniel doomed to inhabit an assortment of hells, the characters and landscapes of this "unfortunate collection" will challenge and charm the adventurous reader....

Two old women were boarders in the home of R. Anthony Joseph when he was a child in New Orleans, Lousiana. He later learned that they were witches. Some of the things he saw as a child he thought were normal. The occult, psychic development, aura reading, tarot cards, magick and life on the fringes of reality give us a glimpse into this San Jose businessman's world.

A gas-station attendant waits wistfully for a mysterious young woman in a Mustang; astronauts find a promising, but curiously empty, planet; a modern corporation enjoys an eye-opening transformation; and an Irish lass gains enduring fame in post-colonial Pennsylvania: These and other "preposterous accounts" await readers who appreciate a wry angle and a wicked wit in this eclectic collection of stories....

Collection of short stories with a bizarre mix of characters from sales reps to fawning academics. The author is also a playwright, novelist, artist and journalist, with weekly columns in the Melbourne THerald-Sun' and TThe Melbourne Times'.

“You either love Andrea Camilleri or you haven’t read him yet. Each novel in this wholly addictive, entirely magical series, set in Sicily and starring a detective unlike any other in crime fiction, blasts the brain like a shot of pure oxygen. Aglow with local color, packed with flint-dry wit, as fresh and clean as Mediterranean seafood — altogether transporting. Long live Camilleri, and long live Montalbano.” A.J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window Twenty-one short stories spanning the beloved Inspector Montalbano's career Inspector Montalbano has charmed readers in nineteen popular novels, and now in Montalbano’s First Case and Other Stories, Andrea Camilleri has selected twenty-one short stories, written with his trademark wit and humor, that follow Italy’s famous detective through highlight cases of his career. From the title story, featuring a young deputy Montalbano newly assigned to Vigàta, to “Montalbano Says No,” in which the inspector makes a late-night call to Camilleri himself to refuse an outlandish case, this collection is an essential addition to any Inspector Montalbano fan’s bookshelf and a wonderful way to introduce readers to the internationally bestselling series.