Weird Tales 359 presents interviews with Laird Barron and Richard Kirk, features on books and weird music, and short stories by Stephen Graham Jones, Evan J. Peterson, Tom Underberg, Leena Likitalo, Joel Lane, and Conrad Williams -- plus poetry and the usual features.

Darkness, both literal and psychological, holds its own unique fascination. Despite our fears, or perhaps because of them, readers have always been drawn to tales of death, terror, madness, and the supernatural, and no more so than today when a wildly imaginative new generation of dark dreamers is carrying on in the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft and King, crafting exquisitely disturbing literary nightmares that gaze without flinching into the abyss—and linger in the mind long after. Multiple award-winning editor Ellen Datlow knows the darkest corners of fiction and poetry better than most. Once again, she has braved the haunted landscape of modern horror to seek out the most chilling new works by both legendary masters of the genre and fresh young talents. Here are twisted hungers and obsessions, human and otherwise, along with an unsettling variety of spine-tingling fears and fantasies. The cutting edge of horror has never cut deeper than in this comprehensive showcase of the very best the field has to offer. Enter at your own risk.

'A poet of misfits, outsiders and the forsaken, his empathy for their suffering ever poignant.' – Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual 'Joel Lane understood and expertly exploited the connection between exterior and interior landscapes like no other.' – Paul Tremblay, author of The Pallbearer's Club

From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon. The Weird is the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Originally published in 1986. This book is a unique compilation of biographical sketches which covers editors, publishers, photographers, bureau chiefs, columnists, commentators, cartoonists, and artists. Alphabetical entries provide overviews of the lives and personalities of a good cross-section of important people. There is also a short essay on awards and prize winners. Everything is efficiently indexed. This is a supremely useful reference tool for those in mass media and popular culture fields.

The Shadow Kingdom and other weird tales Robert Ervin Howard was an American pulp writer and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of ""a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror."" He is well known for having created the character Conan the Barbarian. Meet Solomon Kane, Kull of Atlantis, Bran Mak Morn, Black Vulmea, James Allison and others in Howards weird tales of fantasy and horror. In these classics Howard spins tales of unrelenting terror, the legacy of one of the world's great masters of the macabre.

The Strange Tales of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are exquisite and amusing miniatures that are regarded as the pinnacle of classical Chinese fiction. With their elegant prose, witty wordplay and subtle charm, the 104 stories in this selection reveal a world in which nothing is as it seems. Here a Taoist monk conjures up a magical pear tree, a scholar recounts his previous incarnations, a woman out-foxes the fox-spirit that possesses her, a child bride gives birth to a thimble-sized baby, a ghostly city appears out of nowhere and a heartless daughter-in-law is turned into a pig. In his tales of humans coupling with shape-shifting spirits, bizarre phenomena, haunted buildings and enchanted objects, Pu Songling pushes back the boundaries of human experience and enlightens as he entertains.