Thirteen years after a police officer searching a suspected child molester's home spilled a vial of silver pollen, America is still struggling with how to recognize its sentient fruit population. Charles is just a normal guy working at a doughnut shop until an apple and a banana shoot each other in a mafia dispute, leaving a briefcase full of foreign currency and a specimen bucket at the corner booth. When Charles turns the wiseguys into doughnuts and steals their luggage, hoping for a better life for himself and his kiwi fruit girlfriend, he finds himself in the middle of a mafia war. As his girlfriend travels the DC metro area, selling off the contents of the bucket, Charles finds he is the target of a seasoned hit-tomato, who happens to be the biggest Michael Jackson fan who ever lived.

Meet Manny. He's your average shut-in with a penchant for late night television and looting local fountains for coins. With eight locks on his door and newspapers covering his windows, he's a more than a bit paranoid, too. His wasn't a great life, but it was comfortable-at least it was until the morning he awoke with an egg between his legs. But what might have been a curse becomes a charm as this unlikely event leads him to all night diner, where he finds inedible pie, undrinkable coffee, and the girl of his dreams. But can this unexpected chance at love survive after the egg cracks and time itself turns against him, dead-set on rerouting history and putting a shovel to the face of the one person who could bring real and lasting change to Manny's world?

"On the surface, Thompson looks like any other blue-collar New Jersey town. But beneath the working-class exterior lies a bizarro world of fetishistic crime, sleazy motels, and squid. In these three bizarro-noir novellas, the reader is thrown into a world of murderers, drugs made from squid parts, deformed gun-toting veterans, and a mischievous apocolyptic donkey." -- Back cover

A group of fanatical religious tourists from the future travel back in time to meet Adam and Eve. Unfortunately, their time ship crashes, killing the majority of the crew (including the leprechauns) and leaving them stranded in this strange shark-infested land. Among the survivors are: Ernest who has the ability to turn people into mannequins, Ira who wields a razor-edged bible for a weapon, Wayne a giant wizard head with fat lizard legs, Donkey the hunchback halfwit, Anton the birdman, Rattlesnake Doctor, Ancestor, and Sturgeonwolf. This cult of deranged priests soon discover that Eden is a far more surreal and dangerous place than they could ever have imagined. It is going to take everything they've got in order to survive long enough to find another way home--Publisher's description.

In the not-too-distant future, the United States is a nuclear wasteland, and the remaining inhabitants are at the mercy of gangs, marauders, mutants, and the last millionaire in the country, Mr. Silver. Now five drivers must compete in a life-or-death race to the eastern seaboard where the ancient city of R'lyeh has emerged, bringing either their salvation or doom. Standing in their way are nuclear mutants, cannibals, a tooth-tornado, and other post-apocalyptic terrors.

No one under seventeen should be admitted without a parent or guardian to these “fun-filled” illustrations of twisted movie moments from a beloved animator (Parade). Let’s face it, reading sucks . . . but movies are fun! In this grown-up parody of a children’s picture book, Pixar writer and artist Josh Cooley presents the most hilariously inappropriate—that is, the best—scenes from contemporary classic films in an illustrated, for-early-readers style. Terrifying, sexy, and awesome scenes from such favorite films as Alien, Rosemary’s Baby, Fargo, Basic Instinct, Seven, The Silence of the Lambs, Apocalypse Now, The Shining, and many more are playfully illustrated and captioned to make reading fun and exciting for kids who never grew up. A sly celebration of the things fans love most about these legendary films (and movies in general), this is one book that probably should not be read at bedtime.

"Keith watched a version of himself being dissected, the body parts being used along with those of Lincoln and Booth in order to make some sort of mechanized assassin-victim hybrid. It would spend eternity annihilating itself, finding new ways to explode, puncture and penetrate its own body parts." Moonshine smuggling in New Jersey unleashes a Civil War hangover of squid parts, car crashes, stove pipe hats, urethral insertion fetishism, and a hankering for pancakes. King Scratch, a nightmare from the mind that birthed Piecemeal June and Fistful of Feet. "With King Scratch Jordan Krall has delivered a unique and twisted tale that brilliantly exudes the limitless imagination of the author and, in my opinion, elevates Krall to the upper echelon of the Bizarro lit scene." Kevin Woods, director of Bath, Survival, and Wise Guys VS Zombies "Krall has quite a flair for outrage as an art form." Edward Lee, author of The Big Head, Goon and Brides of the Impaler

"If this is your first taste of Howard, I envy you."--From the Introduction by George R.R. Martin Acclaimed cult author Waldrop''s stories are sophisticated, magical recombinations of the stuff our pop-culture dreams are made of. Open this book and encounter jazz singers, robotic cartoon ducks, nosferatu, angry gorillas, and, of course, the dodo. The first paperback (and twentieth anniversary) edition of a landmark debut collection. Waldrop''s capacious, encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes, baseball players, world wars, long-dead film stars, Mexican wrestlers, pulp serials, and fairy tales is put to good use in these sophisticated re-combinations of oddball television shows, radio plays, scientific expeditions, extinct species, knock-knock jokes, and questions like these: * What if the dodo wasn''t extinct after all? * What if sumo wrestlers could defeat their opponents with the power of the mind? * What if Izaak Walton and John Bunyan went fishing for Leviathan in the Slough of Despond? Never published in paperback, long out of print, and extremely collectible, Howard Who? was Waldrop''s seminal debut collection. If you haven''t read Waldrop before, you''re in for a treat. "The best Waldrops tend to mix the humorous and wistful.... Italo Calvino once said that he was "known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself." Much the same could be said of Howard Waldrop. You never know what he''ll come up with next, but somehow it''s always a Waldrop story. Read the work of this wonderful writer, a man who has devoted his life to his art -- and to fishing." --Michael Dirda, Washington Post "A charming collection." --Los Angeles Times "Back in print after so many years, Howard Who? remains a terrific collection of short stories. There is nobody else alive writing stories as magnificently strange, deliriously inventive, and utterly wonderful as Howard Waldrop." --Metrobeat Table of Contents Introduction by George R. R. Martin. The Ugly Chickens Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen Ike at the Mike Dr. Hudson''s Secret Gorilla . . . the World, as we Know''t Green Brother Mary Margaret Road-Grader "Save A Place in the Lifeboat for Me Horror, We Got Man-Mountain Gentian God''s Hooks Heirs of the Perisphere Praise for Howard Waldrop: "Clever, humorous, idiosyncratic, oddball, personal, wild, and crazy." --Library Journal "Wise and funny." --Publishers Weekly "An authentic master of gonzo sf and fantasy." --Booklist "Erudite and gonzo." --Science Fiction Weekly "Waldrop subtly mutates the past, extrapolating the changes into some of the most insightful, and frequently amusing, stories being written today, in or out of the science fiction genre." --The Houston Post/Sun "The man''s a national treasure!" --Locus "The resident Weird Mind of his generation, he writes like a honkytonk angel." --Washington Post Book World About the Author: Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His highly original books include Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, and Going Home Again. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette "The Ugly Chickens."

A witty, personal and groundbreaking inquiry into the nature, treatment and definition of human pain

A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew--people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater--down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness. Unfortunately the only people suitable for long-term employment in these experimental power stations are crazy, some of them in unpleasant ways. How many of them can survive, or will be allowed to survive, while worldwide disaster approaches from below? Starfish, the first installment in Peter Watts' Rifters Trilogy At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.