Phantom limbs, porous realities, and strange reflections shifting in black glass. The thirteen stories included in this decade-spanning collection explore how memory affects place and place memory, the traumas that haunt bodies like ghosts, and the desperation of needing to be seen and understood by others. Only in pulling back the bloody veil of this world may we be so blessed to see things as they really are—and not as we wish them to be. David Peak builds stories that are intricate structures, impossible monuments to human darkness. To read them is to feel something tap against a secret part of us, a hidden bone that refuses to be forgotten. —Nadia Bulkin, author of She Said Destroy David Peak writes like a black-winged emissary from the Void, and Eyes in the Dust and Other Stories is a travelogue behind the walls, beneath the surface, and through the worm-tunnels that pierce a dying world’s heart. From fever dreams and haunted houses to fissures in reality and the emptiness beyond, no one else captures the aspects of the abyss like David Peak. —Gordon B. White, author of As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions

This is a collection of stories by a master of science fiction adventure, with added dimensions of speculation and cold, hard realism.

About the Book A COLLECTION OF MACABRE STORIES FROM INDU MENON, WHO IS CONSIDERED TO BE KAMALA DAS’S SUCCESSOR A Gond tribal activist is kidnapped by the goons of a giant mining company forcibly acquiring land in his village. In order to defame him, they shoot a porn film with him and a young prostitute who turns out to be his childhood sweetheart; a cobbler skins his daughter’s hanging corpse to make the special ‘Cinderella shoes’ he had once promised her; an LTTE female tiger accused of plotting the assassination of an Indian leader ruminates on the deaths of a Sri Lankan Tamil separatist leader and a French priest who tried to assassinate Louis XV on the same date centuries apart; a nurse with bovine features stalks a female patient whose live-in partner confronts the lesbian cow and is assaulted by her. Indu Menon’s stories are not for the fainthearted. At the centre of all that blood, gore and broken bones lies the inveterate spirit of wronged women, who refuse to go down without a fight. Her stories live unvarnished life truths. With the imagination of a poet, in lyrical and inventive prose, her narratives startle the reader by refusing to draw the line between lived and imagined terrains. Many consider Indu Menon a successor to Kamala Das, having inherited the same insouciance and outlook. This collection may well help us imagine what Das would have written if she were alive today.

The first collection in English of an endlessly surprising, master storyteller Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila’s stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted—you’ll finish each one gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest—Dávila’s debut collection in English—you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.

Somewhere in the depths within us all we possess good and evil, honorable and shameful, ugly and beautiful. J.M. Tresaugue's Shadows Beyond the Flames and Other Stories proves just that. Within each of us we have the power to do great good, and in the blink of an eye we can turn into a depraved, immoral human being. You find variations of these human characteristics within the contents of stories such as The Manual and Sometimes Always. However, within Graphic Burn we are given a glimpse of what being a better person truly means. There are stories that grip us, stories that shake us to our cores, and stories that inspire. The stories contained within this volume touch on a little of everything; from the macabre, to the hopeful, but mainly the darkness within us. You won't be disappointed with the variety of science fiction, horror, fantasy, strange, unusual, and revenge thrown in for good measure in Shadows Beyond the Flames and Other Stories.

In the eighteen stories in this retrospective of his best short fiction, Dale Short shows why he is one of the best prose stylists of his generation and why he deserves a break-out success. Short's writing has been hailed by Wally Lamb as "simultaneously mythical and modern; a wild ride," and Dennis Covington has called him "wise and compassionate, a major Southern writer." He writes here from many perspectives--male, female, first-person, third-person, grieving widow, newly divorced dad, jailed redneck, riverman laid up with heart trouble, conjure woman--and in every story the voice is as true as that of a child and as clear as fresh ice. The marvel of Short's prose is that the writing is so good it disappears, leaving the reader surrounded only by the story, which resonates long after the last word is absorbed. The other remarkable thing is how Short can go from comedy to tragedy within a single paragraph, sometimes within a single sentence, and then back again. His timelines here range from the Civil War to the near future, and the locales vary from a Kentucky mining town to the Gulf Coast of Mexico to the constellation Orion--all in all, a rare feast for the imagination. Stories that have appeared before only in magazines, this collection charts more than two decades of the growth and exploration of an author who won the first Redbook Fiction Prize at the age of twenty-seven, and whose acclaimed novel The Shining Shining Path was called by reviewers "Southern magical realism" and praised by Publishers Weekly as "boldly imaginative; a provocative spiritual odyssey." Publishers Weekly added, "Short takes risks in a single paragraph that many writers never attempt in an entire novel."

Erendira accidentally burns down her grandmother's house and is forced to pay her back with the money she earns from prostitution. However, it seems Erendira has a more appropriate way of repaying her. The book's main themes are death, power, love and duty.

‘An admirable collection. Each story has its subtle nuances of narrative and language which established a quite distinct character. A most impressive work of fiction’ The Times Graham Swift’s taut prose style, natural gift for characterization and tight grasp of the details and complexities of real life combine beautifully in these concentrated and enigmatic stories to offer an incisive exposé of the illusion, subterfuge and enigma of everyday interaction. Focusing on the combative relationships between men and women – between a mismatched couple; an ageing doctor and his hypochondriacal patient; a teenage refugee swept up in the conflict of an oppressively sentimental father and his rebellious son – these spare, Kafkaesque stories are a microcosm for all human cruelty and need. ‘Graham Swift . . . has a wide range; he can be delicately sensitive or outrageously funny. He is a born storyteller’ Daily Telegraph ‘He has style and he has range, and quiet strengths that are continuously and effortlessly displayed. Graham Swift should be read by everyone with an interest in the art of the short story’ Evening Standard

Siraj-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal was neither coward nor afraid of wars. He routed the British army from Calcutta within four days. After that could he defend the State of Bengal in spite of his so many enemies because of his cruelty and profligacy? What caused his downfall? Was it profligacy or cruelty & who and how they conspired against him to take their revenge was a quite intrigue? It is an interesting historical story which one must read along with other interesting and inspiring stories.