​What does it mean to be human in a universe of shifting, sometimes terrifying realities? Eighteen stories from Jack Skillingstead’s second decade of publishing feature intense and surprising explorations of who we are, who we wish to be, and who we can’t be. In “The Whole Mess” a genius math professor solves a multiverse equation only to find himself pursued by ancient Masters across the many iterations of his could-have-been lives. “Straconia” gives us a Kafkaesque world where all the lost things go, including people who must first find themselves before they can find a way back home. “Tribute” looks at a post-NASA space race that goes nowhere—until an unlikely pair of marooned astronauts find each other and the future. ​Also included in this collection is “The Writing Life,” a self-reflection on memory, ambition, and imagination in the formation of one writer’s journey.

This dynamic collection of 27 stories offers a wealth of fantastical and horrifying settings. Life after death, digital personalities, alien invasion, and Lovecraftian horror. It includes “Life on the Preservation,” the basis for Skillingstead’s Philip K. Dick nominated novel of the same name. In the title story, a parapolice detective in hot pursuit of a serial killer receives help from a responsive memory module of the killer’s mother, but soon discovers that he might be falling in love with the module. Edgy and surreal, each tale reflects on familiar, emotional issues and complex relationships from new and imaginative angles.

From ROCKET SCIENTISTS WE WERE NOT… and Other Stories: “We were goofballs, and magnets for mischief. Pinheads, really. Boys who managed to screw up just about everything, everywhere: scouts, camp, school, dancing lessons, church, vacations, team sports, bowling, first dates, and summer jobs. You name it…” In these stories of misadventures from small town mid-20th century America, three lifelong buddies celebra

Set in the latter half of the fabulous 1940s, Pope’s Last Case and Other Stories details the adventures of tough, hardboiled, ex-Private Eye Vince Pope and his lovely, rich, socialite wife, Laura. Vince, a veteran of WW II, has hung up his PI shingle in favor of a life of leisure, but old pals and new troubles keep interfering. Written as an homage to Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, this collection of short stories deftly captures the mood and optimism of the country after the Second World War when men were men and the ladies were gorgeous. Join Vince and Laura as they confront gangsters, crimes of passion, crooked politicians, and even a serial killer in this thrill-packed collection of stories that also has the continuity of a novel. Stories included in this collection: Whodunit? A Girl’s Best Friend Between Two Worlds Lost Weekend No Promises Bitter Almonds Knockouts Pope’s Last Case

" The little girl came into her papa's study, as she always did Saturday morning before breakfast, and asked for a story. He tried to beg off that morning, for he was very busy, but she would not let him. So he began: “Well, once there was a little pig—” She put her hand over his mouth and stopped him at the word. She said she had heard little pig-stories till she was perfectly sick of them. “Well, what kind of story shall I tell, then?” “About Christmas. It's getting to be the season. It's past Thanksgiving already.” “It seems to me,” her papa argued, “that I've told as often about Christmas as I have about little pigs....."

BENNY THE ANTICHRIST and other stories The first ever collection of stories and vignettes from noted science fiction and fantasy storyteller Scott Ellis, including... Benny the Antichrist - He's the arch-arch-villain, the most made guy in this universe or any other. And he's looking to make a career change... The Reason of Sleep - How do you make your way in a world ruled by those who never sleep and those who live in dreams? Fae-Dar - There's this bar, see, full of gods, trolls, pixies and every other being out of myth and legend. And in walks an accountant... In the Shaft - two guys getting high and playing b-ball in a skyscraper elevator shaft, what could go wrong? Saccade - He has no illusions. That's his problem. Magic Phone - A lyrical conversation about guns, long distance and neutrinos The Deep Crew, who handles the psychic garbage of an entire city? A special kind of sanitation worker.

Short Story Collection

20 selections, all lovingly translated from the Yiddish, include among others "Progress in Kasrilevke," "Summer Romances," "Birth," "There's No Dead," "Three Widows," "Homesick," "On America," and "A Home Away from Home."

One of the most beloved and prolific writers of Yiddish literature, Sholom Aleichem (1859–1916) produced a wealth of wonderful stories that combine traditional Jewish oral humor with Western literary tradition. For years a living legend, he wrote enduring gems of fiction, eleven of which are included in this entertaining collection. The master storyteller brilliantly recaptures the joy and tribulations of Jewish life in such tales as "Geese," "At the Doctor's," "Three Widows," "The Passover Eve Vagabonds," "On America," "Someone to Envy," "Three Calendars," "The Ruined Passover," the title story, and two others. Introduced and ably translated by Curt Leviant, these tales sparkle with wit, wisdom, and a warm humanity that will appeal to a wide audience of readers, especially those with an interest in Jewish cultural life.

Benjamin Hale's fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling. In prose alternately stark, lush, and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the seven stories in this collection are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair. As in his acclaimed debut novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, the voices in these stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a U.S. congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippie in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place, carried by haunting, peculiar narratives, threads in the vast tapestry of American life. Weaving a pleasure in the absurd with an exploration of the extraordinary variety of the human condition and the sway our most private selves and hidden pasts hold over us, the stories in The Fat Artist reside in the unnerving intersections between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation.