A comic book fan gets his wish; A woman's quest for the perfect man; Diseases sold over the Internet. The Literature of the Fantastic is on display in this volume of the Philippine Speculative Fiction series, featuring new takes on old tropes and fresh imaginings from Filipino authors.

A courtesan who secretly controls flame; A baby that eats soil; A professor tasked with proving the masculinity of a national hero; A quest to create a kite that reaches the stars. Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 is the first of several anthologies that showcases the rich variety of Philippine literature. Between these covers, you will find magic realism next to science fiction, traditional fantasy beside slipstream, and imaginary worlds rubbing shoulders with alternate Philippine history-demonstrating that the literature of the fantastic is alive and well in the Philippines.

Book is clean and tight. No writing in text. Like New

The Corrections meets We Need to Talk About Kevin in this harrowing multigenerational saga about a family harboring a serial killer in their midst in this “masterful novel” that “peers into the dark heart of America” (Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Independence Day) As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century. As the siblings leave home and fan across the country, each pursues a shard of the American dream. Myra serves as a prison nurse while raising her son, Ronan. Her middle sisters, Lexy and Fiona, find themselves on opposite sides of class and power. Alec, once an altar boy, is banished from the house and drifts into oblivion. As he becomes an increasingly alienated loner, his mother begins to receive postcards full of ominous portent. What they reveal, and what they require, will shatter a family and lead to devastating reckoning. Through one family’s pursuit of the American dream, Wolf at the Table explores our consistent proximity to violence and its effects over time. Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp writes with gorgeous acuity, cutting to the heart of each character as he reveals the devastating reality beneath the veneer of good society.

Harry Kollatz Junior’s debut novel. Carlisle Montgomery is a "six-foot-five, redheaded, pigtailed, gap-and-bucktoothed, nine-fingered, guitar playing freak.” Smoking, slugging whisky, arm wrestling, entangled with women and men and with her hard-touring group, the Live Wires, a "bluegrass band with a honky-tonk problem they’re not trying to fix" with their "purebred American Mongrel music." It’s the 1990s and the world is divided between Grunge and Garth Brooks and this story delves into the heart of what it means to be a musician and an artist in a changing world. "A dizzying, dazzling, physical novel, featuring an epic character sometimes great at love, sometimes great at being bad at it. Kollatz lays downright musical tracks in breathless, thumping prose, and Carlisle Montgomery, like its heroine, is damn near invincible." -- Susann Cokal, The Kingdom of Little Wounds, Mermaid Moon