Throughout Minnesota, from Austin to International Falls, people flock every year to more festivals--county fairs, arts and craft shows, ice-fishing contests, and music festivals--than you can shake a stick at. Most come for the food and fun, but a few festival-goers have more devious intentions in mind.In this diverse collection of short stories, members of Twin Cities Sisters in Crime reveal the chilly underside of dog-sled races, gang rivalries at a Cinco de Mayo festivals, erra...

"An outstanding debut...If you're a fan of Jack Reacher or Lisbeth Salander, you are gonna love Nikki Griffin." — New York Times bestselling author Douglas Preston"Action packed and razor sharp - Jack Reacher would love Nikki Griffin." —Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Past TenseNikki Griffin isn't your typical private investigator. In her office above her booksto...

Nightmares come in many forms. Some rend the veil of sleep with heart-stopping madness. Others defy sanity to leave a helpless corner of your mind twitching for release. Sometimes, hours after waking, a nightmare drifts across your memory, tainting your day with wisps of discomfort. NIGHTMARES UNHINGED reveals horror in all its mutable forms—abject to absurd—through twenty tales of terror.Contributors include Mario Acevedo, Edward Bryant, Dustin Carpenter, Sean Eads, Keith Ferrell,...

In shadowy back alleys, crumbling brownstones, and gleaming skyscrapers, cities harbor unique forms of terror. Here lie malicious ghosts, cursed buildings, malignant deities, and personal demons of every kind. Twenty of today's most talented writers bend their skills toward the darkness, creating brand new tales guaranteed to keep you awake at night. Especially if you live in the dark cities. Far worse than mythical creatures such as vampires and werewolves, these are horrors that lurk in ...

The New York Times #1 Bestselling Series**“Exceptionally entertaining...an offbeat sense of humor and a feisty sense of justice.”**—San Francisco ChronicleThe first 15 books in Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone mysteries are now available in one collection! From the sensational blockbuster A is for Alibi to the thrilling case in O is for Outlaw, you won't want to miss a page!

The acclaimed author "assembles a stellar collection of twenty stories that create their own worlds in twenty pages or less" ( USA Today ).Tom Perrotta explains in his introduction that "all of [these stories] took me somewhere I didn't expect to go, and jolted me into that state of heightened awareness and emotional receptivity that's one of the great rewards of reading good fiction."In Nathan Englander s What We ...

A Recommended Summer Read fromVanity Fair * New York Post * BBCThe riveting story of a woman convicted of a brutal crime, the prison psychologist who recognizes her as his high-school crush—and the charged reunion that sets off an astonishing chain of events with dangerous consequences for bothAs an inmate psychologist at a state prison, Frank Lundquist has had his fair share of surprises. But nothing could ...

Crime is common ground for the twenty-one women writers in this extraordinary collection of contemporary mystery fiction, introduced and edited by Sara ParetskyThe voices here include professional crime solvers who take you from the mean streets of V.I. Warshawski’s Chicago in a case of music and murder . . . to the California freeway where Kinsey Millhone's beloved VW skids into a shooting . . . to the gang-held turf of Sharon McCone’s San Francisco, where an eye ...

"This beautiful, complex debut collection assembles some of Nebula winner Pinsker’s best stories into a twisting journey that is by turns wild, melancholic, and unsettling." ― Publishers Weekly (starred review)Pinsker has shot like a star across the firmament with Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea.In this collection, Pinsker weaves music, memory, technology, history, mystery, love, loss, and even multiple selves on generation s...

Chicken Soup for the Soul’s first-ever humor collection, and the timing is perfect. This is storytelling at its funniest.If laughter is the best medicine, then this book is your prescription. Turn off the news and spend a few days not following current events. Instead, return to the basics—humanity’s ability to laugh at itself.Maybe you should even do a news cleanse for a few days! Hide under the covers and read these stories instead. Or read a chapter a da...

Fifty remarkable short stories from a range of contemporary fiction authors including Junot Diaz, Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and more, selected from a survey of more than five hundred English professors, short story writers, and novelists.Contributors include Russell Banks, Donald Barthelme, Rick Bass, Richard Bausch, Charles Baxter, Amy Bloom, T.C. Boyle, Kevin Brockmeier, Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Peter Ho Davies, Janet Desaulniers, Junot...

Despite all his disaster planning, and the bomb shelter he built under his shed, Mario Scietto was not prepared for the apocalypse that hit Monument, Colorado. A series of escalating disasters, beginning with a monster hailstorm and ending with a terrible chemical weapons spill that affects people differently depending on blood type, has torn the world as he knows it apart. "What Mario Says" is set in the world of Emmy Laybourne's Monument 14.This short story was acquired ...