For the first time in their lives, nineteen year-old Nur De Dernberg and her younger sister Deirdre are leaving Seychelles, Africa. They've come to Boston for a year, but not to party with the college kids – they're here to learn English. Nur, trapped by her inability to speak the language and her sister's inability to speak in anything other than clipped wisecracks, finds herself in a strange country with nobody to talk to; she is dreadfully, existentially alone.Until, that is, sh...

AND NOW, a few paragraphs to describe this collection, which features fifteen short stories and two novellas. These are stories of many different genres, covering a whole range of tones and time periods. There's a little girl learning to deal with a new member of the household, and there's a guy who's having a very hard time killing his coworker. There are stories set at the height of the Persian Empire, in the trenches of World War I, and on a far-off planet called SYL-33. There's slapsti...

"Fidget's Mill was a town full of secrets, populated by people who had no idea how to keep them."It is a time of revolution in the American colonies, an epoch in which men of exceptional talent and ambition agitate to reshape the course of human events. Their names will pass into legend: Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Hamilton. Madison. Monroe.Denton Hedges is there too, and he's trying his best.In the inauspicious year of 1767, he volunteers to visit a no-account Ma...

JAILBREAK! - Get this: Samuzzo D'Amato just busted out of Sing Sing. You know Sing Sing, right? That big famous prison? Real maximum security type deal. Anyway, forget about Sing Sing already, on accounta D'Amato's outta there.Only don't forget about it so fast. See, D'Amato's lawyer cooked up a way to bust him out legally. Whole bunch of loopholes, I guess, since you better believe D'Amato did all those crimes they said he did. Plus some others. Point is, the wheels of ain't-so-ju...

Nobody in Manhattan is having a particularly swell seventh of August this year. It's way too hot, the subways are running late...and then, just before nine in the morning, a heavily-armed, well-organized militia descends upon the city with guns, explosives, and a seemingly indiscriminate bloodlust. Not a swell day to be a New Yorker, to say the least...but an especially un-swell day to be Jairzinho Navias.That's not just because Jairzinho's having problems in his personal life (he ...

Far in the future, war is fought entirely through simulations. No land is ever taken, no lives are ever lost. Like a game no one wins or loses. To be honest, it's basically just peace with games. It's pretty boring. Sorry for starting this off saying the galaxy was at war.But you see, not too long ago the galaxy was at proper war. DORAGHA, that period was called. Terrible weapons were constructed to fight this war. Atrocities were commonplace. It all became too costly. In lives los...

A man loses his shoes on an airplane. A woman gets trapped in a bathroom by a ghost (maybe). A mob enforcer startles easily. A young actor wants his face on the wall of a pizza parlor. What do they all have in common? Nothing. This is a short story collection. That would be a super weird novel, if those were all one thing.Some of these stories have appeared in publications such as Suspense Magazine and Storgy. Others, including the novella "Winner Winner", are brand new. In between...

ACTION! - Samuzzo D'Amato might be the biggest bruiser on the boardwalk, but he's got a secret, a real Achilles heel - he's some kinda jumpy about loud noises! Not the sorta thing a tough guy wants people knowing. Nobody's gonna hire muscle maybe might jump outta his skin if a dog barks too loud, see what I'm sayin?SUSPENSE! - So anyway, one day he's on this job, and it turns out the fellas he's workin with heard about how Samuzzo gooses easy. Oh, and one more thing - the job's an ...

There is a building in the middle of Manhattan. Well, there are lots of buildings in the middle of Manhattan. But there's this one in particular.It's sixty-two stories tall. One of the biggest on its block. Yet nobody ever goes in, and nobody ever comes out. Which makes sense; all of the doors and windows are sealed shut.No one seems to know what the building is, or who owns it. In every sense save the physical, the building doesn't exist. No one seems bothered by this. Unt...

Karen McCorkal, a mid-level programmer at family-run corporation/sovereign nation Westmore Industries, has created a program capable of programming other programs. This renders human programmers redundant, and Westmore is nothing if not efficient.So they fire her.And, oops, sort of erase her identity in the process.She does not take it well.Now a non-person, Karen's got all the time in the world to devote to her newest hobby: tearing Westmore - man, company an...

The law was clear enough: children born into slavery after July 4th, 1799 would be free by young adulthood. Those born before, however, were doomed to a life of servitude. Of being owned.Shed a tear for Aggy, then, the owned woman whose long labor produces a twin on either side of that deadline; Ambrose, the firstborn, delivered late on July 3rd, and his sister Patience, birthed bright and early on the 4th. Though mere minutes separate their respective arrivals, Patience and Ambros...

In the era of hair metal, all the good times are happening down on the Sunset Strip. Which is why that's the first place Delmer goes, after moving across the country to chase his dreams of rock stardom.Too bad about that killer stalking around the Strip. The one who takes a particular interest in the hard-partying metalheads. Sure, there's a detective named Isley on the case, but she's coming off of a few things too. The sorts of things she used to buy down there on Sunset. Which d...