We started the fires at dusk.The opening to the title story of this collection by Michael Jasper is a distillation of the mix of danger, disquiet, and determination that runs through all sixteen stories.Whether it’s the return of a prodigal son to the family farm ("The Chicken Project"), the young high school teacher conscripted into refereeing a basketball game with his new school’s rivals from the nearby reservation ("Home Court Advantage"), or the impossible fea...

In a near future filled with violence from terrorists and suicide cultists, the Wannoshay aliens crash-land on the Great Plains of America and Canada.Less than a dozen years from now, over thirty black ships containing the aliens the world will come to know as the Wannoshay arrive on the frozen earth of the Great Plains of America and Canada.Over the course of a year, the aliens attempt to become part of American society, only to be banished to internment camps when they ar...

Magic: more contagious than the common cold…Kelley Strickland and her twin brother Jeroan accidentally step into an ancient battle between a power-hungry Sorcerer—who wants to rid the world of what he calls “renegade” magic-users—and a good Sorcerer who can barely remember his own name.Kelley soon learns that her new-found way of using magic just might save her adopted city, her brother, and her new, magically infected friends.Or it could doom them all....

Sometimes those who can't be found just might not be lost…In the remote mountain town of Boone, North Carolina, Hank “Hanky J” Johnson and Bim Mayer find people that nobody else can. All thanks to Hanky J’s brains and Bim’s ability to psychically connect to other people.Their skills get put to the test when a group of elderly people go missing. All of whom used to teach at nearby Appalachian State University.And each missing person shares a connect...

Trajectories in Architecture: Plan, Sensation, Temporality presents a compelling examination of underlying issues in late-twentieth-century architecture. Three formal preoccupations and conceptual orientations are used as guiding threads or trajectories. These three trajectories – the plan as conceptual device, a logic of sensation, and temporalities – serve to organise individual chapters in the central sections of the book and provide a new lens to the study of period work, reve...

This bookexamines the central decades of Peter Eisenman’s work through a formal and thematic analysis of key architectural projects and writings, revealing underlying characteristics and arguing for their productive continuity and transformative role.The book explores Eisenman’s approach to architectural form generation and thinking. It does this through a thematic and formal analysis of projects and writings from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Following an introductory chapter ad...

They’re not gonna grow up without a fight.1974. Ozzy’s going to be a father. Augie’s got a huge house to build. Just a few years out of high school, neither of them want to work this hard. They’d rather live outside the law and stick it to the Man, man.Over the course of this turbulent year, lifelong friends Ozzy and Augie have no choice but to face adulthood.It might take more than a little “hoodoo voodoo”, a surly pregnant wife, a few ghosts, str...

Try not to listen to those who whisper...Tommy Roling has a great freelance job, a healthy daughter, and a new city to call home. Plus he’s finally comfortable with the fact that he’s a werewolf. So why isn’t he happy?Could it be his daughter’s “terrible twos,” which seem even more terrible because she chooses to stay in her wolf body most of the time? Or is it his growing distance from his family and Nina, his on-again, off-again girlfriend?Those questions...

Stories of where the normal meets the strange...From the travails of a water-carrying alien on a harsh world.... to the loss of a child by a much-too-young father touched by the were gene. From the plight of a young immigrant painter struggling to get by... to the story of a young man who has to decide whether to help when he comes across a car in the ditch and a family fighting for survival in that wrecked vehicle...And more...Twenty-one stories about the ...

Blow the silver whistle, ring the tarnished bell…Bartolamus the Sorcerer is dying. His days of adventuring and forging new words of magic are firmly behind him. Or so it seems.As his trembling apprentice approaches his bedside with a silver whistle in his right hand and a tarnished bell in his left, the ancient wizard shares his history.He also reveals his plans for one last quest: an attempt to re-open the doors to the barred and mysterious City of All-Wor...

Magic: It can show up in the strangest places…An old man sleeping in a cardboard box in snowy Chicago holds the secret of sorcery in his head.But thanks to the damage done to him by using magic decades ago, he doesn’t realize it. Most days he can’t even remember his own name.When two teens try to jump him in an alley, the magic Words come back to him at last, and he “infects” the kids with magic.And soon Chicago has a wild epidemic of magic on its h...

An unlikely team of misfit players, and the coach fighting to hold them all together...The All Nations Team tells the story of the first fully integrated, "post-racial" baseball team, very loosely based on an actual team that played in the years before World War I.In his first season as head coach of the All Nations team, former slave George Grunion must contend with racist crowds, flagging team morale, his own loneliness, and even the ghost of the previou...