What do you get when you mix a father with severe PTSD after barely surviving the Vietnam War, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant mother with anger issues and no filter whatsoever, rivers of booze, an awkward but academically gifted son, and a daughter with a hidden disability and a mile-wide rebellious streak? This is going to get messy. Then throw in a generous helping of domestic violence, some good old-fashioned small-town Southern homophobia, and the kind of dark family secret that makes h...

Black Shapes in a Darkened Room is a collection of witty, visceral, and darkly imaginative short fiction from the author of the novel The Concrete Sky. Revenge and eroticism, humor and despair, the supernatural and the everyday… Marshall Moore draws new contour lines and makes new connections in this nighttime map of the human soul."Moore's characters all wear bruise-colored glasses… a perspective which can be both odd and exhilarating" —Gemma Files.

Grace White and her brother Robert, overweight and affluent, are desperate to hang onto their respective love interests. Grace's husband Rich is bonking every woman he can talk into bed. Grace is willing to look beyond his affairs if she can just have her marriage back. Robert's law school fling James's interest diminished as Robert's waistline increased, but Robert has never moved on. The only solution? Losing those excess pounds… by any means necessary. And when James finds a supernatura...

A mysterious windfall upends Lena Haze’s almost-comfortable middle-class American life. Her husband Marcus has inherited some prime Hong Kong real estate, a building in Wan Chai – the bustling, gentrifying heart of the city. It comes with a catch, though: the building must not be sold. With financing from local investors, Lena begins overseeing renovations to convert it into a premier boutique hotel. Alone in Hong Kong and a recent arrival, Lena struggles with culture shock, business obsta...

Marshall Moore’s short fiction is propelled by a scathing wit and a dark imagination, and he does not shy away from taking readers down roads that are less traveled and rarely even mapped. In the title story, a con man cons a beguiling con artist… or does he? In “Grape Night,” a new arrival in Hong Kong enjoys the pleasures and terrors of a wine-tasting party with visiting gods from the Greek pantheon. In “Underground,” the minotaurs who secretly control urban life welcome a new member of ...

Our twenty-sixth issue is haunted, alcohol-soaked, possibly delusional, bathed in moonlight, wandering through forests and caverns, and inflamed by all-manner of approaching catastrophes.Featuring new short fiction, poetry, CNF, and translations from Alberto Ortiz De Zarate (translated by Whitni Battle), Darlene Eliot, Nara Vidal (translated by Emyr Humphreys), Luna Sicat-Cleto (translated by Bernard Capinpin), Suzana Stojanović, Siamak Vossoughi, Marshall Moore, Farhad Pirbal (tra...

Never Turn Away is a collection of Marshall Moore's work from the 10 years since his debut novel The Concrete Sky was published. Included are excerpts from that book and his second novel An Ideal for Living, short stories from the collections Black Shapes in a Darkened Room and The Infernal Republic, and the first chapter of his forthcoming novel Bitter Orange. In addition to telling a hell of a story, Moore can crack you up, piss you off, and completely horrify you. If you haven't checked...

"Showcases the extremes of one of the world's capitals. From ghost stories, to historical thrills, to underworld brutality . . . endlessly fascinating."— CrimeReadsAkashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. In Hong Kong Noir, fourteen of the city's fin...

Foreword by Jerry L. Wheeler.Things are not going well for Chad Sobran. His mother is gravely ill. His creditors are circling like sharks. And he's being stalked by his violent, homophobic, and obsessive older brother Martin. One night, while drunk at a party, Chad falls off a balcony and breaks his wrist. He comes to in a psych facility, under observation: Martin has convinced the emergency room doctors that the fall was a suicidal jump. In the hospital, Chad meets Jonathan Fairba...

**"Quirky and hilarious but also deep and heartfelt, The Henchperson’s Guide To Unionizing is an unforgettable and fantastic story about being human. I loved it!"—Sarah Beth Durst, New York Times bestselling author of The SpellshopThe stunning first edition paperback of The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing features stenciled edges depicting a character from the book—order while supplies last!**As the laboratory assistant to the br...

The first study to explore deeply and intimately the complex and multifaceted nature of creative writing practice, The Scholarship of Creative Writing and Practice offers a new route in scholarly inquiry for creative writing studies, probing beyond pedagogical methods (with which most of the field's scholarship is occupied) to explore the writing life as it is experienced by a wealth of international writer/academics.With academic creative writing programs...

Scholars of the African Americas are sometimes segregated from one another by region or period, by language, or by discipline. Bringing together essays on fashion, the visual arts, film, literature, and history, this volume shows how our understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas can be enriched by crossing disciplinary boundaries to recontextualize images, words, and thoughts as part of a much greater whole.Diaspora describes dispersion, but also the seeding, sowing, or...