*Featuring the 1st Place winner of the 2010 CMU literary prize (On Feeing the Silent Train) A surreal, deadpan collection of three short stories. Droughts & deadly lakes, strange visitors & mysterious solitude, Nikola Tesla & abandoned ant hills all play a role in these darkly humorous tales. Fans of stories by Murakami and Carver may find something to like.  Except- "The lack rain was killing me. I can't pinpoint exactly what I meant by that,...

This Prospective Guide isn’t here to hold your hand and walk you step-by-step through your adventure. Because that’s not adventure. No, this guide is here to offer some perspective. To share some tales. To offer a few opinions. To help you decide on which path to take. But the joy remains in the unknown.That’s the Prospective Perspective.Excerpt:"So you’re interested in a little northern adventure, eh? A little salt in your hair, jellyfish in your n...

This book gathers together nearly 200 of the most beautiful entries into four distinct chapters; Sun, Moon, Stars, Rain. Together with several new and exclusive poems that don't appear anywhere else, each chapter of I Wrote This For You focuses on a different facet of life, love, loss, beginnings and endings."I need you to understand something. I wrote this for you. I wrote this for you and only you. Everyone else who reads it, doesn't get it."

A groundbreaking meditation on sexual politics, love, and human tenacity from the world-renowned pioneer of feminist writing and prophetic author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood.When it first appeared in 1971, Margaret Atwood’s Power Politics startled readers with its vital dance of woman and man. It still startles today, and is just as iconoclastic as ever. These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here A...

River and Niko find their dad is missing, and they have no choice but to track him down. But when they discover the clues lead to a shady reptile dealer, they start to think they might have gotten in over their heads. A short story from Guys Read: Thriller, edited by Jon Scieszka.

If we had the chance to do things again differently, would we?Hard to say when the snow began falling. In the 2020s, there were rumors of global warming, of severe weather changes and it was not all rumor. Many of us could feel the changes. Warm and then cold. Rain and then the sunniest of days. Then all went bad, warmer and warmer each day.

A book of brilliant, adventurous stories from the award-winning Doug Dorst.With the publication of his debut novel, Alive in Necropolis, Doug Dorst was widely celebrated as one of the most creative, original literary voices of his generation-an heir to T.C. Boyle and Denis Johnson, a northern California Haruki Murakami. Now, in his second book, The Surf Guru, his full talent is on display, revealing an ability to explore worlds and capture charact...

The poems in Money Shot are forensic. Just as the money shot in porn is proof of the male orgasm, these poems explore questions of revelation and concealment. What is seen, what is hidden, and how do we know? Money Shot's investigation of these questions takes on a particular urgency because it occurs in the context of the suddenly revealed market manipulation and subsequent "great recession" of 2008–2009. In these poems, Rae Armantrout searches for new ways to organize information. What c...

In Just Saying, improbable and even untenable speakers are briefly constituted—only to disappear. The result is part carnival, part nightmare. A television pundit's rhetoric segues into an unusual succulent with writhing maroon tongues. When the world suddenly becomes legible, is that revelation or psychosis? In this book, the voice of the Lord and/or the voice of the security state can come from anyplace. The problem of identity becomes acute. The poems in Just Saying may be imagined as c...

This is the first book of a two-book series about grace, heartbreak, and breathing freely.I will tell youagain and again:in some small way,everything matters.

Body bags lined the slabs along the walls of the room. She gazed at each one and shivered. They made her feel uneasy. What sight would be revealed when she unzipped them? Sighing, she walked to the first one. With shaky hands she unzipped it slowly, the smell nauseating. She placed the palm of her hand on, what was left, of his forehead. She let out a loud gasp as images slammed into her head....With every body bag, a horrific tale is waiting to be told.What awaits you insi...

Crack addict Henry bumps into theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the two set out on a drug-fuelled adventure, contemplating the nature of science, addiction, and the restlessness of human life. “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” is part of Michael Christie’s critically acclaimed short-story collection, The Beggar’s Garden. It was nominated for a Journey Prize.The Beggar’s Garden follows a diverse group of characters, from a bank manager to a drug addict to a reti...