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Crashby J.G. Ballard
In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways" experiments with erotic atrocities among crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens toward his own demise in an intentionally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor.
Empire of the Sun
Concrete Island
The Kindness of Women
by Karen Joy Fowler
This remarkable collection by the award-winning Karen Joy Fowler includes thirteen of the author's most acclaimed stories, including "Praxis," about a theater where the real and unreal collide; "The Poplar Street Study," a darkly comic account of an alien invasion; and "The Gate of Ghosts," a poignant story of a child's journey to a strange and deadly world.
"Fowler has carved her own niche — this is the quality of story that awards exist to honor."
— Science Fiction Review
"A stunning first collection, with some real treasures."
— Ursula Le Guin
Sarah Canary
The
Kin of Ata are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant
The kin of Ata live only for the dream. Their work, their art, their love are designed in and by their dreams, and their only aim is to dream higher dreams. Into the world of Ata comes a desperate man who is first subdued and then led on the spiritual journey that, sooner or later, all of us must make. This book itself is such a journey. It has been called a love story, science fiction, Jungian myth and utopian allegory. It takes place in the tradition of fine visionary novels.
Ella Price's Journal
The Garden of Eros
Killing Wonder
Sleeping
in Flame by Jonathan Carroll
Ricocheting between the haunted chic of Vienna and the mystical crassness of Los Angeles, between the world of desire and the landscape of dreams, Sleeping in Flame is a hypnotic literary novel with irresistible elements of fantasy and magic.
It is the story of Walker Easterling, who saves a woman's life only to place her in infinitely greater danger by falling in love with her. It's the story of Maris York, an androgynous beauty who arouses incinerating passion in the men around her. It is a novel populated by a shaman with a fondness for sandwiches, an autistic Adonis, and tiny man as powerful and ravenously jealous as the God of the Old Testament.
The Land of Laughs
Bones of the Moon
The Heidelberg Cylinder
The
Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski
Enter The Muse Asylum and watch the lives of three recent college graduates become entangled by romantic and literary obsessions, and by their search to uncover the identity of the great American writer Horace Jacob Little: Jake Burnett, a young reporter and reverent fan of the reclusive author, determined to make a name for himself by unmasking the legend; Andrew Wallace, a disturbed genius and inmate of the Overlook Psychiatric Institute for artists, who is convinced that Horace Jacob Little is plotting against him; and Lara Knowles, the girl they both love.
The three try to break through the shadows and tricks of the enigmatic author, only to find themselves caught in a twisted game of reflections and reversals, where each seems to be pursuing another — for love, for success, or for some far more sinister purpose.
A
Barrel of Laughs,A Vale of Tears
by Jules Feiffer
"A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears scores 10 out of 10 on the demanding Pinkwater Scale... For certain people, I think it may become a special, personal book — they'll take along when they go to college and resort to it as comfort reading. As adults, they'll share it with best friends and children. Not a bad fate for a book."
— Daniel Pinkwater
"Jules Feiffer follows The Man in the Ceiling with another winner, this time a rollicking medieval farce that pokes fun at medieval farces — and just about everything else — while managing at the same time to be hilarious, engaging, and thoroughly entertaining."
— Family Life
The Man in the Ceiling
Werewolves
in Their Youth by Michael Chabon
Nine stunning short stories from the Pulitzer Prize Winner for Kavalier and Clay that take us into the hearts and lives of young people and people in mid-life caught in emotional moments of turning point or change. Brilliant, frightening, funny, these stories are shot through with Chabon's unique vision and uncanny understanding of our mysteries and nightmares, hilarity and pain.
Wonder Boys
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Kavalier and Clay
The
Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy by Tim Burton
Witty and macabre all at once, this cast of gruesomely sympathetic children are misunderstood outcasts who struggle to find love and belonging in their cruel, cruel worlds. Lovingly lurid illustrations evoke both the sweetness and tragedy of these dark yet simple beings — hopeful, hapless heroes who appeal to the ugly outsider in all of us, and let's us laugh at a world we have long left behind (mostly, anyway).
Nightmare Before Christmas
A
Dozen Black Roses by Nancy A. Collins
Deadtown. A place the damned call home. An urban quagmire greedily devouring lost souls, its bloodstained streets haunted by the living dead. In an ancient war between two gluttonous vampires, Deadtown is both the battleground and buffet table.
But all that's about to change. Into the carnage walks Sonja Blue, a vampire and vampire hunter, hell-bent on sending Deadtown's ruling fiends to the graves they've eluded for centuries. And if the rest of Deadtown gets in her way, well... she'll make damn sure the place lives up to its name.
by Lindsey Davis
After six months in wild Germania, imperial gumshoe Marcus Didius Falco is back in Rome sweet Rome. But his apartment has been ransacked. And although he desperately needs 400,000 sesterces in order to marry his aristocratic love, Helena, his only client is his mother, who insists that he find out whether the scandalous claims against his dead brother, Festus, are true.
Then the chief tarnisher of Festu's good name is murdered, and Marcus becomes the prime suspect. Someone is definitely fiddling with the scales of justice. The more Marcus hunts for the thread that will lead him out of his doom-laden labyrinth of misery and mystery, the less his life is worth. Except, as seems likely, as a meal for the Emperor's hungry lions...
Silver Pigs
Shadows in Bronze
Venus in Copper
Wasp
Factory by Iain Banks
Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least:
"Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my younger brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody in years, and don't intend to ever again.
It was just a stage I was going through."
"One of the top 100 novels of the century."
— The Independent
"A literary equivalent of the nastiest brand of juvenile delinquency."
— Times Literary Supplement
"The Wasp Factory is a first novel not only of tremendous promise, but also of achievement, a minor masterpiece perhaps."
— Punch
Consider Phlebas
Look to Windward
The
Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly
The Dollmaker was the name of the serial killer who had stalked Los Angeles ruthlessly, leaving grisly calling cards on the faces of his female victims. Now, with a single faultless shot, Detective Harry Bosch thinks he has ended the city's nightmare.
But the dead man's widow is suing Harry and the LAPD for killing the wrong man — an accusation that rings terrifyingly true when a new victim is discovered with the Dollmaker's macabre signature.
So for the second time, Harry must hunt down a death-dealer who is very much alive, before he strikes again. It's a blood-tracked quest that will take Harry from the hard edges of the LA night to the last place he ever wanted to go — the darkness of his own heart.
The Black Echo
Trunk Music
The Last Coyote
From
the Dust Returned
by Ray Bradbury
The Eternal Family has lived for centuries in a house
of legend and mystery in upper Illinois — and they are not
like other Midwesterners. Rarely encountered in daylight hours, their
children are curious and wild; their old ones have survived since before
the Sphinx first sank its paws deep in Egyptian sands. And some sleep
in beds with lids.
I Sing the Body Electric
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Deus
Irae by Philip K. Dick
and Roger Zelazny
What chance has Tibor McMasters — one limbless heretic — against the awesome power of the legendary Deus Irae, the wrathful entity behind World War III? Commissioned to paint the deity's likeness, Tibor must first find him. And to do that he must travel across the nightmare landscape of the post-holocaust world, braving its terrifying mutations while his Christian companion acts on orders to sabotage his mission.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
edited by Sara Nickles
Who wants to walk the straight and narrow all the time? Certainly not the writers featured in this raucous anthology. Laced with illicit tales and juicy confessions, Lying, Cheating, and Stealing will remind you just how good it feels to finally get what you want — in bed, in the bank, and just in the nick of time.
Some of the featured writers are: Woody Allen, Ann Landers, Groucho Marx, Jon Carroll, and Mark Twain.
Drinking, Smoking,
& Screwing
The
Between by Tananarive Due
When Hilton was a boy, his aged grandmother saved him from drowning by pulling him out of a treacherous ocean current, sacrificing her life for his. Now, thirty years later, Hilton begins to think his borrowed time is running out. His wife, the only elected African-American judge in Dade County, Florida, has begun receiving hate mail from a man she once prosecuted, and Hilton's sleep is plagued by nightmares more horrible than any he has ever experienced. As he battles both the psychotic stalking his family and the unseen enemy that haunts his sleep, Hilton's sense of reality is slipping away. Shocking and utterly convincing,
The Between is a novel about a man desperately trying to hold on to the people and life he loves but may have already lost, and it holds readers suspended between the real and the surreal until the final moment of chilling resolution.
Rubicon
Beach by Steve Erickson
Haunted by his past, a political prisoner under police surveillance wanders a ravaged, flooded Los Angeles that floats free of time, where strange music bubbles up through the cracks in the asphalt. There he sights a mysterious young woman in the act of murder, and his pursuit of her leads him deep into a world of betrayed dreams, decayed meanings, and abandoned passions — beyond America and past the Twentieth Century, to the far shores of Rubicon Beach. Infused with a highly charged poetry, this is the novel that established Steve Erickson as one of the most original and visionary American writers of his generation.
"Steve Erickson has that rare and luminous gift for reporting back from the nocturnal side of reality."
— Thomas Pynchon
Days Between Stations
Tours of the Black Clock
Arc d'X
I
Was a Teenage Fairy by Francesca Lia Block
In this mesmerizing postmodern fairy tale, critically acclaimed author Francesca Lia Block distills elements of fantasy and realism into an intoxicating blend of striking imagery and raw emotion.
This is the story of Barbie Marks, who dreams of being the one behind the camera, not some barely flesh-and-blood version of the plastic doll she was named after. It is the story of Griffin Tyler, whose androgynous beauty hides the dark pain within him. And finally, it is the story of Mab, a pinkie-sized, magenta-haired, straight-talking fairy who may or may not be real.
With the same lush, electrifying prose that made Weetzie Bat a cult classic, Francesca Lia Block concocts a potent brew of magic and transformation to stir the soul, revealing that love can heal the deepest scars.
The Rose and the Beast
Violet and Claire
Dangerous Angels
To
Your Scattered Bodies Goby Phillip José Farmer
All those who ever lived on earth have found themselves resurrected — healthy, young, and naked as newborns — on the banks of a mighty river, in a world unknown. Miraculously provided with food, but with no clues to the meaning of their strange new afterlife, billions of people from every period of Earth's history — and prehistory — must start again,
Sir Richard Francis Burton would be the first to glimpse the incredible way-station, a link between worlds. This forbidden sight would spur the renowned nineteenth-century explorer to uncover the truth. Along with a remarkable group of compatriots, including Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the Victorian girl who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), and English-speaking Neanderthal, a WWII Holocaust survivor, and wise extraterrestrial, Burton sets sail on the magnificent river. His mission: to confront humankind's mysterious benefactor's, and learn the true purpose — innocent or evil — of the Riverworld...
The Fabulous Riverboat
The Stone God Awakens
The Gates of Creation
Coldheart
Canyon by Clive Barker
Hollywood has made a star of Todd Pickett. But time is catching up with him. He doesn't have the perfect looks he had last year. After plastic surgery goes awry, Todd needs somewhere to hide away for a few months while his scars heal.
As Todd settles into a mansion in Coldheart Canyon — a corner of the city so secret it doesn't appear on nay map — Tammy Lauper, the president of his fan club, comes to the City of Angels determined to solve the mystery of Todd's disappearance. Her journey will not be an easy one. The closer she gets to Todd the more Coldheart Canyon's secrets she uncovers: the ghost of the A-list stars who came to the Canyon for wild parties; Katya Lupi, the cold-hearted, now-forgotten star for whom the Canyon was named, who is alive and exquisite after a hundred years; and finally, the door in the bowels of Katya's dream palace that reputedly open up to another world, the Devil's Country. No one who has ever ventured to this dark, barbaric corner of hell has returned without their souls shadowed by what they'd seen and done.
Weaveworld
The Thief of Always
Everville
Psychoshop
by Alfred Bester & Roger Zelazny
The Black Place of the Soul-Changer was doing business in Rome six centuries before Christ. It will probably be there on the last day of the cosmos. You might call it a pawnshop, but its sign has three gold infinity symbols instead of the usual balls, and its Latin motto, Res Ullus, translates as "anything." This is the Psychoshop, where you can dump any unwanted aspect of your spirit as long as you exchange it for something else — arcane knowledge, a change of luck, or a sixth sense. Just remember: All sales are final.
In this genuinely mind-boggling novel, two of the most unfettered talents in speculative fiction envision a commercial establishment that attracts customers from Edgar Allan Poe to a sorcerer intent on fabricating the Beast of Revelations. Brimming with wit and imaginative bravado, scandalously sexy, and fabulously strange, Psychoshop is the first-ever collaboration between two winners of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grandmaster Award.
Also by Bester:
The Demolished Man
Also by Zelazny:
Lord of Light
This Immortal
The Dream Master
The
Best of Roald DahlIf Stephen King could write with murderous concision, he might have come up with "The Landlady," the story of a boarding house with an oddly talented proprietess and a small but permanent clientele. If Clive Barker had a sense of humor, he might have written "Pig," a brutally funny look at cooks and vegetarianism. And a more bloodthirsty Jorge Luis Borges might have imagined the fanatical little gambler in "Man From the South," who does his betting with a hammer, nails, and a butcher knife.
But all these stories in this volume were written by Roald Dahl, whose genius for the horrific and grotesque is unparalleled and entirely his own.
My Uncle Oswald
Going Solo
James and the Giant Peach
Sharpe's
Company by Bernard Cornwell
Looming on the border of Portugal and Spain in the fortress of Badajoz. To lead an assault on its thick, sheer walls and battlements is suicide, yet Richard Sharpe must lead one. Inside the walls are his wife and daughter, and only he can save them. Outside is the misshapen, vengence-crazed Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill, a man determined to kill Sharpe. Sharpe knows that in the heat of battle only the cold steel of his battered sword and the ruthless bloodlust if a soldier at war will protect him from the danger of both sides.
Sharpe's Enemy
Sharpe's Gold
Sharpe's Honor
by H. Beam Piper
Three classic novels, one treasured volume! More than three decades ago, H. Beam Piper's best-selling science fiction novel Little Fuzzy was published for the first time, captivating readers everywhere. Now, three of Piper's delightful Fuzzy books are available for the first time.
From Little Fuzzy, our first introduction to the furry creatures, who proved themselves to be not just cute little animals but an intelligent, independent race... to Fuzzy Sapiens, the sequel that tells the story of the Fuzzie's fight against extinction... to Fuzzies and Other People, the legendary lost manuscript of H. Beam Piper that was discovered in a basement trunk after his tragic death... these three books come together for the first time to create a charming and exciting science fiction omnibus.
