How would you feel if today was your last day on Earth? Lotus is the part of yourself you're afraid and ashamed by, all the bad thoughts you shove inside the back closet in empty room in the darkest corner of your brain. This 18-poem literary/visual arts collection explores themes such as death, sex, drugs, drinking, honesty, and the after-life. With rock 'n' roll flare and an appreciation for nature, Austin Davis unravels everything from teenage degeneracy to the cosmos in under 50 pages. Grateful acknowledgement is made to Myla K. Smart from the Etsy shop @ArtnNeedles for providing phenomenal artwork, as well the editors of the following publications where some of these poems first appeared: *** Button Poetry, Emerge Literary Journal, Ghost City Press, Maudlin House, Okay Donkey Magazine, and The Tempe Writers Forum
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future, by the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine. “Deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects.” —Esquire We’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. What emerges is an absorbing, funny, and deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with what’s ahead.
Powerful war machines of the far-future collide across a barren desert world in this post-apocalyptic debut novel from award-winning Australian author Cat Sparks. Seventeen-year-old Star and her sister Nene are orphans, part of a thirteen-wagon caravan of nomadic traders living hard lives travelling the Sand Road. Their route cuts through a particularly dangerous and unforgiving section of the Dead Red Heart, a war-ravaged desert landscape plagued by rogue semi-sentient machinery and other monsters from a bygone age. But when the caravan witnesses a relic-Angel satellite unexpectedly crash to Earth, a chain of events begins that sends Star on a journey far away from the life she once knew. Shanghaied upon the sandship Dogwatch, she is forced to cross the Obsidian Sea by Quarrel, an ancient Templar supersoldier. Eventually shipwrecked, Star will have no choice but to place her trust in both thieves and priestesses while coming to terms with the grim reality of her past-and the horror of her unfolding destiny-as the terrible secret her sister had been desperate to protect her from begins to unravel. Meanwhile, something old and powerful has woken in the desert. A Lotus Blue, deadliest of all the ancient war machines. A warrior with plans of its own, far more significant than a fallen Angel. Plans that do not include the survival of humanity.
A novel by the author of the viral essay sensation "The Crane Wife": When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged older half-sister, to help. This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. Elsa and Nolan travel to their father's field station off the Gulf Coast, where a group called the Reversalists obsessively study the undowny bufflehead, a rare duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running in reverse. On an island that is always looking backward, it's impossible for the siblings to ignore their past, and years of family secrecy threaten to ruin them all over again. Yet, despite themselves, the Greys urgently trek the island to find the so-called Paradise Duck, their father's final obsession, all the while grappling with questions of nature and nurture, intimacy and betrayal, progress and forgiveness.
"You're going to love Nyx . . . she makes Han Solo look like a Boy Scout.”—io9 Ex-government assassin turned bounty-hunter, Nyx, is good at solving other people’s problems. Her favorite problem-solving solution is punching people in the face. Then maybe chopping off some heads. Hey—it’s a living. Nyx's disreputable reputation has been well earned. After all, she’s trying to navigate an apocalyptic world full of giant bugs, contaminated deserts, scheming magicians, and a centuries-long war that’s consuming her future. Managing her ragtag squad of misfits has required a lot of morally-gray choices. Every new job is another day alive. Every new mission is another step toward changing a hellish future—but only if she can survive.
New Authors and collections. Stories of the end of civilized life have always fascinated us, from the mythological world endings, Armageddon to Ragnorok, to the flood stories of across the Ancient world. They make us wonder what we would do if all around us came to an end: no transport, no fuel, no communications: a retreat into the desperation, the onslaught of disease, how would we survive? This is the source of zombie literature and provides the inspiration for this fabulous mix of horror and adventure, of classic and brand new writing in the successful series of Gothic Fantasy titles from Flame Tree. New, contemporary and notable writers featured are: Mike Adamson, Bill Davidson, Michael Paul Gonzalez, Michael Haynes, Liam Hogan, Jennifer Hudak, Curt Jeffreys, Su-Yee Lin, Wendy Nikel, Konstantine Paradias, Darren Ridgley, John B. Rosenman, Zach Shephard, Meryl Stenhouse, Morgan Sylvia, Lucy Taylor, Natalia Theodoridou, and Shannon Connor Winward. These appear alongside classic stories by authors such as Stephen Vincent Benét, George Allan England, M.P. Shiel, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
For fans of the oral history genre phenomenon World War Z, an inventive new spin on the apocalypse featuring a worldwide plague of insomnia. Remember what it’s like to go an entire night without sleep? What if sleep didn’t come the following night? Or the night after? What might happen if you, your friends, your family, your coworkers, and the strangers you pass on the street, all slowly began to realize that rest might not ever come again? How slowly might the world fall apart? How long would it take for a society without sleep to descend into chaos? Sleep Over is a collection of waking nightmares, a scrapbook collection of haunting and poignant stories from those trapped in a world where the pillars of society are crumbling, and madness is slowly descending on a planet without rest. Online vigilantism transforms social media into a blame game with deadly consequences. A freelance journalist grapples with the ethics of turning in footage of mass suicide. Scientists turn to horrifying experiments as they grow more desperate in their race for a cure. In Sleep Over, these stories are just the beginning. Before the Longest Day, the world record was eleven days without sleep. It turns out many of us will be forced to go much longer. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
The Apocalypse—or the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the last book in the Bible—has inspired many artists over the centuries to present their own perceptions of its events and characters. What might a woman clothed with the sun, a dragon with seven heads, the harlot of Babylon, the New Jerusalem, and paradise look like? Irma Korte has gathered a collection of more than 60 such color illustrations here, made during the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. The images trace the events of the Apocalypse of St. John, rendering its central figures and episodes lifelike for us. They are accompanied by an insightful interpretation: Dr. Korte suggests that the Revelation deals with the most essential problems in religion, such as the nature of man, reality, and evil. As the visions proceed, St. John lives through a profound inner transformation. He gives up shallow beliefs and moves toward personally experienced spirituality, culminating in final liberation. St. John, like anyone who has traveled the same path, undergoes both anxiety and bliss, encounters beasts and enjoys the happiness of paradise. The images and events of the Revelation are compared to the descriptions made by Christian mystics and saints, as well as to Oriental philosophy and yoga theory. These saints and rishis include, among others, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Ramana Maharshi, and Paramahansa Yogananda. Mythical images allow for many interpretations. Readers may use these old and strangely captivating illustrations as a source of inspiration to find their own meaning in St. John’s visions. Irma Korte, Ph.D., has published several books and articles. She elaborated her interpretation of the Apocalypse of St. John in her earlier work The Revelation of St. John—An Inner Journey to Liberation, which is a detailed study of the Revelation. It offers more comparisons to the images of the Apocalypse of St. John from different cultures and time periods.
