The Man with Two Heads and Other Stories is a collection of quirky tales that will take you from The Great Exhibition of 1851 to the Afterlife. You will encounter a new breed of humanity ready to rule the world, and discover the secret of The Man with Two Heads. Take a drink of Nectar which will bring you health, youth and happiness and find out what happens on The Last Day. You will find love, humour, horror and science fiction blended into entertaining, thought-provoking and sometimes challenging fiction.
From distant stars to a Cocoa Beach Hooters, Derwin Mak's short fiction takes readers through tales of mystery, wonder, and horror. Ethnic traditions meld with fantastic visions in these twelve stories about memory fabric, eldritch gods during the Salem witch trials, and of course, Mecha-Jesus, Japan's very own android kami.
Published two years after the 1919 masterpiece Winesburg, Ohio, this collection of short stories explores intriguing psychological depths, redolent with personal epiphanies, erotic undercurrents, and bursts of passion among seemingly repressed, inarticulate Midwesterners.
Stephanie Corinna Bille, a Swiss short-story writer, playwright, poet, and novelist and winner of the 1975 French Prix Concourt, is often considered the major contemporary Franco-Swiss woman writer. In The Transparent Girl and Other Stories Monika Giacoppe and Christiane Makward have assembled and translated a magnificent collection of Bille's work that exposes an English-speaking audience--many for the first time--to Bille's exotic, captivating, mystical, and sexually provocative stories.
When Jack Davis took up his pen for EC Comics, he made his innocent victims more eye-poppingly terrified, his ax-murderers more gleefully gruesome, and his vampires and werewolves more bloodthirsty and feral than any other artist. These horror and suspense tales ― from the pages of Vault of Horror,Haunt of Fear, Crime SuspenStories, and Shock SuspenStories ― offer everything a horror fan could ask for: re-animated bodies and body parts, a ghoul who stores bodies like a squirrel stores nuts, a vampire who moonlights at (where else?) a blood bank, greedy business partners, corrupt politicians, jealous lovers, revenge from beyond the grave, and a healthy complement of vampires, werewolves, and assorted grotesqueries. All leavened with the cackling, pun-laced humor of scripter Al Feldstein and illuminated as only the virtuoso brushwork of Jack Davis can present them.
This collection of sixteen short stories is set in Egg Rock, a fictional town north of Boston. They are written in approximate chronological order spanning hundreds of years and are linked not only by the setting but by the reappearance of characters, their ancestors, and descendants. Many are loosely based on local North Shore legends and historical events. Ragnhild is an adviser to Thorvald Eiriksson, son of Erik the Red and brother of Leif, on his voyages to Vinland. He describes their discovery of an idyllic almost island during Thorvalds last days. Ezra Newhall is a jack-of-all-trades who works at Egg Rocks sprawling, jerry-built hotel, called The Castle. On the eve of the Civil War the Castle owners son returns home with a secret that is about to be revealed. Priscilla, a writer seeking peace and quiet in a secluded Egg Rock cottage during World War II, gets swept up by the war in a way she could never anticipate. Mayland, a TV weatherman, and his wife barely survive a devastating fire, the work of an arsonist with a hundred-year grudge. In Forty Steps and Other Stories the reader discovers a unique place that leaves its imprint, for better or for worse, on all who call it home.
• Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize This collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. In one story, a woman sleeps with the village priest, trying to gain back the land the church took from her family; in another, relatives in the Azores fight over a plot of land owned by their expatriate American cousin. Even apparently small images are cast in terms of the earth: Milton, one narrator explains, has made apples the object of a misunderstanding by naming them as Eden's fruit: "In the Bible, no fruit is named in the Garden of Eden - and to this day apples are misunderstood. They were trying to tempt people not into sin but into listening to the earth more closely. . . . their white meal runs wet with the knowledge of the language of the land, but people do not listen."Vaz's beautiful, intensely conscious language often delicately slips her stories into the realm of the fado, the Portuguese song about fate and longing. "Listen for the nightingale that presses its breast against the thorns of the rose," on character sings, "that the song might be more beautiful." Such a verse might describe Vaz's own motive behind her willingness to confront her subject's ambiguities and her characters' conflicts - the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life's discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.
The book Chain and Other Stories contains nine stories. The first story, Chain, is about two federal agents who go undercover in Anchorage, Alaska, with two NYC detectives to investigate whether or not an oil mogul is using kidnapped kids to make weapons sold throughout the United States if so stop him. The next story, Gradill, is about an FBI agent who is investigating a case in Chicago where a bioterrorist is using SARS and Anthrax to poison or sicken CEOs of biochemical companies and local politicians who are giving them leeway to get funding and do research. The last of the first stories is Shatter Blue Magica story dealing with a young man who is an assassin who leaves a person alive he was supposed to kill, now he is only having to kill the person before he kills him and the lady he loves. The second batch of stories starts with Shatter Blue Magic 2, which is about the assassin from the first story having to kill his younger brother and sister-in-law, who have both been assigned to kill him, his wife, son, and employers. Web is the sequel to Chain where the two federal agents from the first story go undercover in Phoenix, Arizona, with two Phoenix detectives to investigate and stop two nightclub owners in Phoenix from kidnapping teenage girls and selling them to the adult entertainment industry to work as adult film stars. Gradill 2 is where the FBI agent from the first story is going undercover in Chicago to investigate a local domestic terrorist group and stop them from wrecking havoc in Chicago. The third batch of stories is Gradill 3 where the FBI agent from the two previous stories goes undercover with her sister to investigate a growing local domestic terrorist group who is causing trouble in Chicago and to stop them. The Last Call for Shatter Blue Magic picks up where the second story left off, healing his wounds from his encounter with his brother and sister-in-law, the assassin takes one last job where he must go around the world killing criminal organizations, corrupt policemen, crooked politicians, and terrorists, or he and his family and employers will be killed. Link is the last story in the Chain series where the two federal agents must go to Honolulu, Hawaii, with two Honolulu detectives to go undercover at a local sweatshop to investigate and stop a local rich woman and her friends from using children from Asia and America to work in her sweatshop making clothes that end up in department stores.
