In Vancouver, $600 a month gets you half a bachelor suite. On Mayne Island, it gets you a three–bedroom house overlooking the waters of Active Pass, with varied wildlife and lush trees as neighbours. With that in mind, Grant Buday trades in the high–powered city life in Vancouver for the small town eccentricities of Mayne Island. The scenery, however impressive, is not the only change. A college English instructor for six years, Buday now finds himself working wherever a hand is needed. Some of his more adventurous jobs included stealing a boat with one of the locals, who in exchange asked Buday for a word of the day; sheep herding on a deer farm with no deer; and his current part–time gig, helping out at the Mayne Island Recycling Depot. Living on Mayne has also presented Buday with endless opportunities for learning, whether it's firewood–picking lessons from his tree–felling Mennonite neighbour Jake, or chainsaw lingo lessons from the local dealer in Sidney. In Stranger on a Strange Island, Buday explores the layered nature of small–town life, the rich history of Mayne Island and the reasons that compelled him to trade in city life for the island life. Stranger On a Strange Island is number 19 in the Transmontanus series.
Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) was a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe and like Poe drew on his penchant for the grotesque and the bizarre to explore the boundaries of conventional thought. Best known as the founder of the modern Japanese detective novel, Ranpo wrote for a youthful audience, and a taste for playacting and theatre animates his stories. His writing is often associated with the era of ero guro nansense (erotic grotesque nonsense), which accompanied the rise of mass culture and mass media in urban Japan in the 1920s. Characterized by an almost lurid fascination with simulacra and illusion, the era’s sensibility permeates Ranpo's first major work and one of his finest achievements, Strange Tale of Panorama Island (Panoramato kidan), published in 1926. Ranpo’s panorama island is filled with cleverly designed optical illusions: a staircase rises into the sky; white feathered “birds” speak in women’s voices and offer to serve as vehicles; clusters of naked men and women romp on slopes carpeted with rainbow-colored flowers. His fantastical utopia is filled with entrancing music and strange sweet odors, and nothing is ordinary, predictable, or boring. The novella reflected the new culture of mechanically produced simulated realities (movies, photographs, advertisements, stereoscopic and panoramic images) and focused on themes of the doppelganger and appropriated identities: its main character steals the identity of an acquaintance. The novella’s utopian vision, argues translator Elaine Gerbert, mirrors the expansionist dreams that fed Japan's colonization of the Asian continent, its ending an eerie harbinger of the collapse of those dreams. Today just as a new generation of technologies is transforming the way we think—and becoming ever more invasive and pervasive—Ranpo's work is attracting a new generation of readers. In the past few decades his writing has inspired films, anime, plays, and manga, and many translations of his stories, essays, and novels have appeared, but to date no English-language translation of Panoramato kidan has been available. This volume, which includes a critical introduction and notes, fills that gap and uncovers for English-language readers an important new dimension of an ever stimulating, provocative talent.
When 114 people go missing on Roanoke Island in what seems like an eerie repeat of what happened hundreds of years before, seventeen-year-olds Miranda and Grant may be the key to the mysteries past and present.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the widely acclaimed, bestselling author of American War—a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving novel that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child. "Told from the point of view of two children, on the ground and at sea, the story so astutely unpacks the us-versus-them dynamics of our divided world that it deserves to be an instant classic." —The New York Times Book Review More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vänna. Vänna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vänna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, Vänna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy. In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir’s life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair—and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.
• Marketing focus on combination of gift production and high content values, delivering a curated read to genre enthusiasts. • Spotlight on submission process for the new stories, promoted online through blogs and social media • Monthly newsletter to increase mailing list of genre special interest readers. • Major interest pushed through Instagram, with Youtube reviewers and influences. Strange lands in fiction stretch from deep below the earth, to the outer reaches of space. This incredible new collection combines the talents of a new generation of writers with classic and ancient storytellers: from H.G. Wells to Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Defoe to Jules Verne. Find here too the Land of the Lotus Eaters from Homer’s Odyssey and the mad horrors of H.P. Lovecraft, the utopian fantasies of Samuel Butler and, from Hans Christian Andersen an early fantasy about visiting the moon. ‘Strange Lands’ is fabulous collection of enduring and brand new tales. New, contemporary and notable writers featured are: Rhoads Brazos, Ed Burkley, Ramsey Campbell, Victoria Dalpe, Philip Ellis, Marissa Harwood, R. Leigh Hennig, Gordon Linzner, Christian Macklam, S.R. Masters, P.L. McMillan, Hannah Onoguwe, Alex Penland, Kelly Sandoval, Sam Stark, and M. Elizabeth Ticknor. The Flame Tree Gothic Fantasy, Classic Stories and Epic Tales collections bring together the entire range of myth, folklore and modern short fiction. Highlighting the roots of suspense, supernatural, science fiction and mystery stories the books in Flame Tree Collections series are beautifully presented, perfect as a gift and offer a lifetime of reading pleasure.
Who is not captivated by tales of Islanders earnestly scanning their watery horizons for great fleets of cargo ships bringing rice, radios and refrigerators - ships that will never arrive? Of all the stories spun about the island peoples of Melanesia, tales of cargo cult are among the most fascinating. The term cargo cult, Lamont Lindstrom contends, is one of anthropology's most successful conceptual offspring. Like culture, worldview and ethnicity, its usage has steadily proliferated, migrating into popular culture where today it is used to describe an astonishing roll-call of people. It's history makes for lively and compelling reading. The cargo cult story, Lindstrom shows, is more significant than it at first appears, for it recapitulates in summary form three generations of anthropological theory and Pacific studies. Although anthropologists' enthusiasm for the notion of cargo cult has waned, it now colors outsiders' understanding of Melanesian culture, and even Melanesians' perceptions of themselves. The repercussions for contemporary Islanders are significant: leaders of more than one political movement have felt the need to deny that they are any kind of cargo cultist. Of particular interest to this history is Lindstom's argument that accounts of cargo cult are at heart tragedies of thwarted desire, melancholy anticipation and crazy unrequited love. He makes a convincing case that these stories expose powerful Western scenarios of desire itself—giving cargo cult its combined titillation of the fascinating exotic and the comfortably familiar.
When a family takes a boating trip, the last thing they expect is to be shipwrecked on an island-especially an island with weird, otherworldly plants and animals. Now, what started out as a bad vacation turns into a terrible one as Lyle, Karen, and their two kids, Janie and Reese, must find a way off the island while they dodge its strange and dangerous inhabitants. Is the island alive? Is it from another world? In this rousing, Swiss-Family-Robinson tale with a twist, the answers to these questions could save them... or spell their doom.
This gripping tale of mystery and horror takes place on a remote Canadian island that the isolated narrator soon discovers to be alive with terror and ghostly apparitions. A solitary scholar is left on a small island in a large Canadian lake to study on what should have been a peaceful and productive retreat. Yet, as night falls and the scholar realises the weight of his isolation, the secluded island begins to echo eerie voices and footsteps. He soon becomes convinced malevolent spirits are haunting him and must try to retain his sanity as well as his life. With its vivid descriptions and chilling atmosphere, A Haunted Island is a masterful work of gothic horror, sure to leave you chilled to the bone.
Inspired by the pulps, film noir, and screwball comedy, Passing Strange is a story as unusual and complex as San Francisco itself from World Fantasy Award winning author Ellen Klages, and a finalist for the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novella San Francisco in 1940 is a haven for the unconventional. Tourists flock to the cities within the city: the Magic City of the World’s Fair on an island created of artifice and illusion; the forbidden city of Chinatown, a separate, alien world of exotic food and nightclubs that offer “authentic” experiences, straight from the pages of the pulps; and the twilight world of forbidden love, where outcasts from conventional society can meet. Six women find their lives as tangled with each other’s as they are with the city they call home. They discover love and danger on the borders where magic, science, and art intersect. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.