A Vision of Neon is a story of two friends - one who survives the complex years of adolescence and one who does not - and the unconditional love and commitment between these young girls. Wild, sharp-tongued red-head Kelsey embodies the confidence that her shy and quiet best friend, the story's narrator, only dreams of. But as time passes, Kelsey's seeming confidence and acts of teenage rebellion become overshadowed by day-long crying spells, invented stories of fictitious friends and thin slashes of scab that mark her skin. In high school, Kelsey descends into mental illness, while the narrator attempts to maintain a normal teenage life, despite continuing efforts to support her suicidal friend. However, both girls must ultimately face one difficult fact: regardless of their longings, Kelsey's sickness has a debilitating stranglehold on them both.

A dark secret hides in the swirling dust and exultant revelry of Burning Man. Asha Amarasuriya is bored and struggling to get by as a martial arts instructor in Oakland. When an enigmatic seductress offers her a golden ticket, Asha decides to take a leap of faith and head to Burning Man. But there is more than meets the eye at the infamous desert pilgrimage and Asha gets sucked into a quest to unravel a sinister mystery at the heart of Black Rock City. Will Asha and her friends survive to expose the shadowy conspiracy? By the time the Man burns, their lives will have changed forever.

Without neon, Las Vegas might still be a sleepy desert town in Nevada and Times Square merely another busy intersection in New York City. Transformed by the installation of these brightly colored signs, these destinations are now world-famous, representing the vibrant heart of popular culture. But for some, neon lighting represents the worst of commercialism. Energized by the conflicting love and hatred people have for neon, Flickering Light explores its technological and intellectual history, from the discovery of the noble gas in late nineteenth-century London to its fading popularity today. Christoph Ribbat follows writers, artists, and musicians—from cultural critic Theodor Adorno, British rock band the Verve, and artist Tracey Emin to Vladimir Nabokov, Langston Hughes, and American country singers—through the neon cities in Europe, America, and Asia, demonstrating how they turned these blinking lights and letters into metaphors of the modern era. He examines how gifted craftsmen carefully sculpted neon advertisements, introducing elegance to modern metropolises during neon’s heyday between the wars followed by its subsequent popularity in Las Vegas during the 1950s and '60s. Ribbat ends with a melancholy discussion of neon’s decline, describing how these glowing signs and installations came to be seen as dated and characteristic of run-down neighborhoods. From elaborate neon lighting displays to neglected diner signs with unlit letters, Flickering Light tells the engrossing story of how a glowing tube of gas took over the world—and faded almost as quickly as it arrived.

“A moving evocation of the small-town South in the mid-twentieth century” that “belongs on the shelf with the works of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty” (Orlando Sentinel). John Kennedy Toole—who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces—wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole’s heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole’s suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication. “Heartfelt emotion, communicated in clean direct prose . . . a remarkable achievement.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “John Kennedy Toole’s tender, nostalgic side is as brilliantly effective as his corrosive satire. If you liked To Kill A Mockingbird you will love The Neon Bible.” —Florence King “Shockingly mature. . . . Even at sixteen, Toole knew that the way to write about complex emotions is to express them simply.” —Kerry Luft, Chicago Tribune

It's the summer of 1994 in suburban Chicago, and you can enter a sweepstakes for a spaceship from Jupiter to land in your backyard. According to the company facilitating the visits, the spaceship is 100 percent non-toxic. Ernest Allen's family won, but as his panic increases, so do his questions: What are the effects of longterm exposure to the saucer, and why is it really here? His wife Cynthia and their children, Alison and Gabe, are less concerned with the saucer, and more worried about his growing paranoia.

How did people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? This study weaves documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in Shanghai in early 20th century.

A collection of stories about the outsiders - the criminals, the soldiers, the addicts, the mathematicians, the gamblers and the cage fighters, the refugees and the rebels. From the battlefield to alternate realities to the mean streets of the dark city, we walk in the shoes of those who struggle to survive in a neon-saturated, tech-noir future. Twelve hard-edged stories from the dark, often violent, sometimes strange heart of cyberpunk, this collection - as with all the best science fiction - is an exploration of who were are now. In the tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Philip K Dick, and David Mitchell, Neon Leviathan is a remarkable debut collection from a breakout new author. "Haunting and iridescent--combines the paranoid weirdness of the best Philip K Dick, the chilly but cool-as-fuck future gleam of cyberpunk, and an achingly beautiful literary inflection reminiscent of mainstream heavyweights like Murakami or Ishiguro. T. R. Napper's futures feel at once gritty and vertiginous and close-focus human in the way only the best SF can manage. Whatever roadmap he's working from, I can't wait to see where he's taking us next." Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon "It is easier to write about violence than to write about the aftermath--the grief, the guilt, the long-held trauma. It's easier to write about the shouted argument than the taut silence which follows it. It's easier to write about dreamlike unreality than it is to invest a reader in the mundane and the everyday. And yet the stories within Neon Leviathan balance all these competing demands with a deft and masterful hand." Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time "Heartbreaking... it evokes the depth of Chinese history, the successive wars, the poetry that expresses both the love of the landscape and the pain of the soldier leaving home, perhaps never to return." (for Dark on a Darkling Earth) Lois Tilton, Locus Magazine "T. R. Napper's cyberpunk story is a standout [in the collection], featuring a download with the tension of a high-speed chase" (for Twelve Minutes to Vinh Quang) Publisher's Weekly "The story is by turns blackly funny, speculatively impressive, and bleakly moving." (for A Strange Loop) Rich Horton, Locus Magazine "Wonderfully strange" (for An Advanced Guide to Successful Price-Fixing in Extra-Terrestrial Betting Markets) Sci Fi Review "Darkly gonzoid" (for An Advanced Guide to Successful Price-Fixing in Extra-Terrestrial Betting Markets) Lois Tilton, Locus Magazine "Thrilling and Moving" (for Ghosts of a Neon God) Rocket Stack Rank "The whole reads like a fever dream" (for Great Buddhist Monk Beat Down) Tangent Online