This is a collection of 105 flash fiction stories published in Ghost Parachute magazine. Ghost Parachute seeks to publish writing that is unapologetically bold. We wish to lose ourselves in fresh and vibrant imagery. We want to read what we've always known but were too afraid to say. We want to read a story unlike any other story we've read before. It's easy to view the world in black and white, so Ghost Parachute paints a streak of gray. Great stories don't ride the popular, easy narrative, and great characters are often impossible to love yet we love them anyway. We aim to unleash the spider behind the rose and dance in the surreal.

America's most talented storytellers share their most courageous, compelling, unputdownable work in a collection made for story lovers. Praised early on by Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk author Ben Fountain and The Weight of Blood author Laura McHugh, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES is a new annual short story anthology whose guiding philosophy is that a collection of interesting "full meal" short stories could, as one @JustCoolStories Twitter follower put it, "make America cool again." Toward this end, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 features a previously unpublished story by the multi-major-book-award-winning author of Blacktop Wasteland S. A. Cosby; the timeless, previously unpublished short story that led Tina Brown to sign Frances Park's When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon; and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin's heartfelt rendering of married life that apparently was too startling for the editors of several university-affiliated literary magazines. And since interesting storytelling―rather than a list of publishing credits―matters most to story-hungry readers, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 also includes a page-turner about dating in Hollywood written by MFA student Megan Ritchie; Brooklyn native D.Z. Stone's very first published fiction, a hilarious love story that celebrates the power of women; a heartbreaking account of adult siblinghood authored by David Ebenbach―among others in this treasure trove of unputdownable, sharply written, sometimes comic, sometimes frightening, always suspenseful stories loaded with twists and turns. "Coolest American Stories 2022 is a helluva lot of fun. These stories bump and brim with rambunctious energy and show that the American short story is alive and well. Many thanks to Mark Wish and Elizabeth Coffey for this breath―or let's call it a gale―of fresh literary air." --Ben Fountain, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk "Extraordinarily rich storytelling from fresh, vibrant voices―Coolest American Stories promises to be an annual force." --Laura McHugh, internationally bestselling author of The Weight of Blood and What’s Done in Darkness "Love short stories? This collection is for you. Not yet sure how to feel about short stories? This collection is definitely for you. Whoever you are, wherever you are: read these stories!" --Lori Ostlund, Flannery O’Connor Award winner and author of After the Parade and The Bigness of the World

Slappy's back as a ghost! And this time, the only thing you'll play is hide-and-go-shriek!

The Parachute Paradox tells the life story of artist Steve Sabella (*1975), who was born in Jerusalem's Old City and raised under Israeli occupation. After living through both intifadas, being kidnapped in Gaza, and learning to navigate Palestinian and Israeli culture, he feels in exile at home.For him, the occupation attaches each Palestinian to an Israeli, as if in a tandem jump. The Israeli is always in control, placing the Palestinian under threat in a never-ending hostage situation. He realizes he has two options: either surrender or unbuckle his harness.Blurring fact and fiction, love and loss, the memoir traces one man's arduous search for liberation from within, through a confrontation with his colonized imagination.Limited Edition of 1250 with handwritten numeration.

"[Bergmann] chronicles the drug trading, the risks and rewards, and the demarcations between the city and suburbs even as he witnessed suburbanites come into the city to buy drugs." ---Booklist "Not just illustrative and emotive, this pummeling, immersive social text is grounded in street-level reportage and seeded with wisdom." ---Kirkus Reviews "In prose that is equally eloquent and enlightening, Luke Bergmann brings to the surface the lives of two young men living in a place that is regarded by too many people as a forgotten city." --- Alford A. Young, Jr., Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Associate Professor, Sociology and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan "Luke Bergmann sometimes risks life and limb to bring us firsthand the lives of young people who mainstream media and academic research have ignored---except for the occasional crime story or impersonal policy brief. Getting Ghost is a journey worth taking . . . It sets a new standard for documentary reportage." --- Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day and Off the Books "Postapocalyptic" Detroit---infamous for its abandoned buildings, empty lots, and blighted streets---may be the only American city to have earned such an epithet. As a teenager who frequently visited Detroit with his father, Luke Bergmann saw the devastation caused by the collapse of the automobile industry. Years later, he returned to the city as an anthropologist to study the incarceration of inner-city youth, and his research connected him with two teenaged drug dealers, Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps. For nearly three years Bergmann lived on the city's West Side, hanging out with Dude and Rodney, driving around, hearing their stories and dreams, and witnessing the intricacies of Detroit's urban drug trade. Bergmann is soon more than an observer, as he intervenes with Dude's probation officer when he misses a hearing and becomes Rodney's only contact when he flees the city to escape criminal charges. Through it all, he strives to understand their lives, their families, and the neighborhoods they call home. In an effort to break through the conventional wisdom about who sells drugs and why, Bergmann chronicles the unsettling alchemy of choice, force of habit, structural inequality, and political neglect that combine to restrict the horizons of too many young people in America's cities. As Rodney and Dude spin through the revolving door of juvenile detention, "getting ghost" becomes a rich metaphor---for leaving a scene; for quitting the trade; and, ultimately, for mortality. With stunning insight, courage, and even humor, Getting Ghost illuminates complex inner lives that are too often diminished by empty stereotypes as it reveals the common yearnings in all of our American dreams. Luke Bergmann is a research director at the Detroit Department of Health and Wellness Promotion and an adjunct faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Cover photo © Simon Wheatley, Magnum Photos

It began as an innocent prank. Call someone on the phone, shake them up a little with some sexy whispers and then hang up. But when one of the numbers is on Fear Street, readers can be sure there is more than "innocence" in store!

A first collection by an award-winning writer features characters at relationship crossroads in such stories as "Lizard Man," in which two men race to save a sick alligator; and "The End of Aaron," in which a girl helps her boyfriend face his greatest fears.