Who are Minnie and Earl? In the earliest days of constructing the first permanent colony on the moon, they are the single secret shared by the everyone working on the project: two friendly old people, who somehow beat the astronauts to the lunar surface and are perfectly happy with hosting the kids to nightly dinners, but remain close-mouthed about who they are and how they got there. But they are not the strangest thing to be found on the moon. Three entries from Adam-Troy Castro's Nebula-nominated series feature some of the adventures stemming from this extremely weird period in the history of lunar colonization. Get ready to find out about the explanation that doesn't matter. About the first gunfight in the history of lunar colonization. About the strangely familiar couple doing pratfalls out in the lunar wastes, where only one deeply confused team engineer can see them. And about just what Wyatt Earp has to do with all this. Don't be afraid. You can always drop on and Minnie and Earl for advice. This collection includes: "Sunday Night Yams At Minnie and Earl's", a 2002 Analytical Laboratory Winner for Best Novella and 2003 Nebula Nominee for Novella "Gunfight on Farside", 3rd Place for 2010 Analytical Laboratory Award for Best Novella "The Gorilla In A Tutu Principle or, Pecan Pie at Minnie and Earl's", a 2020 Analog Analytical Laboratory Award Winner for Best Novella

DIVHailed by Time as an “extravagantly comic” novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America’s South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actress–cum-pool shark/divDIV/divDIV On the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling, pool-playing sometimes-actress who claims to have recently starred in a theatrical production about a “woman named Drown.” He moves in with her and just as quickly begins encountering her strange compatriots. Before he knows it, they’re heading farther south together—to Florida—where the data that the dropout scientist is collecting from life’s laboratory is about to get quite contradictory./div Richly influenced by offbeat literary giant Donald Barthelme, Padgett Powell’s A Woman Named Drown offers readers a smorgasbord of literary strangeness—a surreal series of adventures in which nothing much—and yet everything—happens at once.

In the spring of 1896, Rachael, just shy of her twentieth birthday, boards a train destined to a remote cattle ranch in Oregon for a prearranged employment position. An arrangement made by a guilt-ridden wife who could no longer tolerate her husband's forceful adulterous actions upon their young housemaid. Seizing the opportunity of his wife's intervention, he demands that Rachael take his two young illegitimate children with her on her journey west; if she wants her father to remain alive. Traveling west from Brockport, New York, Rachael undertakes her first assignment from her new boss, the ranch owner. She will be required to transact business in a man's world by overseeing the loading of supplies and freight along the train route. Her third business stop, Rock Springs, Wyoming, brings her face to face with four members of her new employer, three brothers and the ranch foreman. Overwhelmed, she unconsciously turns to one brother for security, beginning his commitment to her.During the next decade of hard work, Rachael struggles to bury her past. Her new family, the Prestons and their bunkhouse crew, give her an optimistic appreciation of life as she learns there are no social boundaries in the West. By including her in all the daily trials and tribulations of ranch life, cattle roundups, hunting, procuring and preserving their food supply, expanding families, and celebrating holidays, Rachael learns to live and trust again. She receives her second chance.