Sky Rats is the story of three rat adventurers who try to find treasure and avoid trouble (and learn a few lessons along the way). Inspired by the spirit of some of our favorite old Republic serials and tales of pirates, Sky Rats was conceived as a way to entertain and educate young minds in a fun way. Join Strock, Mason, and Prudence as they trek to Skull Island Cave in search of a fortune in gold guarded by a frightening Cave Snake! Fully Illustrated by artist Michael Broom, this tale is sure to be a hit with your own young aspiring adventurer.

Having failed English, eighteen-year-old Steve York must generate a paper to get credit and chooses to write about his years in high school, during which he experienced his first love and struggled with family relationships.

The Sky Rats crash-land on a mysterious tropical island inhabited by a group of former pirates, who offer to help them find a way home.

The author dispenses rat facts and rat stories, looking into the history of rats, and describes how, with the aid of a notebook and night-vision gear, he sat nightly in a garbage-filled alley getting to know the wild city rat.

The Civilized Rats is a novel that tells the story of a tribe of rats that came together to establish an organized humanlike society under the inspiration of Nunuto, the city rat. In one of their annual tribal gatherings, they adopted the idea and started a kingdom of rats modeled along that of humans. The civilization, as they called it, blossomed. Under the inspirational Nunuto, the rats raised and trained an army that they named ratmy. They attacked humans, killed a snake, killed a cat, and chased away another deadly snake that swallowed rats. However, when Nunuto died of a snakebite, there arose a leadership crisis in the ratmy. This led to the breakup of the kingdom as intractable civil wars set in. Splinter ratmy groups emerged here and there and went violent. Societal problems like violence, stealing, robbery, rape, murder, wars, banditry, looting, fights for supremacy, and other problems akin to those found in human societies set in. The disunity among rats became worse than it was at the beginning. The kingdom collapsed, thus ending their dream of an organized society. One comes to the last but very brief chapter, only to discover that the entire story was a mere dream by an overfed rat that fell asleep in a kitchen.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street Journal • NPR • New York Public Library • LitHub • Mental Floss “Influenced by the likes of Jane Austen and Rick and Morty, Smith tackles timely issues while leaving room for some delicious reality TV references.”—Entertainment Weekly In the burned-out, futuristic city of Empire Island, three young people navigate a crumbling metropolis constantly under threat from a pair of dragons that circle the skies. When violence strikes, reality star Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, the spoiled scion of the metropolis’ last dynasty; Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, his tempestuous, death-obsessed betrothed; and Abby, a feral beauty he discovered tossed out with the trash, are forced to flee everything they've ever known. As they wander toward the scalded heart of the city, they face fire, conspiracy, mayhem, unholy drugs, dragon-worshippers, and the monsters lurking inside themselves. In this bombshell of a novel, Chandler Klang Smith has imagined an unimaginable world: scathingly clever and gorgeously strange, The Sky Is Yours is at once faraway and disturbingly familiar, its singular chaos grounded in the universal realities of love, family, and the deeply human desire to survive at all costs. Praise for The Sky is Yours “It’s a mesmeric world, comic in the way teenage voyages of self-discovery inevitably are, but with an undertone of menace, horror, even hints of allegory. Satire, too . . . Smith’s imagination is inexhaustible. The Sky Is Yours is a great and disturbing debut, which colonizes a new realm of the magic city.”—The Wall Street Journal “Smith’s gifts of imagination are staggering. . . . Much like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky before it, The Sky is Yours filters youth through a warped yet poignantly canny speculative fiction lens. At the same time, it’s funny as hell, full of madcap detail, firecracker dialogue, and a healthy dose of absurdism in the face of darkness.”—NPR “Readers who love ambitious literary genre fiction should be on the lookout for Smith’s first novel, a vibrantly uncanny dystopia set on an island metropolis, in the shadow of dragons that swoop overhead, where income inequality and mass incarceration have spun out of control.”—HuffPost “An unmissable masterpiece.”—PopSugar

I Corps, Republic of South Vietnam, bloody 1968 Live the harrowing highs and traumatic lows of one marine youth who finds his seven-month “in country” war-weary self carrying a field radio burden for a suspect glory-minded forward observer artillery officer who’d yet to learn the undeclared war was a government sham, a political ruse that would one tragic day force the FO team’s “command structured” relationship to a “who’s responsible” head over a short round of friendly artillery, which put their field commander permanently out of action. The resolve-testing war with the North Vietnamese Army, the near immobilizing, ever-sweltering jungle mountains and sandy flatlands, the thought-friendly villages, the two of our people executed, the four enemy prisoners executed in turn, as well as President Johnson’s bombing halts and retaking enemy positions are the nerve-pickling building blocks shackled themselves together like a confrontation-packed novel about combat-weary vets not taught to run from a political fight either. Experience the combative days, literally sweat the chancy nights, devour the popular songs . . . when lucky enough to hear such haunting “sounds” as “Get Off My Cloud” by the Rolling Stones. For one can’t simply “throw their rifle down and quit!” The corps will toss said shameless in the brig for untold years; though a panicked one can steal away into the masking jungle and surrender, yet hard-core enemy will put a bullet through a deserter’s enlisted head like a pesky bunker rat, unless one’s a commissioned officer, then the VC “might” keep said alive as a “peace”-bargaining chip. One may understand the historic reason why many the combat marine during such oh-so-questioning times likened themselves to the politically used, if not correct, title of Uncle Sam’s misguided children—know what it’s truly like to stalk and be stalked, kill or be killed, fear and be feared.