Once upon a time there was a bad, bad poet called James, whose head was nothing more than a huge egg with facial features crudely appended. And one day, while James was on the toilet thinking about a line from The Waste Land ("Hieronymo's mad againe"), the egg cracked open and out lurched an ambiguous creature called the Bird King. From the moment he stepped into our world, the Bird King was very busy. He flapped his patchy wings, made absurd laws, fell in love with inanimate objects. Following him around with his head still gaping and his mulchy brain exposed, James recorded the Bird King's episodic adventures, transmitting them to the world through Twitter. ****************************************** Enjoy James Knight's latest collection of broken stories, poetic fragments and assembled pictures, including the long poems "The Death of the Bird King", "The Monsters" and "The Madness of the Bird King", as well as "Oneiroscope", 24 original artworks and 60 short pieces.

One of NPR’s 50 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of the Decade: A fifteenth-century palace mapmaker must hide his powers in the time of the Inquisition . . . Award-winning author G. Willow Wilson’s debut novel Alif the Unseen was an NPR and Washington Post Best Book of the Year and established her as a vital American Muslim literary voice. Now she delivers The Bird King, an epic journey set during the reign of the last sultan in the Iberian peninsula at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. Fatima is a concubine in the royal court of Granada, the last emirate of Muslim Spain. Her dearest friend, Hassan, the palace mapmaker and the one man who doesn’t leer at her with desire, has a secret—he can draw maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality. When representatives of the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrive to negotiate the sultan’s surrender, Fatima befriends one of the women, not realizing that she will see Hassan’s gift as sorcery and a threat to Christian Spanish rule. With their freedoms at stake, what will Fatima risk to save Hassan and escape the palace walls? As the two traverse Spain with the help of a clever jinn to find safety, The Bird King asks us to consider what love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate. “Wilson has a deft hand with myth and with magic, and the kind of smart, honest writing mind that knits together and bridges cultures and people.” —Neil Gaiman, author of Norse Mythology “A triumph . . . one of the best fantasy writers working today.” —BookPage “A treasure-house of a novel, thrilling, tender, funny, and achingly gorgeous. I loved it.” —Lev Grossman, author of the Magicians trilogy

Snowmen are clowns in sinister stasis. While you sleep they smother cats and feast from bins. At dawn their paunches drip. (from "The snowmen") Head Traumas is the latest collection from the author of The Madness of the Bird King, a book described by acclaimed novelist Jeff Noon as "a brilliant piece of work". This substantial collection contains poems, prose poems and pictures. It includes a revised version of The Madness of the Bird King, Mr Punch Dreams, nine Oneiroscope pieces (combining text and image), numerous 13-part prose poems, and more.

Inside the second-hand phone Chen Hao bought, there was actually a Heavenly Court's welfare group, various great gods crazily sent red packets, and a Heavenly Court store that had all sorts of martial skills, pills, pets, weapons, and magical equipment! Thus, the ordinary university student, Chen Hao, embarked on the bizarre path of cultivation.

"Some of the other visitors think Machine 13 is actually the Bird King himself, encased in red plastic. Whatever it is, it terrifies me." (13 machines from the Bird King's private collection) From the creators of The Madness of the Bird King: a book of poetic fragments in thirteen chapters, each accompanied by an enigmatic colour illustration. "An open book, a blank page. A face, probably your face, stooping to see." (13 pieces of a broken mirror)

In this historical fantasy novel from Sydney Taylor Honor winner and National Jewish Book Award finalist Sofiya Pasternack, Ziva will do anything to save her twin brother Pesah from his illness—even facing the Angel of Death himself. Pesah has lived with leprosy for years, and the twins have spent most of that time working on a cure. Then Pesah has a vision: The Angel of Death will come for him on Rosh Hashanah, just one month away. So Ziva takes her brother and runs away to find doctors who can cure him. But when they meet and accidentally free a half-demon boy, he suggests paying his debt by leading them to the fabled city of Luz, where no one ever dies—the one place Pesah will be safe. They just need to run faster than The Angel of Death can fly...

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin From the Paperback edition.