A doorway to a strange, parallel world - that looks surprisingly (and rather disappointingly) like our own. A historian seeking evidence of ESP in Victorian London stumbles on a group who condemn him, as a man who knows too much, to a ghastly fate. And a man who discovers his mother is older than he thought. Much older. It's all here in these sixteen stories, ranging from the macabre to the downright zany. Written over a period of twenty years, these curious tales reflect one man's love of the sci-fi and horror worlds. From the moment he picked up a lurid copy of "Princess of Mars," the author was hooked. There's a spoof of the EC genre where zombies talk dirty and a tip of the hat to the Weekly World News. There are gruesome stories that dredge up ancient magic from darker times. And there are tales of glittering starships and heroes with laser guns dangling from the hip. This is the world where science and fantasy mingle, a world where. the spaceship lands by the haunted castle.

An exquisite middle grade debut about a girl who befriends ghosts from acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Lauren DeStefano, perfect for fans of Neil Gaiman and Sheila Turnage.

An uplifting anthology of short stories, each accompanied by the author's personal insights into the characters or background of the tale, ranges from a delightful tale of camping the wilderness to enjoying a Disneyland Christmas, all the while sharing their Christian faith. Reprint.

Imagine walking home from school one day and seeing a brain on the side of the road, a brain that, it turns out, is looking for a new home. Or instead of paying attention to the teacher, you shoot a paper airplane across the room and accidentally rip a hole in the fabric of the universe. And what would you do if you discovered that your class reading group was actually recruiting kids with telekinetic powers? Tales from Beyond the Brain is a collection of thirteen spooky stories that are as outrageous as they are terrifying. It's a throwback to the weird tales of yesteryear, in the vein of Tales from the Crypt and The Twilight Zone, but with contemporary characters and settings. Getting an education has never been more dangerous.

The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost incorporates Korean folk tales, ghost stories, and myth into a phenomenal depiction of epic tragedy. Written by a zainichi, a permanent resident of Japan who is not of Japanese ancestry, the novel tells the story of Mandogi, a young priest living on the island of Cheju-do. Mandogi becomes unwittingly involved in the Four-Three Incident of 1948, in which the South Korean government brutally suppressed an armed peasant uprising and purged Cheju-do of communist sympathizers. Although Mandogi is sentenced to death for his part in the riot, he survives (in a sense) to take revenge on his enemies and fully commit himself to the resistance. Mandogi's indeterminate, shapeshifting character is emblematic of Japanese colonialism's outsized impact on both ruler and ruled. A central work of postwar Japanese fiction, The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost relates the trauma of a long-forgotten history and its indelible imprint on Japanese and Korean memory.

Growing up as an Indian American immigrant in white Southern culture, Prasanta Verma unpacks the exhausting effects of cultural isolation and marginalization as well as the longing to belong and the hope of finding safe friendships in community. Our places of exile can become places of belonging–to ourselves, to others, and to God.

Here's something that doesn't happen every millennium: Roughly 35 million years ago, a stray meteorite dropped out of the sky over Virginia and left an impact that helped shape one of the continent's most distinctive coastlines. This scene of cataclysmic violence now lies beneath the calm waters of Chesapeake Bay. The occurrence of this prehistoric event only recently came to light, and the consequences of that impact will stretch far past our lifetimes. As Diane Casto Tennant makes clear in her new book, it wasn't the last interesting thing to happen in these parts. Selected from Tennant's widely admired writing for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, these stories reveal the rich natural history Virginia had compiled long before the first human set eyes on it--as well as the fascinating phenomena that still surround us. Her search for stories takes the author from dinosaur footprints along the Rappahannock to the best-preserved insect fossils on earth. On the way, she encounters a cast of characters that includes shark fishermen, math geniuses, wolf callers, and a birder with extraordinary eyesight. She speaks with a man who can read the minds of horses and introduces us to a very special Jamestown skeleton that could help solve a 400-year-old mystery. Tennant also explores those other inhabitants of the mid-Atlantic, looking to animals for miraculous stories of survival and adaptation. We witness the difficult life of Sea Turtle No. 62, whose journey illustrates the hazards confronting its species. We consider what it means to be the fastest dog in the world. We join a quest to find a barking tree frog and glimpse the strange afterlife of beached whales. While the author doesn't avoid the hard in the hard sciences, these stories speak primarily to the wonder of science. For the common reader, whose stores of scientific knowledge may not be vast but whose curiosity is, the perfect guide has just arrived.