A Guardian Best Graphic Book of 2015 Iris (or balletgirl-42 as she's known on the internet dating circuit) is a zookeeper looking for love when she is diagnosed with breast cancer. Overnight, her life becomes populated with a carnival of daunting hospital characters. Despite the attempts of her friends – Maud, Granma Suggs, Larry the Monkey and a group of singing penguins – to comfort her, Iris's fears begin to encircle her until all she has to cling to is the attention of a lighthouse keeper called sailor_buoy_39. The Inflatable Woman combines magic realism with the grit of everyday life to create a poignant and surreal journey inside the human psyche.

From a ruptured, spurting vein of the cult zombie classics you love, comes a story that takes the genre in an entirely twisted new direction. When a trucking accident causes a top secret chemical weapon to spill over a load of adult novelty toys, all hell breaks loose outside a sleepy rural town. Now, as the terror spreads through the countryside, the sheriff and townsfolk must decide whether to fight the oncoming horde of killer sex toys or call in the military for assistance. Lock up the kids, bring in the dogs, turn down the lights, and prepare for a new brand of horror unlike anything you have experienced.

"At its best, original, flat, urgent, the voice stays with us… an awkward, restless, honest presence, that won't sit down and talk, and won't go away." —Jean Valentine

In the spring of 1994, Rwanda was the scene of the first acts since World War II to be legally defined as genocide. Two years later, Clea Koff, a twenty-three-year-old forensic anthropologist analyzing prehistoric skeletons in the safe confines of Berkeley, California, was one of sixteen scientists chosen by the UN International Criminal Tribunal to go to Rwanda to unearth the physical evidence of genocide and crimes against humanity. The Bone Woman is Koff’s riveting, deeply personal account of that mission and the six subsequent missions she undertook—to Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo—on behalf of the UN. In order to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity, the UN needs to know the answer to one question: Are the bodies those of noncombatants? To answer this, one must learn who the victims were, and how they were killed. Only one group of specialists in the world can make both those determinations: forensic anthropologists, trained to identify otherwise unidentifiable human remains by analyzing their skeletons. Forensic anthropologists unlock the stories of people’s lives, as well as of their last moments. Koff’s unflinching account of her years with the UN—what she saw, how it affected her, who was prosecuted based on evidence she found, what she learned about the world—is alternately gripping, frightening, and miraculously hopeful. Readers join Koff as she comes face-to-face with the realities of genocide: nearly five hundred bodies exhumed from a single grave in Kibuye, Rwanda; the wire-bound wrists of Srebrenica massacre victims uncovered in Bosnia; the disinterment of the body of a young man in southwestern Kosovo as his grandfather looks on in silence. Yet even as she recounts the hellish working conditions, the tangled bureaucracy of the UN, and the heartbreak of survivors, Koff imbues her story with purpose, humanity, and an unfailing sense of justice. This is a book only Clea Koff could have written, charting her journey from wide-eyed innocent to soul-weary veteran across geography synonymous with some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. A tale of science in the service of human rights, The Bone Woman is, even more profoundly, a story of hope and enduring moral principles.

In Show Me Where It Hurts, Monica Chiu argues that graphic pathography—long-form comics by and about subjects who suffer from disease or are impaired—re-vitalizes and re-visions various negatively affected corporeal states through hand-drawn images. By the body and for the body, the medium is subversive and reparative, and it stands in contradistinction to clinical accounts of illness that tend to disembody or objectify the subject. Employing affect theory, spatial theory, vital materialism, and approaches from race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, disability studies, and comics studies, Chiu provides readings of recently published graphic pathography. Chiu argues that these kinds of subjective graphic stories, by virtue of their narrative and descriptive strengths, provide a form of resistance to the authoritative voice of biomedicine and serve as a tool to foster important change in the face of social and economic inequities when it comes to questions of health and healthcare. Show Me Where It Hurts reads what already has been manifested on the comics page and invites more of what demands expression. Pathbreaking and provocative, this book will appeal to scholars and students of the medical humanities, comics studies, race and ethnic studies, disability studies, and women and gender studies.

Collected here for the first time are 34 strange and erotic tales of vampires, created by some of supernatural fiction's greatest mistresses of the macabre. From the classic stories of Edith Nesbit, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, to modern incarnations by such acclaimed writers as Poppy Z. Brite, Nancy Kilpatrick, Tanith Lee, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Pat Cadigan, these blood-drinkers and soul-stealers range from the sexual to the sanguinary, from the tormented good to the unspeakably evil. Among these children of the night you will encounter Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Byronic vampire Saint-Germain, Nancy A. Collins' undead heroine Sonja Blue, Tanya Huff's vampiric detective Vicki Nelson and Freda Warrington's age-old lovers Karl and Charlotte. Featuring the only vampire short story written by Anne Rice, the undisputed queen of vampire literature, and boasting an autobiographical introduction and original tale by Ingrid Pitt, the star of Hammer Films' The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, this is one anthology from which every vampire fan will want to drink deeply.

Today, debates about globalization raise both hopes and fears. But what about during William Faulkner's time? Was he aware of worldwide cultural, historical, and economic developments? Just how interested was Faulkner in the global scheme of things? The contributors to Global Faulkner suggest that a global context is helpful for recognizing the broader international meanings of Faulkner's celebrated regional landscape. Several scholars address how the flow of capital from the time of slavery through the Cold War period in his fiction links Faulkner's South with the larger world. Other authors explore the literary similarities that connect Faulkner's South to Latin America, Africa, Spain, Japan, and the Caribbean. In essays by scholars from around the world, Faulkner emerges in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific contexts, in a pan-Caribbean world, and in the space of the Middle Passage and the African Atlantic. The Nobel laureate's fiction is linked to that of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Wole Soyinka, Miguel de Cervantes, and Kenji Nakagami.