Van Pelt's first collection, "Strangers and Beggars," was voted one of the Best Books of 2003 by the American Library Association. This new collection continues to explore the ever-changing boundaries of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

"She asked me if I liked them. And what could I say? They were wonderful." From the very beginning of Sergio Troncoso's celebrated story "Angie Luna," we know we are in the hands of a gifted storyteller. Born of Mexican immigrants, raised in El Paso, and now living in New York City, Troncoso has a rare knack for celebrating life. Writing in a straightforward, light-handed style reminiscent of Grace Paley and Raymond Carver, he spins charming tales that reflect his experiences in two worlds. Troncoso's El Paso is a normal town where common people who happen to be Mexican eat, sleep, fall in love, and undergo epiphanies just like everyone else. His tales are coming-of-age stories from the Mexican-American border, stories of the working class, stories of those coping with the trials of growing old in a rapidly changing society. He also explores New York with vignettes of life in the big city, capturing its loneliness and danger. Beginning with Troncoso's widely acclaimed story "Angie Luna," the tale of a feverish love affair in which a young man rediscovers his Mexican heritage and learns how much love can hurt, these stories delve into the many dimensions of the human condition. We watch boys playing a game that begins innocently but takes a dangerous turn. We see an old Anglo woman befriending her Mexican gardener because both are lonely. We witness a man terrorized in his New York apartment, taking solace in memories of lost love. Two new stories will be welcomed by Troncoso's readers. "My Life in the City" relates a transplanted Texan's yearning for companionship in New York, while "The Last Tortilla" returns to the Southwest to explore family strains after a mother's death—and the secret behind that death. Each reflects an insight about the human heart that has already established the author's work in literary circles. Troncoso sets aside the polemics about social discomfort sometimes found in contemporary Chicano writing and focuses instead on the moral and intellectual lives of his characters. The twelve stories gathered here form a richly textured tapestry that adds to our understanding of what it is to be human.

DIV DIVDIVTwelve stories of women caught in the emotional turbulence of romance in Manhattan/divDIV /div/divDIVFor the twelve narrators of Susan Minot’s breathtaking collection—artists and lawyers, teenagers and thirty-somethings—love in New York doesn’t come easy. And as they struggle to reconcile their yearnings for romance with their needs for independence, they face resistance to emotional commitment at every turn. /divDIV /divDIVIn intense snapshots of these women’s most intimate moments, Minot brings to life their dreams and disappointments, hopes and heartbreaks, and highlights the emotional fissures that divide women and men./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features a new illustrated biography of Susan Minot, including artwork by the author and rare documents and photos from her personal collection./div /div

Supernaturally tinged stories from William T. Vollmann, author of the National Book Award winner Europe Central Watch for Vollmann’s new work of nonfiction, No Immediate Danger, coming in April of 2018 In this magnificent new work of fiction, his first in nine years, celebrated author William T. Vollmann offers a collection of ghost stories linked by themes of love, death, and the erotic. A Bohemian farmer’s dead wife returns to him, and their love endures, but at a gruesome price. A geisha prolongs her life by turning into a cherry tree. A journalist, haunted by the half-forgotten killing of a Bosnian couple, watches their story, and his own wartime tragedy, slip away from him. A dying American romances the ghost of his high school sweetheart while a homeless salaryman in Tokyo animates paper cutouts of ancient heroes. Are ghosts memories, fantasies, or monsters? Is there life in death? Vollmann has always operated in the shadowy borderland between categories, and these eerie tales, however far-flung their settings, all focus on the attempts of the living to avoid, control, or even seduce death. Vollmann’s stories will transport readers to a fantastical world where love and lust make anything possible.

Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon — these are our guides through the Wastelands... From the Book of Revelations to The Road Warrior; from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Road, storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. Gathering together the best post-apocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today’s most renowned authors of speculative fiction, including George R.R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King, Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon.

Horton's elegiac anthology of 15 mostly hard SF stories illuminates a broad spectrum of grief over love thwarted through time, space, human frailty or alien intervention, from the gentle melancholy of Michael Swanwick's "Triceratops Summer," which posits tame Technicolored time-warped dinosaurs in Vermont, to newcomer Leah Bobet's "Bliss," an agonizing riff on near-future drug addiction. Several selections address current political-social issues, like Mary Rosenblum's "Search Engine," which extrapolates today's technology to chilling, Big Brotherly results. The long closing story, Alastair Reynolds's "Understanding Space and Time," however, presents a ray of cosmic hope: the sole survivor of a plague that decimated humanity is rescued and healed by intergalactic entities and lives out millennia while seeking ultimate truths, returning to see mankind regenerated. This anthology reflects the concerns of the genre today—and the apparent inability of our society to do anything about them. -- Publishers Weekly