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Lucy has always known that she was different from the other kids in her home. Of course, it doesn’t help that she suffers from a recurring nightmare that wakes her up with a scream on her lips and sweat pouring down her back. The nightmare is driving her crazy. She’s too scared to sleep, she’s too tired to live, and she feels as though it’s never going to get better...until Daniel shows up, that is.

Hope is the light that burns brightest when times are dark and breathes life into what is best within us. Here are 24 stories that will make you laugh, cry, question, and ultimately believe in better tomorrows. The writers met on Zoom during COVID and are all members of the same writing meetup group.

Barry Hannah's death on March 1 brought writers and fans out of the woodwork to mourn an irrevocable loss to American letters. Now, combining the best of the four story collections he published during his lifetime - Airships, Captain Maximus, Bats Out of Hell, and High Lonesome - and drawing from his final, never-before-seen manuscript, Long, Last, Happy will cement his legacy and serve as the definitive collection of his finest work in the story form.

Asian Anthology: New Writing Vol. 1 is a showcase of short stories and place writing by both new and more established prize-winning writers. Some unexpected, a few surreal and others traditional, these are 22 compelling stories of irony, humanity and satire, exploring a range of subject matter to reveal a glimpse of modern Asian society and culture: a funeral in India, a hotel encounter in Japan, a sleepless night in Hong Kong.

A boy who hates bugs starts to see them everywhere. A basketball player’s skin starts to almost drip off his hands—but no one else can see it. Three friends find a hole in the ground that just gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger... And each story is introduced by Stine himself, providing a personal touch sure to delight fans. Laced with Stine’s signature humor and a hefty dose of nightmarish fun, Stinetinglers is perfect for fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Stine’s own Goosebumps books.

After a long run as a respected journalist, Edward “Fitz” Fitzhugh is on his way out when he stumbles across the story of a lifetime. The Gravedigger is a serial kidnapper who taunts the police with riddles. The other puzzle is his motive, which Fitz is determined to piece together. When an eyewitness to the latest abduction leads Fitz closer to the facts, he realizes that the last great story of his career is not at all what it appears to be.

In these short stories, collected and translated by Ralph McCarthy, we can see just how closely Dazai’s life mirrored his art, and vice versa, as the writer/narrator falls from grace, rises to fame, and falls again. Addiction, debt, shame, and despair dogged Dazai until his self-inflicted death, and yet despite all the lies and deception he resorted to in life, there is an almost fanatical honesty to his writing.

Caribbean born novelist Tobias Buckell established himself as a gifted new voice in science fiction with his stunning first novel Crystal Rain. Now, in his first collection, Buckell demonstrates his strengths in the short form, offering readers a collection of stories that are compelling, smart, wonderfully imagined, and entertaining. Tides from the New Worlds contains 19 stories that range from multicultural science fiction to magical realism, some in print for the first time.

Andy Wofford, middle-aged father and English teacher at a third-tier private school, receives a surprising invitation for a drink from an old college classmate. Once awkward and forgettable, Michael Kinnick has become a famous, wealthy, and absurdly confident lifestyle guru. Of all the people who’d want to catch up, why Michael? After thirty divergent years, why now? Mildly apprehensive, Andy is also very curious.

Biff Denver's affair with his nubile secretary is about to have consequences that he doesn't realize. The Futa MILF Virus gender-swaps men into women. So when Biff gets home that night, he's in for a big surprise. Becoming a busty MILF named Buffy. And that's not the gender-swapped MILF's only surprise. Her wife, Angelica Denver, is packing her own big futa-surprise! The gender-swapped Buffy finds herself aching to give her hot futa-wife's new delight a try.

In this, Theodore Dalrymple’s second collection of short stories, he begins to let his imagination run. The absurdity of modern life is fully laid bare when taken to extremes. You will laugh through your tears.

When a young couple moves into their new home, they are taken aback by the strange behavior of their new landlord. While at first he bid them to do all of the fixing-up the home needed on their own, he quickly changed his tune and was persistent in his attempts to help them tackle some of the rooms himself. The source of his desire to help lies in the fact that the old tenant may have hidden a fortune within the walls - a fortune that winds up belonging to the young couple after all!

Fight demons. Fall in love. Save the world. Welcome to Angel Academy. Need to escape into a world of take charge heroines, hot angels, and a battle that rages between good and evil - and for Celeste’s heart? Look no further. My name is Celeste Venoix and I’m no angel. I never had a family, so I’ve been taking care of myself ever since I was a kid. One night, some creep follows me home, and I use my fists to put him in his place. After the brawl, a handsome stranger approaches me, saying that I might be an angel.

"Years later," Donald Davis remember of his childhood," I came to realize that when you come from a long-dammed-up Scots-Irish gene pool it is an okay thing to wish for something, but it is not an OK thing to get it."

Perhaps no living author of imaginative fiction has earned the awards, accolades, respect, and literary reputation of Gene Wolfe. His prose has been called subtle and brilliant, inspiring not just lovers of fantasy and science fiction, but listeners of every stripe, transcending genre and defying preconceptions.

Boxed set containing all the volumes of the What a Girl Wants series by Emma Reid and Third Cousins. From Book 1: Sarah has spent her whole life fighting against her father’s wishes. She doesn’t care about his old beliefs and traditions; she just wants to go to college. Sarah’s determined to do something with her life that doesn’t involve baking pies and being a good wife, and she’s convinced that with enough hard work, she’ll manage it all. That is, until she gets put on a class assignment with Robert Hasting who seems intent on causing trouble in her life.

Parents love to read children a bedtime story that describes a faraway land or a fantastic character. What is that parent doing? They’re shifting their child’s focus from the activity of the day into a more relaxed state. They are refocusing their child’s brain. And it works! Because every night all over the world parents use this technique to help their children fall asleep. Even though you are an adult, you can benefit from bedtime stories too.

A mysterious note from Merlin sends Jack and Annie to Paris, France, for the 1889 World's Fair. Their mission: find four "new magicians" and protect them from an evil sorcerer who plans to kidnap them and steal the secrets of their magic. When Jack and Annie arrive at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, they find exhibits from all over the world and thousands of people attending the fair!

Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy listeners who are sick of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm in your seat, stay up at night, laugh out loud, and inevitably wish for more.

In time for the one-year anniversary of the Trump inauguration and the Women's March, this provocative, unprecedented anthology features original short stories from 30 best-selling and award-winning authors - including Alice Walker, Richard Russo, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Mary Higgins Clark, and Lee Child - with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.