Comedy Fantasy Short

In this darkly comic and surreal collection from celebrated author Alissa Nutting, misfit women scramble for agency in a series of uncanny circumstances. Throughout these breathtakingly creative 17 stories spread across time, space, and differing planes of reality, we encounter a host of women and girls in a wide range of unusual jobs. A space cargo deliverywoman enlists the help of her cybersex partner to release her mother from cryogenic prison.

Here is Old Man's War author John Scalzi's sendup of the heroic fantasy genre, now a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

It's been a year since Bubba settled things with his crazy brother Jason once and for all, and what a year it's been! The third volume of collected Bubba stories contains more monsters, more inter-dimensional travel, more duels to the death, and more guitar solos than any other season of Bubba yet! Wine, Women, & Song is a collected edition including the novellas Moon over Bourbon Street, Night at the Museum, Midsummer, Oh Bubba, Where Art Thou?

In "The Robot Who Looked Like Me," a busy man and a busy woman find a way to carve out time to romance each other—by having look-alike robots made to do the job—who then run away together.

Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal desert of the soul, an admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a 3,000-word sentence in defense of his passion, an aging porn star dons a dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of a lifetime, and Leonard Cohen shills for Subway: these mercurial and wildly varied stories explode the conventions of short fiction.

Placed under a death debt to a local king by the actions of her mother, Cups finds she can't grow her wings like a proper fairy should. Faced with a sentence of life without the possibility of flight unless she can fulfill her mother's oath, she takes a job at the castle as the Least Jester - only to find the job riddled with all manner of dangers from cupcakes to tea daemons to earth dragons and, worst of all, daydreaming princesses.

When God descends to earth as a Dinka woman from Sudan and subsequently dies in the Darfur desert, the result is a world bizarrely new yet eerily familiar. In Ron Currie's provocative, wise, and emotionally resonant novel we meet God himself; the Dinka woman whose mortality He must suffer when He inhabits her body; people all over the world coping with the devastating news of God's demise.

Tales from the Eerie Canal weaves the sinister mystery of Edgar Allan Poe with the dark humor of Edward Gorey. No canal. No Lake Erie. Just a stream of the disturbing splashed with bits of the absurd.

When Wulfric needs the season's hottest toy, he turns to the only person who can help: Tammy's new boyfriend, who might not be human. Between pizza dinners, helpful Fae, and stacks of waffles, join the crew of Halfway as they solve a Christmas mystery and find out that sometimes, what you can't see can really hurt you. This humorous paranormal short is for fans of witches, waffles, and Christmas. Listen with a cup of tea, and beware - there are spoilers ahead if you've not visited Halfway before.

Jon is a grade school student who has a part-time job at a labratory where they experiment with animal DNA. When he hears that one of the scientists needs a tray full of samples, Jon runs to get it, trying to show how helpful he can be. In his haste he spill the contents of nine cups of animal DNA and the contents mix together. Sure, it was an accident, but the results make for an amazing discovery.

In near-future America, film critic Noah Body uploads his reviews to a content aggregator. His job is routine: watch, seethe, pan. He dreams of making his own film, free from the hackery of commercial cinema. Faced with writing about lousy movies for a website that no one reads, Noah smuggles into his work episodes from his trainwreck of a life. We learn that his apartment in Miniature Aleppo has been stripped of furniture after his wife ran off with his best friend - who Noah believes has possessed his body.

Peter, Quinn, Romeo, and Sam are four (lame) shapeshifters (platypus, mosquito, piranha, sloth) who also happen to be best friends and members of a (terrible) garage band. But the local Battle of the Bands is happening on the full moon, and the boys are forced to turn to Sam's non-were (Goth) sister Natalie to help them out.

Ossie and Baxter are on a mission. They've been sent to conduct a membership interview with Yancey Allyson, the latest applicant to The Society of Super Powered Heroes. But what will they do when they discover that Mr. Allyson is a little bit...unorthodox?

Today is a day like any other on Earth. People wake and work. Minds plug into electronic devices. Social networks spark with spontaneous brain sputterings. And news anchors across the globe offer an ounce of vital information for every pound of mind-numbing nonsense.... Then, the figurative bomb hits. Screens are ablaze, and radio is abuzz with a news flash like no other: Earth has been inherited. The planet has a new owner. And he's not happy to find his endowment overrun by a planetary pestilence.

Don't believe everything the characters tell you. Recommended for fans of John Crowley, Paul Park, and Michael Swanwick.

This is a humorous, episodic novel of dark fantasy and science fiction, composed of the four novellas Amy and the Ankylosaurus, Helen and the Evil Elves of the Elder Gods, Sithe in the City, and Dragon vs Dinosaur. It begins when Magnus creates a device to open portals to other quantum universes so he can show his ex-girlfriend, Amy, real dinosaurs. This goes awry when Amy goes through the portal and he has to rescue her, accompanied by his fellow scientist Helen, Amy's best friend.

When his brother bumbles a burglary, Finn Bates blasts into space with the cops hot on his heels and his brother's DNA broadcast to every spaceport around. With the number of places he can land approaching zero, Finn must plan one final score that his brother can't possibly screw up, or risk getting kicked off every decent planet in the universe.

With her handler, Shiba patrols her territory for illicit magic. But Shiba has just lost her lifelong partner, and his replacement doesn't trust her. With nasty illicit magic sneaking across the border, what's a bitch to do? Of course, the real question is, "Will she do it in time?"

This collection of short stories encompasses 20 years of work by Howard Fast, including some of his best-known and most treasured tales. Not merely fantasy or science fiction, these "Zen stories" explore the world’s mysterious and unanswerable questions, big and small, and the results are at once bizarre, humorous, chilling, and poignant. An American general shoots down what appears to be an angel during a Vietnam War battle, a celebrated author becomes a hunted man, and a mouse is granted human thought and emotion by a group of alien beings.

I ventuno episodi che compongono l'audiolibro formano nelle intenzioni dell'autore un resoconto accurato delle vicende umane viste attraverso gli occhi degli dei. L'ascoltatore viene introdotto nella narrazione attraverso una particolare lente di ingrandimento. Le dimensioni, le distanze perdono senso. Un caffè può diventare il centro immobile di un piccolo universo. I personaggi si muovono attraverso scenari che sono solo lo sfondo delle loro vicende quotidiane.