Fantasy Short Stories

Mia Devlin knows what it is like to love with your whole heart - and then watch your love walk away. Years ago, she and Sam Logan shared an incredible bond built on passion, legend, and fate. But then one day he fled Three Sisters Island, leaving her lost in memories of the magic they shared - and determined to live without love. But now Sam has returned....

Katya deals in Authenticities, trading on nostalgia for a past long gone. But when she encounters a stranger who calls himself Johnny in the woods - even she can't say whether it's real or not.

On Mars, a scientist experiments with a new engine that will one day become the drive that fuels humanity's journey into the stars. On an asteroid station, a group of prisoners are oblivious to the catastrophe that awaits them. On a future Earth beset by overpopulation, pollution, and poverty, a crime boss desperately seeks to find a way off planet. On an alien world, a human family struggles to establish a colony and make a new home. All these stories and more are featured in this unmissable collection of short fiction set in the hardscrabble world of The Expanse.

No resources. No memories. No help. Jak awakens, cold and confused, on the shore of an unknown island at the beginning of a dangerous nightfall. With nothing but his name and a head drained of memory, he stumbles into the nearby forest and is quickly forced to fight for his very survival. When he meets Niri, a beautiful elf exiled from her people and left to die in the wilderness, he begins the quest to build his own tribe in a land of blood, brutality, and wild adventure.

The EMP has officially crippled the nation and her infrastructure sits in ruin. Can a burned-out DEA agent, a Guatemalan-born cartel daughter, and an estranged brother find their way back to their families, or will they succumb to the perils of a nation in steep decline? The Complete Age of Embers is a no-holds-barred post-apocalyptic adventure series chronicling a nationwide descent into a powerless world. 

Travel on an unpredictable and unforgettable literary journey. Find a horrified mother who gives birth to a strange blue pyramid. Encounter an amazing Electrical Grandmother who comes to live with a grieving family. Meet an old parrot who learned over long evenings to imitate the voice of Ernest Hemingway, and becomes the last link to the last link to the great man. Each of these magnificent creations has something to tell us about our own humanity - and all of their fates await you in this collection of 28 classic Bradbury stories and one luscious poem.

When Michael Moorcock began chronicling the adventures of the albino sorcerer Elric, last king of decadent Melniboné, and his sentient vampiric sword, Stormbringer, he set out to create a new kind of fantasy adventure, one that broke with tradition and reflected a more up-to-date sophistication of theme and style. The result was a bold and unique hero: a rock-and-roll antihero who would channel all the violent excesses of the '60s into one enduring archetype.

On the island of Avalon, everyone has magical abilities. Except Selena Pearce. As if being the only nonmagical person on the island isn’t bad enough, her parents happen to be the king and queen of Avalon - and the most magical people alive. She’s never felt like she fit in on Avalon, but that all changes when she leaves the island and meets Julian - a mesmerizing, mysterious human.

No one could ask for a better present than a collection of Connie Willis Christmas tales. These are amazing stories, representing all the best of the Connie Willis experience: true Christmas gifts to her many fans. They are full of humor, absurdity, human foibles, tragedy, joy, and hope. They both send up and embrace many of the best Christmas traditions, such as the Christmas newsletter, Secret Santas, office parties, holiday pageants, and Christmas dinners (both elaborate and spare).

The primarchs, nigh-immortal sons of the Emperor of Mankind, take the stage in a series of short stories showcasing some of their great deeds and hideous acts from across the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy.

Anna never knew werewolves existed until the night she survived a violent attack…and became one herself. After three years at the bottom of the pack, she’d learned to keep her head down and never, ever trust dominant males. But Anna is that rarest kind of werewolf: an Omega. And one of the most powerful werewolves in the country will recognize her value as a pack member—and as his mate.

Prolific novelist Stross pauses to collect short stories that have not (yet) been stitched up into his longer work. Stories that move the US - USSR conflict onto a massive disk in another galaxy (Locus Award-winner "Missile Gap"), offer a spam-filter solution to the Fermi paradox ("MAXOS"), and suggest clever bargains with the devil in a newly frozen Scotland ("Snowball's Chance") demonstrate Stross's ability to crisscross genres, blending SF, fantasy, horror, and espionage.

In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves.

Young Demigods, Your Destiny Awaits! You must prepare yourself for a difficult future: fighting monsters, adventuring across the globe, and dealing with temperamental Greek and Roman gods. You’ll join your favorite demigods from the Percy Jackson and the Heroes of Olympus series as they face dangerous foes and perilous tasks. What you learn from their experiences could very well save your life!

Zombie, Indiana explores the impact of an invading zombie horde on a trio of Hoosier protagonists…each of whom have some dark secrets to keep. When the governor’s daughter mysteriously disappears on a field trip, IMPD Special Sergeant James Nolan, scholarship student Kesha Washington, and Governor Hank Burleson must all come together not only to find the governor’s daughter, but also to undertake a quest to redeem the very soul of the state itself…all while under constant attack from the living dead.

Taken from my old life with little memory of what brought me here, I wake up in a high tech capsule. A wrinkly old elf tells me that my soul is incomplete and has been fused with that of a Solar Dragon to give me a second chance at life. Where? When? An urban metropolis filled with fantasy races, erected atop the back of a giant asteroid. Meteoropolis. And millions of years in the future, to boot. But that's not all. I've got super powers, too. To add to the excitement, I end up hosted by an anxious unicorn elf named Pinky Peach who is basically a professional gamer girl.

It started as a simple heist. It went to hell from there. On a space station orbiting a pale blue sun, a package changes hands. Data too sensitive to transmit will be exposed for one brief moment. The client is paying a crazy sum - if the job is clean. That’s not going to happen. Instead, the galaxy’s unluckiest crew of outlaws will have to put all their resources into salvaging what they can from the job. Even if it’s only avoiding blame for the fallout.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

An IT whiz at the Babylon Casino is enlisted to upgrade security for the game of keno and its random-number generator. The new quantum computer system is foolproof. But someone on the inside is no fool. For once the odds may not favor the house - unless human ingenuity isn’t entirely a thing of the past.

In the tradition of his best-selling debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason's Metamorphica transforms Ovid's epic poem of endless transformation. It reimagines the stories of Narcissus, Pygmalion and Galatea, Midas, and Atalanta and strings them together like the stars in constellations - even Ovid becomes a story. It's as though the ancient mythologies had been rewritten by Borges or Calvino.