Aimee Bender
Author
Language
English
Description
"On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attentions, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. But her gift is no blessing, for her mother - her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother - tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food...
Author
Language
English
Description
A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. Two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who...
Author
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Formats
Description
"On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A darkly comic collection of stories features men and women whose lives are pulled into the bizarre by their erotic desires. A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A...
Author
Language
English
Description
What would you write if no one knew who you were? In the spirit of the demolition derby, where drivers take heedless risks with reckless abandon, welcome to the first convocation of the Secret Society of Demolition Writers. Here is a one-of-a-kind collection by famous authors writing anonymously-and dangerously. With the usual concerns about reputations and renown cast aside, these twelve daredevils have each contributed an extreme, no-holds-barred...
Publisher
Akashic Books
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Philip K. Dick to Aldous Huxley. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, urban sprawl, and diversity, Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. This debut title of a new city-based anthology series features brand-new tales from 14 of the...
Publisher
Akashic Books
Pub. Date
[2023]
Language
English
Description
"While the common belief is that "body horror" as a subgenre of horror fiction dates back to the 1970s, Joyce Carol Oates suggests that Medusa, the snake-haired gorgon in Greek mythology, is the "quintessential emblem of female body horror." In A Darker Shade of New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers, Oates has assembled a spectacular cast to explore this subgenre focusing on distortions to the human body in the most fascinating of ways" -- Page...
13) A Touch of Magic
Author
Publisher
Symphony Space, Inc
Language
English
Description
"Remarkable how the nursery caught the telepathic emanations of the
children's minds...The children thought lions, and there were lions..."
-From The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
By turns funny, moving, romantic and surreal, and filled with unexpected twists and turns, each of the tales on this lineup has a magical element.
Andrew Lam's
The Palmist
performed by James Naughton
A chance encounter on a bus between a fortune-teller
...