Inspired by horror fiction, myths and fairy tales, Apple and Knife is an unsettling ride that swerves into the supernatural to explore the dangers and power of occupying a female body in today’s world. These short fictions set in the Indonesian everyday—in corporate boardrooms, in shanty towns, on dangdut stages—reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. Sometimes wacky and always engrossing, this is subversive feminist horror at its best, where men and women alike are arbiters of fear, and where revenge is sometimes sweetest when delivered from the grave. Mara finds herself brainstorming an ad campaign for Free Maxi Pads, with a little help from the menstruation-eating hag of her childhood. Jamal falls in love with the rich and powerful Bambang, but it is the era of the smiling general and, if he’s not careful, he may find himself recruited to Bambang’s brutal cause. Solihin would give anything to make dangdut singer Salimah his wife – anything at all. In the globally connected and fast-developing Indonesia of Apple and Knife, taboos, inversions, sex and death all come together in a heady, intoxicating mix full of pointed critiques and bloody mutilations. Women carve a place for themselves in this world, finding ways to subvert norms or enacting brutalities on themselves and each other.

A best-of story selection by the master of horror manga.This volume includes nine of Junji Ito’s best short stories, as selected by the author himself and presented with accompanying notes and commentary. An arm peppered with tiny holes dangles from a sick girl’s window… After an idol hangs herself, balloons bearing faces appear in the sky, some even featuring your own face… An amateur film crew hires an extremely individualistic fashion model and faces a real bloody ending… An offering of nine fresh nightmares for the delight of horror fans. 1. Used Record or Second-Hand Record (from House of the Marionettes, あやつりの屋敷 Ayatsuri no Yashiki), a story about people fighting over the ownership of a record that has a singer's singing as they died recorded on it. 2. Shiver (from Slug Girl, なめくじの少女 Namekuji no Shoujo), a story about a cursed jade stone that causes holes to open up all over a person's body if they're around it. 3. Fashion Model (from Souichi's Diary of Curses, 双一の呪い日記, Sōichi no Noroi no Nikki), a story about an oddly ominous fashion model. 4. Hanging Balloons (from The Face Burglar, 顔泥棒 Kao Dorobou), a story about balloon headed dopplegangers out to hunt their counterparts the moment they go outside. 5. Marionette Mansion (from House of the Marionettes, あやつりの屋敷 Ayatsuri no Yashiki), a story about a family who rather than deciding what they do or how they live, they instead hire puppeteers to control their actions via strings from the attic of their home. 6. Painter (from Tomie), a story about a strange but beautiful woman named Tomie who wishes for an artist to accurately capture her beauty, and all the misfortune that happens as a result... 7. The Long Dream (from The Story of the Mysterious Tunnel,トンネル奇譚 Ton'neru kitan), a story about a man who claims that the length of his dreams are becoming longer and longer and about how he begins to change as his dreams extend farther and farther. 8. Honored Ancestors (from The Face Burglar, 顔泥棒 Kao Dorobou), a story about an amnesiac girl and the encounter that caused her to lose her memories and about carrying on the family line. At all costs. 9. Greased (from Voices in the Dark, 闇の声 Yami no Koe, a story about oil and grease. 10. Fashion Model: Cursed Frame [new]

A collection full of grotesque imagination and surreal urban legends. Every night, a young man hears children playing outside of his boarding house. But the alley below his window is fenced off from the world. What secret lies within the stains on the alley’s walls? Then, when a young woman’s family starts acting strangely at the same time she begins having bizarre dreams, she decides to stay with her aunt, but the town she heads for has neither addresses or roads… Also, an all-you-can-eat ice cream truck that’s more sinister than sweet! Legendary horror author Junji Ito presents ten blood-curdling short stories.

A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.  As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.  In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories.  Morris explains what drove She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.” 

A delightfully thought-provoking study of why we have sex, from award-winning psychoanalyst Darian Leader'It was just sex.'It's a familiar claim. But is it really possible?The old idea that sexuality is a smouldering, animalistic force within us, desperate for release yet restrained by social forces, has little to support it. Bodies aren't just sticks that make fire when you rub them together, and the pain, heartache, and regret that can accompany the highs of sexual excitement show us that much more is at stake.So, what are we really thinking about when we think about sex? And what are we really doing when we do it?As acclaimed psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues, with his trademark clarity, energy and wit, there is no such thing as 'just sex'. It is always about so much more than that - about phantasy, anxiety, guilt, revenge, violence, love - and Leader draws on his analytic experience, historical research and case studies to explore their importance to every aspect of our sexual lives.'One of our most important contemporary thinkers' Guardian 'Leader writes beautifully, with majestic clarity and an easy flow between argument and case-study' Telegraph'Leader is as much a philosopher as a psychoanalyst and his ideas are engrossing and enlightening' Metro

Through an intensive study of 'Aaron Green,' a Freudian analyst in New York City, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm reveals the inner workings of psychoanalysis.

In a style that is writerly and audacious, Adam Phillips takes up a variety of seemingly ordinary subjects underinvestigated by psychoanalysis--kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, composure, even farting as it relates to worrying. He argues that psychoanalysis began as a virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine, but that virtuosity has given way to the dream of science that only the examined life is worth living. Phillips goes on to show how the drive to omniscience has been unfortunate both for psychoanalysis and for life. He reveals how much one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists examination.

A best-of story selection by the master of horror manga.This volume includes nine of Junji Ito’s best short stories, as selected by the author himself and presented with accompanying notes and commentary. An arm peppered with tiny holes dangles from a sick girl’s window… After an idol hangs herself, balloons bearing faces appear in the sky, some even featuring your own face… An amateur film crew hires an extremely individualistic fashion model and faces a real bloody ending… An offering of nine fresh nightmares for the delight of horror fans. 1. Used Record or Second-Hand Record (from House of the Marionettes, あやつりの屋敷 Ayatsuri no Yashiki), a story about people fighting over the ownership of a record that has a singer's singing as they died recorded on it. 2. Shiver (from Slug Girl, なめくじの少女 Namekuji no Shoujo), a story about a cursed jade stone that causes holes to open up all over a person's body if they're around it. 3. Fashion Model (from Souichi's Diary of Curses, 双一の呪い日記, Sōichi no Noroi no Nikki), a story about an oddly ominous fashion model. 4. Hanging Balloons (from The Face Burglar, 顔泥棒 Kao Dorobou), a story about balloon headed dopplegangers out to hunt their counterparts the moment they go outside. 5. Marionette Mansion (from House of the Marionettes, あやつりの屋敷 Ayatsuri no Yashiki), a story about a family who rather than deciding what they do or how they live, they instead hire puppeteers to control their actions via strings from the attic of their home. 6. Painter (from Tomie), a story about a strange but beautiful woman named Tomie who wishes for an artist to accurately capture her beauty, and all the misfortune that happens as a result... 7. The Long Dream (from The Story of the Mysterious Tunnel,トンネル奇譚 Ton'neru kitan), a story about a man who claims that the length of his dreams are becoming longer and longer and about how he begins to change as his dreams extend farther and farther. 8. Honored Ancestors (from The Face Burglar, 顔泥棒 Kao Dorobou), a story about an amnesiac girl and the encounter that caused her to lose her memories and about carrying on the family line. At all costs. 9. Greased (from Voices in the Dark, 闇の声 Yami no Koe, a story about oil and grease. 10. Fashion Model: Cursed Frame [new]

In the twilight of a polluted planet... — He rejoiced at the sight of flies in a world where everything was dying out. He had 600,000 dollars in the bank, but worked as a garbage-man, and lived in a slum tenement in the heart of a rotting city. He had started a movement that could save the Earth... but was forced to go into hiding to save his own life! A terrifying apocalypse of the future...

From the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones comes a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher." When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruravia. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves. Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers. This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.

SciFi’s favorite antisocial A.I. is again on a mission. The case against the too-big-to-fail GrayCris Corporation is floundering, and more importantly, authorities are beginning to ask more questions about where Dr. Mensah’s SecUnit is. And Murderbot would rather those questions went away. For good.