Playful, practical, this is the style book you can't wait to use, a guide that addresses classic questions of English usage with wit & black humor. Black-&-white illustrations throughout. Introduction Sentences & what we mean by them Words & what kinds of words they are Nouns Verbs Verbals More on verbs Adjectives & adverbs Pronouns Arriving at agreements Phrases Clauses Fragments Comma splices The creation of sentences

A midwife is awoken one night to help a djinn give birth (Yemen). Ghosts of “loose-haired” women wander the newly erected border after the fall of the Soviet Union (Uzbekistan). A water ghost bound to a creek falls for the ghost of a girl wandering the surrounding forest, which is in danger of being destroyed (South Korea). With an expansive view of our haunted world, I Was Alive Here Once breathes new life into familiar tropes and brings fresh perspectives to the borderlands between life and death. In eight contemporary stories from eight different countries, this collection embraces the paradoxical nature of ghosts: as specters of collective memory or collective amnesia, as traces of our past or future, as vengeful or protective, victims or monsters.

Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature’s strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond. Frankenstein was just the beginning: horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn’t exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction. Everyone knows about Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, who was rumored to keep her late husband’s heart in her desk drawer. But have you heard of Margaret “Mad Madge” Cavendish, who wrote a science-fiction epic 150 years earlier (and liked to wear topless gowns to the theater)? If you know the astounding work of Shirley Jackson, whose novel The Haunting of Hill House was reinvented as a Netflix series, then try the psychological hauntings of Violet Paget, who was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women in the Victorian era. You’ll meet celebrated icons (Ann Radcliffe, V. C. Andrews), forgotten wordsmiths (Eli Colter, Ruby Jean Jensen), and today’s vanguard (Helen Oyeyemi). Curated reading lists point you to their most spine-chilling tales. Part biography, part reader’s guide, the engaging write-ups and detailed reading lists will introduce you to more than a hundred authors and over two hundred of their mysterious and spooky novels, novellas, and stories.

With this unique collection, acclaimed author Glen Hirshberg breathes new life into an age-old literary tradition. In the title story a husband struggles with the grief and confusion of losing two children, and forms an odd bond with the infant spectrals that visit him in the night. "Dancing Men" depicts one of the creepiest rites of passage in recent memory when a boy visits his deranged grandfather in the New Mexico desert. "Struwwelpeter" introduces us to a brilliant, treacherous adolescent whose violent tendencies and reckless mischief reach a sinister pinnacle as Halloween descends on a rundown Pacific Northwest fishing village. Tormented by his guilty conscience, a young man plumbs the depths of atonement as he and his favorite cousin commune with the almighty Hawaiian surf in "Shipwreck Beach." In "Mr. Dark¹s Carnival," a college professor confronts his own dark places in the form of a mysterious haunted house steeped in the folklore of grisly badlands justice.

Robert Olen Butler's last short story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, was a keen, piercing book told largely in the voice of Vietnamese immigrants to America. To say that his new collection is a departure is an understatement: Butler has taken actual headlines from the more outrageous of the supermarket tabloids and fashioned short fiction around them. Headlines such as "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed," "Woman Loses Cookie Bake-Off, Sets Self on Fire," and "Every Man She Kisses Dies" are the starting points for this quirky volume from one of the most original American writers at work today.

Rochelle wakes from cryostasis to take up her role as engineer on the colony ark, Calypso. But she finds the ship has transformed into a forest, populated by the original crew’s descendants, who revere her like a saint. She travels the ship with the Calypso’s creator, the enigmatic Sigmund, and Catherine, a bioengineered marvel who can commune with the plants, uncovering a new history of humanity forged while she slept. She discovers a legacy of war between botanists and engineers. A war fought for the right to build a new Earth – a technological paradise, or a new Eden in bloom, untouched by mankind’s past. And Rochelle, the last to wake, holds the balance of power in her hands.

Beyond the border of reality lies an entirely random condition of existence, where mathematiics and probability have no force. Trapped in this pocket of unspace, four very different travelers experience all the alternative potentialities of their interwoven lives, live through the possibilities of racial myth, memory and fantasy—all the while battling their way back toward orderly existence! "A beautiful and exciting and extraordinary book. Some of Joseph's alternate worlds are magical. nor does he neglect something of the pathos behind human 'relationships.

Ocho jóvenes intentan comunicarse entre sí a través de sus pantallas de ordenador. Durante el intercambio de mensajes surge la sospecha de que alguien, alguna fuerza oculta, manipula las misivas y distorsiona los contenidos, provocando una enorme confusión que les impide conocer su verdadera identidad. Confinados en un espacio físico limitado, los jóvenes parecen víctimas de un laberinto cibernético donde es casi imposible distinguir entre la realidad y su representación virtual. Bajo el asedio de Asterisco, un personaje misterioso cuyo yelmo con cuernos de toro es una suerte de máquina productora de realidades, los jóvenes se debaten para volver al mundo real. Viktor Pelevin, el escritor más irreverente, audaz y leído de la literatura rusa poscomunista, convierte la red en un laberinto posmoderno, una metáfora sobre la vida y sus dilemas, embarcando al lector en un viaje delirante, impregnado de humor surrealista.

Considered the most important work of modern Iranian literature, The Blind Owl is a haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation. Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpiece details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover. And as the author gradually drifts into frenzy and madness, the reader becomes caught in the sandstorm of Hedayat's bleak vision of the human condition. The Blind Owl, which has been translated into many foreign languages, has often been compared to the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.

A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly. When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,” Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest. At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.

A classic of Mexican modern literature about a haunted village. As one enters Juan Rulfo's legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo - lover, overlord, murderer. Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.