Aimee Bender

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...

Aimee Bender sits down with Heidi Julavits to discuss her book, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Lillo Wei reads an excerpt from the book.

"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...

An anthology of the bizarre. In The Rememberer, a man undergoes reverse evolution--from man to ape to salamander--at which point a friend releases him into the sea, while in another story a woman gives birth to her mother.

Short stories capture the lives of such offbeat characters as a delusional schizophrenic, an egg donor with second thoughts, and a young girl who discovers a portal to another, ghostly world.

A chilling noir collection featuring fifteen crime and mystery tales and six poems from female authors.
Joyce Carol Oates, a queen-pin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy readers who are sick and...

"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

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