A new North American edition of an acclaimed short story collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing explores what happens when ordinary people collide with bizarre, fantastical situations. A man discovers he has testicular cancer on the day that a Godzilla-like monster attacks the city he lives in; a kitchen-hand is put under terrible peer pressure in a restaurant for zombies; a husband and wife discover they are pregnant with 37 babies; and a man travels into the engine room of his own body to discover Busta Rhymes at the controls. The 14 stories are grotesque, hilarious, unnerving, and moving. No matter how outrageous the subject matter of the stories, they have at their heart genuine human experiences that are common to us all. Bonus BackLit materials will include two new stories and an interview with the author.

Instruction Manual for Swallowing

Literature & Fiction

Marek, Adam

Genre Fiction

ECW Press

A bold voice in absurdist short fiction Intelligent clothing, superhero dictators, contagion-carrying computer games, cross-species reproduction. Welcome to the strange and startling world of Adam Marek; a menagerie of futuristic technology, sinister traditions, and scientifically grounded superpowers a place where the absurd and the mundane are not merely bedfellows, but interbreed. At the core of Adam Marek’s much-anticipated second short story collection is a single, unifying theme: a parent’s instinct to protect a particularly vulnerable child. Whether set amid unnerving visions of the near-future or grounded in the domestic here-and-now, these stories demonstrate that, sometimes, only outright surrealism can do justice to the merciless strangeness of reality, that only the fantastically illogical can steel us against what ordinary life threatens. Bonus BackLit materials will include an interview and a list of Marek’s recommended books.

The Stone Thrower (BackLit Series)

Literary

Revealing a bestiary of hybrids from the techno-crazed future and the mythological past, this surreal short story collection takes imaginative leaps through a science fiction influenced landscape. Reflecting a cinematic feel, young couples reach defining stages in their relationships as zombies fall in love, a stalker tracks a young woman through time only to discover he’s related to her, and a young man battles Godzilla in order to prove a point to his girlfriend. Blurring the boundaries between reality and hallucination—from robotic insects and in-growing cutlery to a woman impregnated with 37 embryos—these fantastical tales offer a world where the body is fluid, the spirit is mechanized, and the beasts know more about humanity than the humans do.

Short Stories & Anthologies

Comma Press

<div>Something has fallen away. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma's award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject--Julia Kristeva's theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille's societal equivalent--with visceral stories of modern unease.</div>

The New Abject: Tales of Modern Unease (Modern Horror)

Woodward, Gerard

HADDON, Mark

Williams, Lara

CONSTANTINE, David

Haddad, Saleem

THEROUX,PAUL

Beard, Alan

Schofield, Sarah

Holness, Matthew

Haughey, Meave

McKnight Hardy, Lucie

Poulson, Christine

Bishop, Bernadine

Featherstone, Karen

Holmes, Gaia

Campbell, Ramsey

DRABBLE, Margaret

A decade after the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the large Hadron Collider at CERN still leads the world in the search to uncover what the universe is made of, how it was formed, and what fate may lie in store for it. If there is such a thing as a cutting edge, it surely lies 100 metres below the Swiss-French border, at the point the beams collide. As part of a unique collaboration, this book pairs a team of award-winning authors with CERN physicists to explore some of the consequences of what the LHC is learning, through fiction. Authors include Sherlock and Dr. Who writer Steven Moffat, novelist and Small Axe screenwriter Courttia Newland, Dame Margaret Drabble and SF legends Ian Watson (whose credits include the screenplay for the Spielberg's A.I.) and Stephen Baxter (winner of the Philip K Dick and John W Campbell Memorial Award). Featuring CERN physicist and engineers: Professor Lyn Evans, Professor John Ellis, Dr. Andrea Bersani, Dr. Tessa Charles, Dr. Joey Huston, Dr. Michael Davis, Dr. Carole Weydert, Dr. Joe Haley, Dr. Kristin Lohwasser, Dr. Pete Dong, Dr. Daniel Cervenkov, Dr. Andrea Giammanco.

Collision: Stories From the Science of CERN

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Caldwell, Lucy

Moffat, Steven

Goldie, Luan

Newland, Courttia

Mamata, Bidisha SK

Reynolds, Désirée

Baxter,Stephen

Watson, Ian.

Kalu, Peter

Luxx, Lisa

Science Fiction

Plant-based skyscrapers, reluctant sex robots, pencil-wielding black-belts fighting a zombie apocalypse... Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Adam Marek' s third collection: an almanac of the absurd, a handbook to the hardware problems of being human. From driverless bodies, to life-coaching AIs, to sleep research on primates, to the effects of time dilation on married life... these stories explore the unlikeliest of possibilities the future may hold for us, as a race, but at their heart is a paradox: what happens when the seemingly limitless potential of human ability runs up against the insurmountable inadequacies of basic human psychology? Sons never forgive their fathers. Superheroes are brought low by simple performance anxiety. Billionaire space industrialists are exposed by their bad parenting skills. Hardwired into our humanity, it seems, are bugs that no amount of future upgrades can ever fix.

THE UNIVERSE DELIVERS THE ENEMY YOU NEED PB

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