Catherynne M Valente

When his mother accidentally kills a Quidhunk in the woods, Osmo Unknown must embark on a quest to find the Eightpenny Woods--the mysterious kingdom where all wild forest creatures go when they die--and make amends. Osmo Unknown hungers for the world beyond his small town. With the life that Littlebridge society has planned for him, the only taste Osmo will ever get are his visits to the edge of the Fourpenny Woods where his mother hunts. Until the...

"Mankind will not get to fight for its destiny. They must sing. A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire concept of intelligent space-faring life. In the aftermath, a curious tradition was invented by the remnants of civilization. Something to cheer up everyone who was left. Something to celebrate having escaped total annihilation by the skin of one's teeth, if indeed one has skin. Or teeth. Something to...

"Inside a small Yorkshire parsonage, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë have invented a game called Glass Town, where their toy soldiers fight Napoleon and no one dies. This make-believe land helps the four escape from a harsh reality: Charlotte and Emily are being sent away to a dangerous boarding school, a school they might not return from. But on this Beastliest Day, the day Anne and Branwell walk their sisters to the train station, something...

A girl has been born into a world with no place for a half-native, half-white child. After being hidden for years, a very wicked stepmother finally gifts her with the name Snow White, referring to the pale skin she will never have. Filled with fascinating glimpses through the fabled looking glass and a close-up look at hard living in the gritty gun-slinging West, readers will be enchanted by this story at once familiar and entirely new.

"A young troll named Hawthorn is stolen from Fairyland by the Golden Wind, and becomes a changeling in our world, a place no less bizarre than Fairyland in his eyes." --

"The Quarian ark Keelah Si'yah sails toward the Andromeda galaxy, carrying 20,000 colonists from sundry races including the drell, the elcor, and the batarians. Thirty years from their destination, a routine check reveals drell lying dead in their pods, and a deadly pathogen on board. Soon, the disease is jumping species, and it quickly becomes clear that this is no accident. It's murder, and the perpetrator is still on board. The ship's systems rapidly...

". . . [An anthology of short stories that] explore what happens when video games and science fiction collide. From text-based adventures to first-person shooters, dungeon crawlers to horror games, these twenty-six stories play with our notion of what video games can be -- and what they can become -- in smart and singular ways." -- Page [4] of cover.