"The Girl at the End of the World: Book 1" (published by Fox Spirit)
Anxious to dig into this one as one of my stories has been included in the anthology. Here's what Fox Spirit has to say about the collection as a whole:
"It’s
the end of days. The sky is falling, the seas are burning and your
neighbour is a zombie. It’s brutal out there. It’s every man for
himself and these heels are going to have to go; you simply can’t
run in them!
Across
two volumes, The Girl at the End of the World offers forty-one
striking visions of the apocalypse and the women and girls dealing
with it. From gods to zombies, from epic to deeply personal, from the
moment of impact to a future where life is long forgotten;
bestselling authors and exciting new writers deliver tales you’ll
still remember when holed up in a fallout shelter with one remaining
bullet and a best friend with a suspicious bite mark on their neck."
"California" by Edan Lepucki
“The
world Cal and Frida have always known is gone, and they've left the
crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a
shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days
tolerable in the face of hardship and isolation. Mourning a past they
can't reclaim, they seek solace in each other. But the tentative
existence they've built for themselves is thrown into doubt when
Frida finds out she's pregnant.
Terrified
of the unknown and unsure of their ability to raise a child alone,
Cal and Frida set out for the nearest settlement, a guarded and
paranoid community with dark secrets. These people can offer them
security, but Cal and Frida soon realize this community poses dangers
of its own. In this unfamiliar world, where everything and everyone
can be perceived as a threat, the couple must quickly decide whom to
trust.
A
gripping and provocative debut novel by a stunning new talent,
California imagines a frighteningly realistic near future, in
which clashes between mankind's dark nature and deep-seated
resilience force us to question how far we will go to protect the
ones we love.”
"The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon
“The
Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon's classic satire of modern
America, about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in
what would appear to be an international conspiracy.
When
her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and
designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife
Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols,
and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern
California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and
attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.”
"Left Hand" by Paul Curran
"Left Hand is every
reason why Paul Curran is one of the smartest, most daring, meticulous,
violent, delicate, awe-inspiring new fiction chiselers in the known
world, if you ask me. His work has been a huge favorite of lucky
insiders like me for years, and now the secret is finally and definitely
out." -Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
"Sweetness #9" by Stephan Eirik Clark
“It's
1973, and David Leveraux has landed his dream job as a
Flavorist-in-Training, working in the secretive industry where
chemists create the flavors for everything from the cherry in your
can of soda to the butter on your popcorn.
While
testing a new artificial sweetener--"Sweetness #9"--he
notices unusual side-effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys:
anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a generalized dissatisfaction with
life. David tries to blow the whistle, but he swallows it instead.
Years
later, Sweetness #9 is America's most popular sweetener--and David's
family is changing. His wife is gaining weight, his son has stopped
using verbs, and his daughter suffers from a generalized
dissatisfaction with life. Is Sweetness #9 to blame, along with
David's failure to stop it? Or are these just symptoms of the
American condition?
David's
search for an answer unfolds in this expansive novel that is at once
a comic satire, a family story, and a profound exploration of our
deepest cultural anxieties. Wickedly funny and wildly imaginative,
Sweetness #9 questions whether what we eat truly makes us who
we are.”
"The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick
"It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who
still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.
This
harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip
K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier
between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick
offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may
just be possible to wake."
(44,215)