Thrill Me

Bold new essays on how to craft a thrilling read--in any genre--from the bestselling author of The Dead Lands Anyone familiar with the meteoric rise of Benjamin Percy's career will surely have noticed a certain shift: After writing two short-story collections and a literary novel, he delivered the werewolf thriller Red Moon and the postapocalyptic epic The Dead Lands. Now, in his first book of nonfiction, Percy challenges the notion that literary and genre fiction are somehow mutually exclusive. The title essay is an ode to the kinds of books that make many readers fall in love with fiction: science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, horror, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Anne Rice, Ursula K. Le Guin to Stephen King. Percy's own academic experience banished many of these writers in the name of what is "literary" and what is "genre." Then he discovered Michael Chabon, Aimee Bender, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and others who employ techniques of genre fiction while remaining literary writers. In fifteen essays on the craft of fiction, Percy looks to disparate sources such as Jaws, Blood Meridian, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to discover how contemporary writers engage issues of plot, suspense, momentum, and the speculative, as well as character, setting, and dialogue. An urgent and entertaining missive on craft, Thrill Me brims with Percy's distinctive blend of anecdotes, advice, and close reading, all in the service of one dictum: Thrill the reader.

THE STORY: Relationships can be murder. THRILL ME: THE LEOPOLD & LOEB STORY is a two-character musical drama that recounts the chilling true story of the legendary duo who committed one of the most infamous and heinous crimes of the twentieth centu

Meet the Mitchell brothers of Fool's Gold, California—five gorgeous men who've left a trail of broken hearts in their wake… Maya Farlow learned the hard way to depend only on herself, so when she fell too deeply for the bad-boy charms of Del Mitchell, she did the only thing she could—she ran. Stunned, Del left Fool's Gold to make his name and fortune in extreme sports. Now ten years later, Maya's been hired to promote her hometown's new slogan, The Destination for Romance. The celebrity spokesman is none other than Del, the man she dumped but never forgot. Awkward! Although Del's not the type to hold a grudge, he's determined to avoid falling a second time for the woman who broke his heart. He's a daredevil, not an idiot. Trouble is, in all his adventures, he never found a rush as exhilarating as Maya's kiss. Maybe risking his heart will prove to be the biggest thrill of all… Look for Best of My Love, the next title in Susan Mallery's Fool's Gold series.

Accused of being boring when she was dumped by her boyfriend, May decided to prove the world wrong by accepting a rich man’s invitation to stay in a luxurious Manhattan hotel for five nights! But in the end, he never showed up. She came all the way to New York…only to be alone? The despairing May is encouraged by a friend to go on an adventure, so once May has bolstered her courage, she puts on high heels, goes into a fashionable bar and pretends to be a completely different person, cool and urbane. There she meets local author Beck Desmond. It’s decided—this plain country flower is going to become a bright city light!

Accused of being boring when she was dumped by her boyfriend, May decided to prove the world wrong by accepting a rich man’s invitation to stay in a luxurious Manhattan hotel for five nights! But in the end, he never showed up. She came all the way to New York…only to be alone? The despairing May is encouraged by a friend to go on an adventure, so once May has bolstered her courage, she puts on high heels, goes into a fashionable bar and pretends to be a completely different person, cool and urbane. There she meets local author Beck Desmond. It’s decided?this plain country flower is going to become a bright city light!

Accused of being boring when she was dumped by her boyfriend, May decided to prove the world wrong by accepting a rich man’s invitation to stay in a luxurious Manhattan hotel for five nights! But in the end, he never showed up. She came all the way to New York…only to be alone? The despairing May is encouraged by a friend to go on an adventure, so once May has bolstered her courage, she puts on high heels, goes into a fashionable bar and pretends to be a completely different person, cool and urbane. There she meets local author Beck Desmond. It’s decided?this plain country flower is going to become a bright city light!

From the author of Shoeless Joe—the basis for the film Field of Dreams—come baseball stories that capture the magic and wonder of the game. No one can write about baseball with the same brilliant combination of mysticism and realism as W. P. Kinsella. Lovers of the game and lovers of fine writing will thrill at the range and depth of the eleven stories that make up this collection. From the magical conspiracy of the title story, to the celestial prediction in “The Last Pennant Before Armageddon,” to the desolation of “The Baseball Spur,” Kinsella explores the world of baseball and makes it, miraculously, a microcosm of the human condition. Praise for W. P. Kinsella’s The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories “[Kinsella] defines a world in which magic and reality combine to make us laugh and think about the perceptions we take for granted.” —The New York Times “His short stories about baseball are wistful things of beauty which serve to remind us how the game should feel—the innate glory of a diamond etched in the minds of Americans.” —Calgary Sun “[Kinsella] uses baseball . . . As a familiar starting place for exploring, with pinpoint control, the human psyche.” —Booklist “Stories that read like lightning and tantalize the reader with fascinating scenarios.” —Publishers Weekly

“A wonderful nightmare of a book: tender and frightening, disturbing but compassionate. Fever Dream is a triumph of Schweblin’s outlandish imagination.” –Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.