Pines and Plains Libraries

A collection of seven short stories celebrates dangerous women, both heroines and villains, and includes contributions by George R.R. Martin, Carrie Vaughn, and Brandon Sanderson.

Men like Lonigan, whose quick draw and hard fists were as respected as his reputation for doing right by the people who did right by him. Lonigan didn't just ride herd for Tom Gurney's Circle G, he loved it as if it were his own. But now that Tom was dead his daughter Ruth was braving the hard cattledrive into Dodge, and it didn't look like she would make it thanks to the conniving outlaw band who thought she was easy pickins'. But they hadn't counted...

1922 opens with the confession of Wilfred James to the murder of his wife, Arlette, due to a long-standing argument about farmland willed to Arlette by her father. In "Big Driver", mystery writer Tess has been supplementing her writing income for years by doing speaking engagements with no problems. But following a last-minute invitation to a book club 60 miles away, she takes a shortcut home with dire consequences. Suffering from cancer, Dave Streeter...

"Twelve cosmic days of Christmas tales ranging from vampires to robots, from the hills of Appalachia to a high orbit space station, all celebrating the holiday in off-beat ways.Twelve new stories of Christmas in very unusual circumstances, ranging from vampires to robots, from the hills of Appalachia to a high orbit space station, all celebrating the holiday in their own, off-beat ways."--

Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the ability to glimpse...

"This powerful collection of short stories traces an emotional arc inspired by Madeleine L'Engle's early life and career, from her lonely childhood in New York to her life as a mother in small-town Connecticut. In a selection of eighteen stories discovered by one of L'Engle's granddaughters, we see how L'Engle's personal experiences and abiding faith informed the creation of her many cherished works. Some of these stories have never been published;...

Stephen King reads three of his classic short stories including 1408, now a feature film! Enter a nightmarish mindscape of unrelenting horror and shocking revelations as the greatest storyteller of our time takes us inside a world of yearning and paranoia, isolation and addiction. It is the world of the smoker. Stephen King's audio original story collection blood and smoke features the tale 1408, now a Dimension Films motion picture starring John...

Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the front lines of the war in Iraq, asking us to understand what happened there and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival--the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning of chaos. In "Redeployment," a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in...

From master anthologist Ellen Datlow comes an all-original of weird tales inspired by the strangeness of Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Between the hallucinogenic, weird, imaginative wordplay and the brilliant mathematical puzzles and social satire, Alice has been read, enjoyed, and savored by every generation since its publication. Datlow asked eighteen of the most brilliant...

Contains stories of the open West, a land where wanderers could find themselves a home, a home to fight for and sometimes to die for.