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After nearly drowning, eight-year-old Maeve Wilhelm falls into a strange comatose state. As years pass, it becomes clear that Maeve is not physically aging. A wide cast of characters finds themselves pulled toward Maeve, each believing that her mysterious "sleep" holds the answers to their life's most pressing questions: Kevin Marks, a museum owner obsessed with preservation; Monique Gray, a refugee and performance artist; Lionel Wilhelm, an entomologist who dreamed of being an astrophysicist; and Evangeline Wilhelm, Maeve's identical twin. As Maeve remains asleep, the characters grapple with a mysterious new technology and medical advances that promise to ease anxiety and end pain, but instead cause devastating side effects.

Weaving together speculative elements and classic fables, and exploring urgent issues from the opioid epidemic to the hazards of biotech to the obsession with self-improvement and remaining forever young, Rebekah Bergman's The Museum of Human History is a brilliant and fascinating novel about how time shapes us, asking what--if anything--we would be without it.

Lloyd Biggie is not only a writer, but also a musician. In THE METALLIC MUSE he has included seven science fiction stories, written over several years, all of which in some way relate to the arts. Thoroughly entertaining and provocative, many of the stories explore the intricate relationship between life and art, and all of them contain very pertinent ideas about present and future experience. Superbly demonstrating their author's depth of insight to the human condition, they offer to all who read them an intriguing blend of accurate analysis and sometimes devastating speculation.

Table of Contents:

• The Tunesmith - (1957) - novelette
• Leading Man - (1957) - short story
• Spare the Rod - (1958) - novelette
• Orphan of the Void - (1960) - novelette
• Well of the Deep Wish - (1961) - short story
• In His Own Image - (1968) - short story
• The Botticelli Horror - (1960) - novelette

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois.

A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate--a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray's stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird.

Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.

A neglected museum gradually succumbs to the elements. A music box rusts beneath a bell of glass. Fragmented texts are pieced together which tell the history of a lost love, the destruction of a civilization, and the origin of the museum.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

An immortal Muse whose very survival depends on the creativity she nurtures within her lovers...

Another immortal who feeds not on artistry but on pain and torment...

A chase through time from 1300s Paris to contemporary New York, with two people bound together in enmity and fury...

When magic and science are melded together, an array of the famous and infamous--from Bernini to Vivaldi, from Lavoisier and Robespierre to William Blake, from Gustav Klimt to Charlotte Salomon--will be caught up unawares in this ages-long battle...

Some tales in this collection were inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, others he revised, two he co-authored--but all bear the mark of the master of primordial terror.

• The Horror in the Museum -- Locked up for the night, a man will discover the difference between waxen grotesqueries and the real thing.
• The Electric Executioner -- Aboard a train, a traveler must match wits with a murderous madman.
• The Trap -- This mirror wants a great deal more than your reflection.
• The Ghost - Eater--In an ancient woodland, the past comes to life with a bone-crunching vengeance.

AND TWENTY MORE STORIES OF UNSPEAKABLE EVIL!

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Stephen Jones
• Lovecraft's "Revisions" - (1970) - essay by August Derleth
• Note on the Texts - essay by S. T. Joshi
• The Green Meadow - (1918) - short story by Winifred V. Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Elizabeth Neville Berkeley and Lewis Theobald, Jr.]
• The Last Test - (1928) - novella by Adolphe de Castro and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Adolphe de Castro]
• The Electric Executioner - (1930) - novelette by Adolphe de Castro and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Adolphe de Castro]
• The Curse of Yig - (1929) - short story by Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Zealia Bishop]
• The Mound - (1940) - novelette by Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Zealia Bishop]
• Medusa's Coil - (1939) - novelette by Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Zealia Bishop]
• The Man of Stone - (1932) - short story by Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Hazel Heald]
• The Horror in the Museum - (1933) - novelette by Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Hazel Heald]
• Winged Death - (1934) - novelette by Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Hazel Heald]
• Out of the Aeons - (1989) - novelette by Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft (variant of Out of the Eons 1935) [as by Hazel Heald]
• The Horror in the Burying-Ground - (1937) - short story by Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Hazel Heald]
• The Diary of Alonzo Typer - (1938) - novelette by H. P. Lovecraft and William Lumley [as by William Lumley]
• The Horror at Martin's Beach - (1923) - short story by Sonia Greene and H. P. Lovecraft (variant of The Invisible Monster) [as by Sonia H. Greene]
• Ashes - (1924) - short story by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.]
• The Ghost-Eater - (1924) - short story by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.]
• The Loved Dead - (1924) - short story by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.]
• Deaf, Dumb and Blind - (1925) - short story by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.]
• Two Black Bottles - (1927) - short story by H. P. Lovecraft and Wilfred Blanch Talman [as by Wilfred Blanch Talman]
• The Trap - [Gerald Canevin] - (1932) - novelette by H. P. Lovecraft and Henry S. Whitehead [as by Henry S. Whitehead]
• The Tree on the Hill - (1934) - short story by Duane W. Rimel
• The Disinterment - (1935) - short story by H. P. Lovecraft and Duane W. Rimel [as by Duane W. Rimel]
• "Till A' the Seas" - (1935) - short story by R. H. Barlow and H. P. Lovecraft (variant of "Till All the Seas") [as by R. H. Barlow]
• The Night Ocean - (1936) - short story by R. H. Barlow and H. P. Lovecraft [as by R. H. Barlow]
• The Crawling Chaos - (1921) - short story by Winifred V. Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Elizabeth Neville Berkeley and Lewis Theobald, Jr.]

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, September 1984. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Science Fiction Yearbook (1985) edited by John F. Carr, Jim Baen and Jerry Pournelle and The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (1992), edited by Tom Shippey.

Sjón's novels have been championed by a veritable pantheon of literary luminaries: Junot Díaz, David Mitchell, A. S. Byatt, Hari Kunzru, and Alberto Manguel, who calls The Whispering Muse "an extraordinary, powerful fable—a marvel." The Whispering Muse is Sjón's masterpiece so far.? The year is 1949 and Valdimar Haraldsson, an eccentric Icelander with elevated ideas about the influence of fish consumption on Nordic civilization, has had the extraordinary good fortune to be invited to join a Danish merchant ship on its way to the Black Sea. Among the crew is the mythical hero Caeneus, disguised as the second mate. Every evening after dinner he entrances his fellow travelers with the tale of how he sailed with the fabled vessel the Argo on the Argonauts' quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece.? What unfolds is a slender, brilliant, always entertaining novel that evokes Borges and Calvino as it weaves together tales of myth and antiquity with the modern world in a literary voice so singular as to seem possessed.

Muse of Fire takes place in a remote future age in which the human enterprise has all but ground to a halt. Earth, drained of its oceans and populated largely by the dead, is little more than a distant memory. The scattered human remnants occupy the lowest rung of a Gnostic hierarchy that dominates both their secular and spiritual lives. Against this backdrop, Simmons introduces the Earth's Men, a wandering troupe of players dedicated to presenting the works of Shakespeare to every accessible corner of the settled universe.

A hallucinatory and startlingly powerful first novel, a darkly visionary On the Road for the new millennium, The Museum of Love traces the macabre and compelling journey of a young French Canadian from his oppressive home town on the shores of Lake Superior across North America. His father is a morbid prison guard, his mother a mystical Catholic, his brother an adolescent saint and martyr while he, an innocent and receptive vessel, fiercely intelligent, anti-religious and tentatively homosexual, inhabits a vivid and strangely lit yet oddly recognizable world - the one that exists only on the inside of a dreamer's eyelids, between the bed and the wall. As Jean-Michel Verhaeren makes his surreal journey of madness and freedom, he experiences the walking wounded, suicides of friends, hostile geographies and periodic moments of extreme clarity - ecstatic visits to the Museums of Negritude, Religion, Love and Death. A work of phantasmagorias and ecstasies, of brutality and tenderness.

A towering testament of ambition and desire, hope and despair, Piers Anthony's epic Geodyssey saga is nothing less than the story of humanity itself. As seen through the eyes of a handful of courageous, passionate men and women reborn again and again in some of the most turbulent ages of history. Muse of Art is the newest chapter in this astonishing chronicle, probing the heart of our deepest fears and highest aspirations, illuminating the spark that makes us what we are.

It is the arts that truly define humanity and set us apart from all other species on earth. In a rousing, passionate story that ranges from the mists of prehistory to a terrifyingly plausible near future, Muse of Art explores the special talents that have inspired and motivated us since the earliest days of our existence: curiosity and creativity, seduction and survival, destruction and healing.

After Rose Rita Pottinger cuts her finger on an enchanted Egyptian scroll, Lewis must work together with his neighbor Florence and sorcerous uncle Jonathan to rescue Rose Rita from the tomb in which she's imprisoned.

The year is 1893,and war is brewing in the First American Kingdom. But Claire Emerson has a bigger problem. Claire's father is a sought-after inventor, but he believes his genius is a gift granted to him by his daughter's touch, so he keeps Claire under his control.

As their province prepares for war, Claire plans to escape, even as her best friend, Beatrix, tries to convince her to stay and help with the growing resistance movement that wants to see a woman on the throne.

When her father's weapon fails to fire on the World's Fair's opening day, Claire is taken captive by Governor Remy Duchamp, St. Cloud's young, untried ruler. Remy believes that Claire's touch bestows graces he's never had, and with political rivals planning his demise, Claire might be his only ally.

The last thing that Claire has ever wanted is to be someone else's muse, but she finally has a choice: Will she quietly remake her world from the shadows--or bring it down in flames?

For the first time in her life, Claire Emerson isn't under a man's control. She's escaped from her dangerous father, and her fiancé, Governor Remy Duchamp, is too weak to rule. All eyes fall on Claire--and the power she could wield.

But that power is precarious as she and Remy are leading St. Cloud in exile after the General's attempted coup. And when King Washington descends on the small province, he brings with him his baseball team, Claire's brother, and a proximity to power Claire has never dreamed of.

With few allies to support her, she determines her best chance at survival is earning the King's good graces. Claire's schemes quickly get out of hand, reminding her that it isn't about who holds the power. It's about a system that grants such power to a select few, and the men who built it that way. Claire isn't anyone's muse, and if she can't fix the system from within, she's determined to be the spark of revolution in the First American Kingdom.

From the master of contemporary urban fantasy, a new collection of "Newford" stories

The city of Newford could be any city in North America, bursting with music, commerce, art, love, hate, and, of course magic. Magic in the sidewalk cracks, myth at the foundations of its great buildings, enchantment in the spaces between its people.

In novels like Moonheart, Forests of the Heart, The Onion Girl, and The Mystery of Grace, and in a series of story collections, urban fantasy master Charles de Lint has explored that magic and those spaces, bringing to life a tapestry of people from all walks of life, each looking for a spark of the miraculous to shape their lives and transform their fate.

Here, in the fifth of the story collections, we reencounter old friends such as Jilly, Sophie, and the Crow Girls. We breathe in intimations of the world beyond death, and of magic beyond time. Longtime readers and newcomers alike will find themselves under Charles de Lint's unique spell.

Jetta's family is famed as the most talented troupe of shadow players in the land. With Jetta behind the scrim, their puppets seem to move without string or stick--a trade secret, they say. In truth, Jetta can see the souls of the recently departed and bind them to the puppets with her blood. But ever since the colonizing army conquered their country, the old ways are forbidden. Jetta must never show, never tell. Her skill and fame are her family's way to earn a spot aboard the royal ship to Aquitan, where shadow plays are the latest rage, and where rumor has it the Mad King has a spring that cures his ills. Because seeing spirits is not the only thing that plagues Jetta. But as rebellion seethes and as Jetta meets a young smuggler, she will face truths and decisions that she never imagined--and safety will never seem so far away.

Sarai has lived and breathed nightmares since she was six years old.
She believed she knew every horror, and was beyond surprise.
She was wrong.

In the wake of tragedy, neither Lazlo nor Sarai are who they were before. One a god, the other a ghost, they struggle to grasp the new boundaries of their selves as dark-minded Minya holds them hostage, intent on vengeance against Weep.

Lazlo faces an unthinkable choice - save the woman he loves, or everyone else? - while Sarai feels more helpless than ever. But is she? Sometimes, only the direst need can teach us our own depths, and Sarai, the muse of nightmares, has not yet discovered what she's capable of.

As humans and godspawn reel in the aftermath of the citadel's near fall, a new foe shatters their fragile hopes, and the mysteries of the Mesarthim are resurrected: Where did the gods come from, and why? What was done with the thousands of children born in the citadel nursery? And most important of all, as forgotten doors are opened and new worlds revealed: must heroes always slay monsters, or is it possible to save them instead?

Harry Radcliffe is a brilliant prize-winning architect---witty and remarkable. He's also a self-serving opportunist, ready to take advantage of whatever situations, and women, come his way. But now, newly divorced and having had an inexplicable nervous breakdown, Harry is being wooed by the extremely wealthy Sultan of Saru to design a billion-dollar dog museum. In Saru, he finds himself in a world even madder and more unreal than the one he left behind, and as his obsession grows, the powers of magic weave around him, and the implications of his strange undertaking grow more ominous and astounding....