The Fires Beneath the Sea - a novel

"In Young's work, the big essential questions-mortality, identity, the meaning of life-aren't simply food for thought; they're grounds for entertainment."-Toronto Star

"Surrealism seldom seems as much like real life as in Young's hilarious and cautionary poems."-Booklist

Bender gathers a generous selection of new work along with treasure from Dean Young's twelve volumes. Strongly influenced by Surrealism, Dean Young's poems flash with extravagant imagery, humorous speech, sly views of the quotidian, and the exposed nerves of heartache. As the American Academy of Arts and Letters raved, "Young's poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. He is one of the most inventive and satisfying poets writing today."

From "Even Funnnier Looking Now":

If someone had asked me then,
Do you suffer from the umbrage of dawn's
dark race horses, is your heart a prisoner
of raindrops? Hell yes! I would have said
or No way! Never would I have said,
What could you possibly be talking about?
I had just gotten to the twentieth century
like a leftover girder from the Eiffel Tower.
My Indian name was Pressure-Per-Square-Inch.
I knew I was made of glass but I didn't
yet know what glass was made of: hot sand
inside me like pee going all the wrong
directions, probably into my heart
which I knew was made of gold foil
glued to dust . . .

Praise for Joan Aiken:

"Joan Aiken's invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come."-Philip Pullman

"Aiken writes with the genius of a born storyteller, with mother wit expanded and embellished by civilized learning, and with the brilliance of an avenging angel."-The New Yorker

Joan Aiken's stories captivated readers for fifty years. They're funny, smart, gentle, and occasionally very, very scary. The stories in The Monkey's Wedding are collected here for the very first time and include six never before published, as well as two previously published under the pseudonym Nicholas Dee. Here you'll find the story of a village for sale . . . or is the village itself the story? There's an English vicar who declares on his deathbed that he might have lived an entirely different life. After his death, a large, black, argumentative cat makes an appearance. . . . This hugely imaginative collection includes introductions by Aiken as well as by her daughter, Lizza Aiken.

Best known for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken (1924-2004) wrote over a hundred books and won the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards. After her first husband's death, she supported her family by copyediting at Argosy magazine and an advertising agency before turning to fiction. She went on to write for Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Argosy, Women's Own, and many others. Visit her online at: www.joanaiken.com.

My dog Tapeworm Johnson needed legitimate veterinary attention. It had been two years since she received annual shots. I read somewhere that an older dog can overdose on all these vaccinations, and I have found—I share this information with every dog owner I meet—that if you keep your pet away from rabid foxes, raccoons, skunks, bats, and people whose eyes rotate crazy in their sockets, then the chances of your own dog foaming at the mouth diminishes drastically. I also believe that dogs don't need microchips imbedded beneath their shoulder blades if you keep the dog leashed or in the house, or with the truck windows rolled up when you drive around showing the dog farm animals living in pastures. I brought this up to Dr. Page one time, back four years earlier when Tapeworm Johnson was somewhere between eight and nine. Tapeworm showed up at my door one morning, her ribs as visible as anything you'd order down at Clem and Lyda's Barbecue Shack off Scenic Highway 11, her paw pads split open from, I assumed, days traveling from wherever her conscienceless owner dropped her off.

Eleven stories, all previously published in journals like The Atlantic, The Oxford American, and The Georgia Review, in which George Singleton brings small-town South Carolina alive. Using everyday situations like a dog needing its annual vaccination and buckets of humorous observations, Singleton pokes and prods his readers into realizing we're all simply restless for a pat on the head.