Gathering together the most outstanding short stories of Susan Palwick's twenty-year literary career, The Fate of Mice is a powerful collection from an extraordinary fantasist. These unflinching tales, including three original pieces, consider a woman born with her heart exposed and the heartless killer who protects her, a wolf who is willingly ensnared by a devious academic, a businessman resurrected to play at politics, and an ingenious mouse dreaming beyond the laboratory.With the perceptiveness of Joyce Carol Oates, the inventiveness of Ray Bradbury, and the emotional resonance of Alice Sebold, The Fate of Mice is a meditation on the very art of storytelling: mythic, beautiful, and often brutal, filled with authentic compassion.

Recoveries by Susan Palwick is an sf novelette about two women who have been friends since they were children: one a recovering alcoholic brought up by parents who believe they're alien abductees. The other, an orphan with an eating disorder, and a secret that might doom the friendship. 8600At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Melinda Soto, aged sixty-four, vacationing in Mexico, is murdered by a fellow American tourist. Back in her hometown of Reno, Nevada, she leaves behind her adopted son, Jeremy, whom she rescued from war-torn Guatamala when he was a toddler--just one of her many causes over the years. And she leaves behind a circle of friends: Veronique, the academic stuck in a teaching job from which she can't retire; Rosemary, who's losing her husband to Alzheimer's and who's trying to lose herself in volunteer work; Henrietta, the priest at Rosemary's and Melinda's church.Jeremy already had a fraught relationship with his charismatic mother and the people in her orbit. Now her death is tearing him apart, and he can barely stand the rituals of remembrance that ensue among his mother's friends. Then the police reveal who killed Melinda: a Seattle teenager who flew home to his parents and drowned himself just days later.It's too much. Jeremy's not the only one who...

Susan Palwick, author of the remarkable Flying in Place, now returns with a compelling new novel of a family cast out of an idyllic realm, learning to live in our own troubled world. With its richly imagined portrayal of a lost culture, complete with poetry and fables, traditions and customs, and its searing yet sympathetic view of own society as seen through new eyes, The Necessary Beggar is an compelling examination of humanity and the redemptive power of love, in the spirit of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Lémabantunk, the Glorious City, is a place of peace and plenty, of festivals and flowers, bejeweled streets and glittering waterfalls. But it is also a land of severe justice. Darroti, a young merchant, has been accused of an unforgiveable crime - the brutal murder a highborn woman. Now, in keeping with the customs of their world, his entire family must share in his...