The Stone Gods

A glimpse into unlikely love braved in the face of the void. On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet–pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. What will happen when their story combines with the world’s story, as they whirl towards Planet Blue, into the future? Will they–and we–ever find a safe landing place? Of immense imaginary and emotional scope, The Stone Gods is Jeanette Winterson at her prescient, playful, muscular best. An interplanetary love story, a traveller’s tale, a hymn to the beauty of the world, this is a novel that will change forever the stories we tell about the earth, about love and about stories themselves.

This collection of short stories by the unjustly neglected star of the pulp fiction era, Abraham Grace Merritt, is full of fantastical and chilling adventures, in which ancient gods stir and people are shockingly transformed. This volume includes Merritt's The Pool of the Stone God, The Drone, The Fox Woman, The Women of the Wood and The Last Poet and the Robots, the collaborative story The Challenge from Beyond, and the fragments The White Road and When Old Gods Wake.

In an Ancient World where the monsters and Gods are real, a mortal's only hope lies in a hero who keeps his wits and his sword sharp... Eno the Thracian is a hero for hire, solving other people's problems for a fee. Having angered the Great God Pan, Eno must leave Greece until the goat-footed one cools off. The High Priest of Amun in Egypt needs his help but several heroes have already perished on the job. Family issues, a love-struck girl, and a depressed pharaoh are the least of Eno's problems. The lion-goddess Sehkmet has a score to settle and she's not about to let a mere hero get in her way!

Enter bestselling author Erin Kellison's captivating new world of gods, monsters, passion, and games... Terah Crane knows not to tempt the gods. A happy life--or at least an uncomplicated one--involves no gods at all. And since her loving grandfather bought her an Indulgence that exempts her from their service, she can focus on her other problems--the fact that her recent divorce has left her broke, unemployed, and reeling. Seeking a fresh start, Terah packs everything she owns into her beat-up car and moves to her family's empty country cottage--never mind that deadly firedrakes occasionally wander into the garden. When an unlikely flood carries a cracked pillar of stone from a nearby shrine right to Terah's doorstep, it seems the gods demand her service after all. The man trapped inside the monolith is still alive, and Terah's reluctant task is to resurrect him, his godkiller of a sword--and his fury for vengeance. The gods' awesome powers are matched only by their careless, capricious whims--and vulnerable mortals are often the ones to suffer and die. Now, the gods are watching Terah, making her a pawn in their savage game. Her survival depends upon navigating a new world of peril and treachery, taking up a weapon, and making a fateful move of her own...

Adam Golaski's newest collection STONE GODS marks his long-awaited return to horror, following the now cult-classic Worse Than Myself (Raw Dog Screaming, 2008). STONE GODS features 15 stories of lives and places set askew.Stone Gods is A Publishers Weekly BookLife Editor's Pick: "Golaski's exploration of the human experience through the supernatural is immersive and self-exploratory. The final story, 'A Rainbow Summer,' employs storytelling itself as a potent instrument. A father breathes life into the animals in Noah's Ark, masterfully capturing the very essence of Stone Gods and what Golaski achieves within these memorable, sharply crafted stories."And praised by Kirkus Reviews: "In measured prose, Golaski's work recalls that of H.P. Lovecraft with surreal shades of Leonora Carrington's or Silvina Ocampo's work. Logic goes out the window in these atmospheric, symbolic tales. A celebration of the strange, cleverly told across stylistic forms."

This study traces the connection of infinity and Levinasian ethics in 21st-century fiction. It tackles the paradox of how infinity can be (re-)presented in the finite space between the covers of a book and finds an answer that combines conceptual metaphor theory with concepts from classical narratology and beyond, such as mise en abyme, textual circularity, intertextuality or omniscient narration. It argues that texts with such structures may be conceptualised as infinite via Lakoff and Núñez’s Basic Metaphor of Infinity. The catachrestic transfer of infinity from structure to text means that the texts themselves are understood to be infinite. Taking its cue from the central role of the infinite in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, the function of such ‘fictions of infinity’ turns out to be ethical: infinite textuality disrupts reading patterns and calls into question the reader’s spontaneity to interpret. This hypothesis is put to the test in detailed readings of four 21st-century novels, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and John Banville’s The Infinities. This book thus combines ethical criticism with structural aesthetics to uncover ethical potential in fiction.