"No one knows Margo's real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality, and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges. That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist,...

"After the tragic death his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house-a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem,...

New York City has collapsed, and a veteran, nicknamed "Dewey Decimal" because he works in the New York Public Library, agrees to become a henchman for a New York D. A., but soon comes to regret his participation in the violence and mayhem involved in his work.

Decimal busies himself retrieving and hiding files of sensitive information from the office of his former boss, DA Daniel Rosenblatt, who's been dead for six weeks. I should know. I shot the man myself, as Decimal admits. U.S. Sen. Clarence Howard, apparently unaware Rosenblatt is dead, threatens Decimal into trying to locate Rosenblatt. Seeking leverage, Decimal finds it in a photo of Howard with a Korean prostitute. Decimal's frantic attempt to...

A new collection celebrates the power of books and the libraries they live in, tracing the stories of such protagonists as a scholar who debates Wilfred Owen with her deceased father, a girl who discovers books bound with sheet music and a woman whose dreams seem to be set in a 1960s novel.

Portals to all the knowledge in the world, libraries are also created universes of multitude of imaginations. Librarians guide us to enlightenment as well as serving as the captains, mages, and gatekeepers who open the doors to delight, speculation, wonder, and terror. This captivating compilation of science fiction and fantasy short fiction showcases stories of librarians -- mysterious curators, heroic bibliognosts, arcane archivists, catalogers...