An obscure author, drawn in by the mysterious Guild of St. Cooper, must rewrite the history of a dying city. But the changes become greater than those he set out to make, and the story quickly unspools backward into an alternate history—a world populated by giant rhododendrons, space aliens, and TV’s own Special Agent Dale Cooper.
An editor at The Nervous Breakdown and co-founder of Monkey Bicycle,Shya Scanlon won the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction at Brown University, where he received his MFA. He lives in New York.
Associated Press: Owen Laukkanen’s “The Stolen Ones” concerns human trafficking and follows two Romanian sisters, Irina and Catalina, who have been kidnapped to sell as sex workers. Irina escapes, triggering a sequence of events that further threaten Catalina. Special Agent Kirk Stevens of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and his FBI partner Carla Windermere are called in to find the sister and the other kidnapped women. Language barriers (Irina speaks very little English) and a crew of slippery villains well-versed in police evasion make their job both difficult and, naturally, dangerous.
Publishers Weekly: Datlow fills this sprawling fourth annual collection with 26 richly envisioned short and mid-length works of speculative fiction from innovative online magazine Tor.com, an independent offshoot of Tor Books. Postapocalyptic futures include alien invaders in Ken Liu’s “Reborn,” earthquakes in Charlie Jane Anders’s humorous “As Good as New,” and a traveling carnival in Seanan McGuire’s “Midway Relics and Dying Breeds.” 
Publishers Weekly: Starting his junior year at new school, Adam Higgs is a loser, and he knows it. He barely has any friends, has never been kissed, and has started working at Pizza Hut. After Adam devises a lucrative homework-selling scheme, suddenly he has an adorable girlfriend and is getting invited to the best parties, but this taste of fame and wealth leads him down a path of escalating risk, selling fake IDs and drugs. In chapters often no longer than a few paragraphs, Matthews (who writes adult thrillers as Owen Laukkanen) employs an irreverent narrative that makes it seem as though readers are seeing Adam through the shrewd perspective of a slacker sitting in the back of class (“You probably figured this out already, but, our boy doesn’t get to many parties”). Witnessing Adam’s descent into delinquency is both painful to watch and addictive. 
Woke Up Lonely author Fiona Maazel’s third novel, What Kind of A Man, about a man with dubious superhuman abilities who is being blackmailed with incriminating photos of an assault he doesn’t remember committing, whose search for the truth leads him to uncover secret research at a neurological institute his parents founded, to Fiona McCrae at Graywolf Press, by Stacia Decker.