T. Ryder Smith

"Stories you'll never forget--just try--from literature's favorite transgressive author. Representing work that spans several years, Make Something Up is a compilation of 21 stories and one novella (some previously published, some not) that will disturb and delight. The absurdity of both life and death are on full display; in "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric...

Chiro, a young bat, is nervous about flying into the world for the first time without his mother, especially on a very dark night, but he soon learns to rely on his "song" to find his way and stay safe.

Ben Collier has just arrived in 1945 Hollywood from war-torn Europe to find that his brother, Daniel, has died under mysterious circumstances. Why would a man with a beautiful wife, a successful career in the movies, and a heroic past choose to kill himself? Determined to uncover the truth, Ben enters the maze of the studio system and the uneasy world beneath the glossy shine of the movie business.

In post-war North Carolina, a member of a car-theft ring picks up an innocent nineteen-year-old Bible saleman and recognizes the young man as just the associate he needs--one who will believe he is working as an F.B.I. spy, one who will drive the cars he steals.

From the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander novels: The "haunting and fascinating" tale of a young boy's harrowing odyssey from Africa to Sweden (Booklist).

In the 1870s, Hans Bengler arrives in Cape Town from Småland, Sweden, driven by a singular desire: to discover an insect no one has seen before and name it after himself. But then he impulsively adopts a young San orphan boy whose parents have been killed...

"As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978-79, he became known as one of many so-called "sex murderers"...

In 1963, at the age of 17, Dwayne Hallston discovers James Brown and wants to perform just like him. His band, the Amazing Ramblers, studies and rehearses in the storage room of his father's shop in a small North Carolina town. Meanwhile, Dwayne's forbidden black friend Larry apprentices to a jazz musician. His mother hopes music will allow him to escape the south.

Told from multiple viewpoints, Shae Tatum, an unarmed, thirteen-year-old black girl, is shot by a white police officer, throwing their community into upheaval and making it a target of demonstrators.

"A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the iconic Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George"-- In 1982 Lapine, at the beginning of his career as a playwright and director, met Stephen Sondheim, nineteen years his senior and already a legendary Broadway composer and lyricist. Shortly thereafter, the two decided to write a musical inspired by Georges Seurat's nineteenth-century painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte....

"The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end. Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location. The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world's stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So...