Adult

Set in a 2054 where humans have locked themselves out of the internet and Elon Musk has incinerated the moon, SET MY HEART TO FIVE is the hilarious yet profoundly moving story of one android’s emotional awakening. One day at a screening of a classic movie, Jared notices a strange sensation around his eyes. Bots are not permitted to have feelings, but as the theater lights come on, he discovers he is crying. Soon overwhelmed by powerful emotions, Jared heads west, determined to find others like himself. But a bot with feelings is a dangerous proposition, and Jared’s new life could come to an end before it truly begins. Unless, that is, he can somehow change the world for himself and all of his kind.

A mother’s love and persistence are put to the test when her teen daughter is stricken with a mysterious, debilitating illness. As time goes on, Dana’s condition drives everyone away --- everyone, that is, except for her mother, Anna. Finally, desperate to improve Dana’s health, the two hit the road in search of a cure. Dana’s chronic symptoms require endless supplements, pharmaceuticals and dietary restrictions, evoking a heroine’s journey. Full of humor, blind hope and alternative medicine, DANCING IN THE NARROWS is a poignant chronicle of Anna and Dana’s multiyear odyssey toward healing from trauma.

Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie that studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big-budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon. Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was ramping up his own film version. His screenwriter: the novelist Ayn Rand, who saw in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer the model for a character she was sketching for ATLAS SHRUGGED. Greg Mitchell’s THE BEGINNING OR THE END chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age.

When an accident claims the life of an oil-rig worker off the North Carolina coast, Coast Guard investigators Rissi Dawson and Mason Rogers are sent to take the case. But mounting evidence shows the death may not have been an accident at all, and they find themselves racing to discover the killer’s identity before he eliminates the threat they pose.

Sara is a Type-A, career-focused event planner, and her younger sister Mariel is the opposite: bohemian, semi-employed and recently engaged. When Sara's mother lures her back to Connecticut under false pretenses, she is perturbed to discover that Mariel is eager to reconcile their relationship. The two sisters haven't spoken since the night Sara realized something was going on between Mariel and Sara's boyfriend, Carter Pryce. And now Mariel is about to marry Carter, who Sara still loves. When Mariel asks Sara to stand in for a bridesmaid who has to cancel at the last minute, Sara realizes it's the perfect cover to unravel the nuptials and win Carter back. Will Sara realize what a bridesmaid-zilla she's become in time to fix the damage before Mariel's big day?

Detective Eddie Kenwood is a dirty cop. He has the highest signed-confession rate in the NYPD and a distinguished career built on putting men behind bars --- whether they’re guilty or not doesn’t matter much to him. When Tank Rizzo’s partner, Pearl, tells him about an old family friend Kenwood put in jail for a murder he didn’t commit, Tank and Pearl vow to take Kenwood down. Also in need of a takedown: the money-laundering accounting firm where Tank’s brother used to work --- before he mysteriously died, leaving Tank the sole guardian of his nephew, Chris. Chris smells a rat and enlists Tank’s help to bring the men who had his father killed to justice.

As the war rages on in the summer of 1943, causing massive destruction and widespread fear, the King and Queen choose to quietly send their youngest daughter, Princess Charlotte, to live with a trusted noble family in the country. Despite her fiery, headstrong nature, the princess's fragile health poses far too great a risk for her to remain in war-torn London. Third in line for the throne, 17-year-old Charlotte reluctantly uses an alias upon her arrival in Yorkshire, her two guardians the only keepers of her true identity. In time, she settles comfortably into a life out of the spotlight, befriending a young evacuee and training with her cherished horse. But no one predicts that in the coming months, she will fall deeply in love with her protectors' son.

It’s been a decade since Trumanell Branson disappeared, leaving only a bloody handprint behind. Her brother, Wyatt, was cleared of wrongdoing by the police, but he was tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion and is in a new documentary about the crime. When Wyatt finds a lost girl dumped in a field of dandelions, making silent wishes, he believes she is a sign. The town’s youngest cop, Odette Tucker, believes she is a catalyst that will ignite a seething town still waiting for its own missing girl to come home. But Odette can’t look away. She shares a wound that won’t close with the mute, one-eyed mystery girl. And she is haunted by her own history with the missing Tru.

In the present, Sacha knows the world is in trouble. Her brother, Robert, just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world is in meltdown --- and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time. This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: Where does family begin? And what do people who think they have nothing in common have in common? Summer.

In these 10 stories, Ron Rash has created a mesmerizing look at the imperfect world around us, from the severing of ties to the natural world in the relentless hunt for profit to the destruction of body and soul with pills meant to mute our pain. "Baptism" was chosen by Roxane Gay for inclusion in THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2018, and "Neighbors" was selected by Jonathan Lethem for THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2019. And in revisiting Serena Pemberton, Rash updates his bestselling parable of greed run amok as his deliciously vindictive heroine returns to the North Carolina wilderness she left scarred and desecrated to make one final effort to kill the child who threatens all she has accomplished.