Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the Earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits.

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive - and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. But Mark isn't ready to give up yet.

It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.

In the not-too-distant future, a 21-member crew launches from Earth. Their mission: to establish a temporary colony on Mars. Little do they know that colony will become permanent–and the last stand of the human race. Because, without warning, every single person left on Earth simply...vanishes. Now, a thousand years later, the resources needed to sustain life are running out, and the very existence of the Mars colony is threatened. Humankind has only one option–to return to its home planet.

Necromancers infest the land of Alderyth, fueling a dark plague that always kills its victims. For Nell, it’s more than a story told by travelers. The deathmark claimed her family and fated her to a life of servitude. When a battered old hag collapses in her arms, suspicion swirls through her fearful town. Could Nell be a carrier of the plague? She flees rather than submit to prying authorities, but not without trouble.

Imara has lived a life separate from her family. She wasn’t shunned, just never acknowledged. The seventh child of a seventh child, she had had the bad taste to be born a girl. Her father’s family had no use for a girl, so she was sent to a city where the populace didn’t use magic. Now that she is grown and entering college, she has chosen the best magical college in the country. It just happens to be located in her birth city.

In a world where silence reigns and humanity has all but vanished, James Jacoby grapples with the crushing loneliness and the haunting memories of a life that once was. Left to navigate the desolate streets of his abandon city, he searches for a reason to keep going amidst the ruins of society.

Blue Deer, Montana, may seem like a tranquil town nestled at the foot of the Crazy Mountains, but an influx of writers, artists, and actors has driven its inhabitants a little nuts. When someone uses a rifle on George Blackwater as he's working on his new screenplay, Sheriff Jules Clement figures the culprit is George's angry wife, Mona, who has been on the rampage since George's latest batch of affairs. But soon the number of killings multiplies, and Jules is surrounded by a variety of suspects, including George himself, still unhinged by something that happened twenty years ago.

These new, recent, and reformulated stories by Joyce Carol Oates showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense. A young, insecure woman finds her relationship changing as she grows more and more dependent on a man who likes to take her on long walks beside a dangerously roaring creek. Another woman, nervous around men, not quite knowing how to act when paid a compliment, becomes flustered when a doctor suggests they go out for coffee, or possibly a drink.