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Critical Mass is a treasure trove of sparkling, spiky prose and a fascinating portrait of our lives and cultural times over the past decades. In an age where a great deal of back scratching and softball pitching pass for criticism, James Wolcott’s fearless essays and reviews offer a bracing taste of the real critical thing.

Something is fishy at Anahata - and it’s not just the giant squid that serves as a mascot for the tech company. A prince in exile is working as a product manager. The sales guys are battling with the engineers. The women employees are the unwitting subjects of a wild social experiment. The VPs are plotting against each other. And the yoga-loving, sex-obsessed CEO is rumored to be planning a moon colony, sending his investors into a tizzy.

Budd Schulberg is a master of the art of the short story, as he proved in his early collection Some Faces in the Crowd. The crowd is the American landscape: indelible characters drawn coast-to-coast from the teeming streets of New York to tables at Hollywood's legendary nightclub, Ciro's. In these sparkling stories, Schulberg brings us vivid, restless people haunted by abrupt failure in the wake of rapid success.

It's been five years since the Mason family vacationed at the lakeside cottage in northeastern Vermont, close to where prize-winning novelist Samuel Mason grew up. The summers that Sam; his wife, Mena; and their twins, Franny and Finn, spent at Lake Gormlaith were noisy, chaotic, and nearly perfect. But since Franny's death, the Masons have been flailing, one step away from falling apart. Lake Gormlaith is Sam's last, best hope of rescuing his son from a destructive path and salvaging what's left of his family.

Was it a living woman that stood by his side, or a dead body reanimated for the time or the occasion in some strange manner?

Brand-new stories by: G. M. Ford, Skye Moody, R. Barri Flowers, Thomas P. Hopp, Patricia Harrington, Bharti Kirchner, Kathleen Alcalá, Simon Wood, Brian Thornton, Lou Kemp, Curt Colbert, Robert Lopresti, Paul S. Piper, and Stephan Magcosta. Early Seattle was a hardscrabble seaport filled with merchant sailors, longshoremen, lumberjacks, rowdy saloons, and a rough-and-tumble police force not immune to corruption and graft.

After losing his brother and being murdered by his enemies, Rideon thought there was nothing left that could hurt him. But he soon discovers life only gets more dangerous after death. Restored by magic, he must trek through a hostile wilderness while stalked by a deranged wild man. His only possessions, a cursed bow and a powerful amulet, prove as treacherous as they are necessary. Driven by the need to find his young brother before their enemies reach the boy first, Rideon must enter dangerous territory and risk the wrath of the ruthless thieves' guild.

Luka's carefree existence as the spoiled son of a minor noble ended the day his family was arrested and imprisoned in the Eyeless Tower. His father, a political rival to the praetor of Camdon, would never live to see freedom again. Luka should have joined his father on the scaffold but fate - or the schemes of men - intervened. Escape came. Now Luka has a chance to thwart his persecutors and avenge his family. Beginning life again in a distant province, he takes a new name - Rideon

The fate of the world is more fragile than ever as Pures battle Wretches and former allies become potential enemies. Inside the Dome Patridge has taken his father's place as leader of the Pures. His intent had been to bring down the Dome from the inside with the help of the secret resistance force led by Partridge's former teacher Glassings. But from his new position of power, things don't seem quite as clear. Perhaps his father had been right.

In his first nine years as a teacher, Brendan Halpin goes from wide-eyed idealist to cynical, heartbroken idealist. Unique among teaching memoirs, Losing My Faculties is not the story of a heroic teacher who transforms the lives of his hardbitten students; rather, it's the inspirational and often unpretty truth about people who choose to get up ridiculously early day after day and year after year to go stand in front of teenagers.

Twenty years ago, Jacob lost everything. Just as he was starting to figure out life as a college freshman, his world was suddenly shattered when a devastating illness destroyed the world he once knew and claimed the lives of everyone that mattered to him. Jacob and the other survivors of the pandemic were transported to the Palace Program. As the years go by and Jacob's relationships in the Palace become more complex, he slowly begins to see that the man-made utopian society is nothing close to a perfect tomorrow.

In five years, little green men are going to invade Earth - and the only man who knows is Professor Emil Vlasov. Is Vlasov crazy? Or is something actually watching the Earth... waiting...

Sal is hard at work trying to figure out if he can keep his crazy little company afloat, and now he wants to add more headcount? Kennedy isn't sure what is going on inside his young and not-all-that-wise head. Courtney is worried that the new hire Salinger wants might not be the best choice for the company - or her. When an unexpected call comes in, Salinger's team gets changed around drastically. He and Kennedy have to scramble to figure out how to balance it again. Can they produce the income they need or will they run out of time and end up food for the creatures in the ZOO?

It is the late 1970s and criminal defense attorney Harrison J. Walker, better known as Jaywalker for his rebellious tactics, is struggling to build his own practice when he receives a call from a desperate mother. Her son, Darren Kingston, has been arrested for raping five white women in Castle Hill, an area of the Bronx long forgotten by the city. A young, good-looking black man, Darren is positively identified by four of the victims as the fifth prepares to do the same.

Heavy Metal has benefited from promo videos, but unfortunately, someone figured out that some of the driving during the Russian Base operation...was just too damned good. People are noticing that Sal and his team have someone extra-special working with them, and they want a piece of her...or all of her. What is the other team willing to attack Sal's people with to get what they want? And do they have capabilities Sal can't conceptualize?

Confined to a studio apartment, Tricia Celano watches the outside world through a flying drone. But when her high-tech toy records a vicious murder, she's determined to track down the killer - a killer who knows she's being watched.

Using real-life practical experiences, serial entrepreneur and thought leader Faisal Hoque teams up with journalist Drake Baer to provide a personal and professional playbook that is part philosophy, part business, and part history. Everything Connects offers the wisdom of 2,500-year-old Eastern philosophies and the interconnected insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Couple that with Fortune 100 corporate cross pollination for creativity and startup thinking for how to adapt with ease, and you'll quickly discover that everything connects.

In working-class Bay Ridge, Michael drives for a car service and gives lifts to his father, a former sanitation worker and current small-time bookie. He has a friend with a heroin habit, and a longtime girlfriend who expects they’ll get married one of these days. Michael spends most of his time on the familiar streets where he grew up, but now he’s crossing the bridge into Manhattan for some college classes—where he meets a seductive female classmate who seems to come from a whole different world.

Forced to come to grips with his understanding of the past - and its implications for the present - Roberts deftly moves between "then" and "now," ignorance and understanding, in honest, confessional prose that places the reader front and center for a true story that, indeed, is far stranger than fiction. Obsessive in nature and elliptical in structure, Roberts' story ultimately inhabits the liminal space between truth and appearances, love and danger, the hunter and the hunted.

Eric Walsh presents Book 2 in the Mad Immortal series.