An intimate, sparkling collection of stories by a debut writer about girls behaving badly and families on the brink of collapse. In these lucid, sharply observant stories, Mandeliene Smith traces the lives of men and women in moments of crisis: a woman whose husband has just died, a social worker struggling to escape his own past, a girl caught in a standoff between her mother's boyfriend and the police. A lively and insightful collection, Rutting...

"Not long after the Berlin Wall came down, three teenagers-a woman and two men-became friends in the East German town of Jena. It was a time of excitement, but also of economic crisis: some four million East Germans found themselves out of a job. At first, the three friends spent their nights lingering in train stations, smoking, drinking, and looking for trouble. Then, they began attending far-right rallies with people called themselves National...

Once upon a time, science fiction was only in the future. It was the stuff of drive-ins and cheap double-bills. Then, with the ever-increasing rush of new, society-altering technologies, science fiction pushed its way to the present, and it busted out of the genre ghetto of science fiction and barged its way into the mainstream. What used to be mere fantasy (Trips to the moon? Wristwatch radios? Supercomputers capable of learning?) are now everyday...