Lior Samson Knihy

From a master storyteller, a provocative new collection of short fiction is about all manner of endings - the end of relationships and of careers, the loss of faith and the arrival of ultimate fates, the end of innocence and the end of the world. In the best traditions of speculative fiction, here are stories that skate around the thin edges of reality and ask questions about the extent to which our beliefs shape our experience of the world.

A geopolitical thriller ripped from real-world headlines! The lifeblood of the modern world is at stake as a wave of suspicious blackouts and a Twitter-fed face-off between the presidents of the United States and the Russian Federation edges toward full-scale cyberwarfare, with the electric power grids of both countries the targets. The Middle East and South America have become proxy battlegrounds in a vicious cycle of escalating threats and counter-threats. An unlikely collection of free agents and insiders is press-ganged into solving a geopolitical riddle to work out exit plans, searching for a way out, for scenarios that will de-escalate the threat and allow both sides to save face. They are themselves caught in internal struggles and a race against the clock to find a way forward that will leave the lights on and the world connected.

Shanna Newsom is an historian with a buried past of her own. While digging in her garden, she makes a discovery that threatens to throw her settled life at Holcomb University into chaos. A found object pulls Shanna and her partner, ex-cop Rand McMurphy, into a vortex of deception and denial. The cold-case trail they follow will test their relationship as it leads from recent accusations of sexual misconduct to an old and untold story of survival at any cost and back to encounters with the difficult truths of today.

Shanna Newsom, a young professor of history at a small Southern university, is a survivor with a past. Skilled and talented, she is too good for the supporting role she has assumed, but staying on script has become essential for her survival. With the arrival of Rand McMurphy, an ex-cop with a hobby solving cold cases, the past begins to catch up with the present, and the threads of her quiet life begin to unravel. Names from the dark past echo in life-changing losses: in a woman's disappearance from campus and in the tragic events at Manhattan's Twin Towers. ALWAYS ME is a tense rollercoaster of romance and mystery, an intricately plotted many-tiered story by a masterful storyteller.

Coleman Todd Drucker is a self-centered, self-made billionaire who lives on the edge: a life of leveraged buyouts and bold business bets, of customized sports cars, sybaritic weekends, and sex on the side. As any smart player would, Drucker hedges his bets, in his case with a very special insurance policy. Drucker's drive is more than matched by the intelligence and ambition of the women in his life, including his beautiful second wife, Barbra Ann Wilson, and the quirky journalist, Dana Carmody, who starts out to learn more about his insurance policy but soon finds herself in deep and dangerous waters. THE DRUCKER PROXY is a fast-paced and intelligent thriller, enriched by complex characters and spot-on social insights raising incisive questions about our times and the near future.

HOFFER AWARD WINNER - TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Karl Lustig is a world-weary consultant and sometime blogger who believes he is in control of his fate. His settled life is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious piece of jewelry, end-product of a chain of events set in motion more than four decades earlier. Rooted in real events and set against the backdrop of Israel's emergence as a nuclear power, BASHERT, Yiddish for fated, is a geopolitical thriller that caroms between continents and bounces between time frames. From MIT to the Middle East, from college days to an uncertain present, it is the story of three people whose lives are intertwined by destiny and by unseen direction. Newly re-edited and reset, the tenth anniversary edition incorporates additional material.

An imaginative, inspiring, and daring cross-border collection of poems and song lyrics by fictional poets and songwriters in the novels and short stories of Lior Samson. Best known as the author of contemporary thrillers, Samson argues that poems and poetry-whether spoken, written, or sung-are part of ordinary, everyday life, and honest fiction recognizes this reality. Here are poems of love and longing, or hope and despair, and songs of sadness and protest, including "Parallel Lines," a rap-metal anthem for our divided and divisive times.