Rachel A Rosen

Instant Classic offers nine sardonic tales holding a carnival mirror to writers and stories. From a deal with the Devil to the ultimate AI vs human showdown, witness the terrifying spectacle of artists who'll do anything to clamber out of the creative trenches alive.

Life is hard. Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating-picking a meal, making it, putting it into your facehole-can feel like an insurmountable challenge. We wrote this cookbook to share our coping strategies. It has recipes to make when you've worked a 16-hour day, when you can't stop crying and you don't know why, when you accidentally woke up an Eldritch abomination at the bottom of the ocean. But most of all, this cookbook exists to help sad bastards like us feel a little less alone at mealtimes.The Sad Bastard Cookbook is funny, realistic, and kind. It's vegetarian/vegan. It's a community-built project. And the e-book is free on the Night Beats website. It's hard to survive late capitalism and we want to help. Content notes: Mental and physical illness, disordered eating, and dark humour throughout, as well as occasional mentions of alcohol, swearing, and political references. If you have specific food triggers, some recipes may be unpalatable to you.

Cascade: Book I of The Sleep of Reason trilogy 120,000 words "A near-perfect blend of implacable horror, gallows humor, and ecological apocalypse." -- Peter Watts, author of Blindsight What does magic want? When Vasai Singh resurrected drowned Mumbai and raised it into the clouds, the world reacted with awe and wonder -- and no small amount of fear. As with the climate crisis believed to have caused the Cascade, resurgent magic proved lucky for some, a disaster for many others, and a source of hope and dread for everyone else. A generation has passed since the Cascade transformed the world, smashing the tectonic plates of the political landscape and infesting the wilderness with demons and shriekgrass. In Ottawa, a scandal-plagued government clings to power, kept afloat by the manipulations of its precognitive political rainman, Ian Mallory. But when his predictions signal only catastrophe ahead, the magic-loathing photojournalist Tobias Fletcher, land rights activist Jonah Augustine, his ex-wife, climate scientist Blythe Augustine, and emoji-spell wielding intern Sujay Krishnamurthy must overcome ideology and bureaucracy to save a future from a present whose agenda spells only doom. Set in a terrifying but all-too believable near future and leavened with a dry wit, Cascade features a cast of fully-realized characters drawn into conflict with each other as they each strive to do the right thing. But who can know what the right thing is, when every choice leads to disaster?