When you can't eat, pray, or love.

Every Hallowe'en, Mrs. Marigold invites only six children to her mansion. One boy, Adam, warns Ashley away, but her parents, desperate to get in good with the richest woman in town, force her to go.
Trick or treat?
Trick. Definitely trick.
The question is if Ashley can get out alive.

Do you seethe with envy? Do you turn such a vibrant shade of green, staring at your friend's award-winning, New York Times bestselling books, that you kind of look like...broccoli?
Yeah. Me too.
Comparing yourself with other writers feels like comparing apples and broccoli.
Guess what? Apples taste pretty sweet. Everyone likes them. Apples seem like the cheerleaders who walk off with the quarterback every time, while you push your glasses up your broccoli nose, scribble poetry in your broccoli diary, and listen to your broccoli parents scream at each other.
Eesh.
This bite-sized book tells you how I kicked envy to the moon—well, not the moon. Okay. The front porch. Using my muscular yet shapely broccoli legs, I kicked envy to the porch so I could write my own work.
I became a rat with an island.
Are you more confused than envious now? Super. Consider my job half done. Complete my mission by buying this short yet sweet, broccoli-positive, rat-friendly book, so you, too, can annihilate envy, write your broccoli sonnets, and sing your broccoli songs forevermore.

Is love stronger than bootlegging, ghosts, and murder?

Two Shaolin monks exiled to outer space try to keep up their traditions, including kung fu, on their way to answer an alien communication signal. But when Little Tiger falls ill, they must reinvent their approach in order to survive.

I'm baaaaack.
That's right. You can't keep the Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World away.
Was I always such a hard-hearted lass? Of course not. I offer you some counter-examples from medical school, a time when I was so earnest and hard-working, I scraped my finger on the mannequin while practicing my digital rectal exam technique (true story).

Then I bring it into real time, swapping more short essays about the emergency room in the digital age, where Twitter co-exists with trauma and tendonitis.

If you enjoyed The Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World and Other True Tales from the Emergency Room, or even if you didn't, come on in.

Award-winning author and physician, Melissa Yuan-Innes, explores the strange new worlds of embryo transplantation ("Red"), human-ape genetic engineering ("Growing Up Sam"), and exile (two Shaolin monks banished to outer space in "Iron Monk") in an exclusive collection of her science fiction stories.

Who wants to lose a few pounds?
I do, I do!
Who wants to read about weight loss?
Um…
Look. I know where you're coming from. Doctors like me should get all excited about slimming down, but if you ask me to count calories or eat like a cavewoman, I sprint for the door. And after I finish sprinting, I want to eat more than a goji berry.
So I wrote this bite-sized book that sums up my entire weight loss philosophy in six words: eat right and get a dog. Okay, I wrote a little more than that, but I promise not to shame you or make up some complex system where you have to order a magic spoonful of powdered spinach from me every Tuesday at midnight.
Just read it. What have you got to lose, except a few inches, a few dollars, and a few degrees of self-loathing? Hooray!

“Sizzling! I read the whole thing in one day, heart pounding, totally gripped by the action.” —Dr. Eileen Sacks, General Surgeon

When a tyrant overtakes her space colony, Emma Lo strikes back with her art.

She employs nanotechnology to transform her nearly century-old body so that she may play Othello in a desperate bid to satirize and overthrow the President—until someone hacks Emma's com link and begins to blackmail her.

A cat-and-mouse game in a 4000-word rapier of a short story where Emma's life and spirit are at stake and, to quote the Scottish play, she "cannot fly, /But, bear-like...must fight the course."

This is the story about a plucky emergency doctor giving birth to two healthy babies—and all the whacked-out stuff that happens in between.

When I read other 'mumoirs', I laugh at the universal truisms: yep, tired. Ooh, a poopy diaper. But look, baby's smile! So worth it. Whoops, I'm pregnant again!

Is that my 20,000-word tale?

I wish.

Yes, I change diapers. Cloth diapers! And my husband changes more than his fair share.

But mostly, I'm an ecstatic new Momzilla carting my infant around as death and disease stalk and smite my family. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to save lives and conceive another baby.

Warning #1: this book is less about official doctor-ing and more about my unbalanced life (but funny! And plucky! Did I mention plucky?).

Warning #2: I wrote it as prose poems because I think poems are an excellent way to distill life into sharp, memorable lines. Also, thanks to babies and medicine, I hardly have my hands to myself, except when I'm sleeping. Poems are short. And I still need to sleep.

Come on in.

A pregnant teenager donates her embryo to a recipient mother who wants red-haired children. The doctor who pioneered the technology performs the microsurgery exquisitely.

Everyone should live happily ever after.

Except this isn't a fairy tale.

"Red," a short story originally published in Nature's Future science fiction section.