Charles Yu won us over with his weird, melancholy novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and now he’s back on July 24 with a collection of short stories called Sorry Please Thank You. Like his novel, these stories are psychological studies of neurotic nerds, struggling to stay alive as they fight liches and loneliness. They’re beautiful, strange, and funny. Want to know more? We’ve got a full short story from the collection right here. It’s called “Hero Absorbs Major Damage,” and it’s about gamers on a campaign — or maybe it’s about people trying to form relationships under extremely odd circumstances. Either way, there’s a lot of hacking and slashing . . . and thinking about the nature of existence. More »