Magical Encounters: Short Stories With a Twist

This collection of twenty short stories tells how everyday people sometimes encounter magic: A young woman discovers that her secondhand cellphone is haunted; a homeless man's encounter with a garden gnome changes his life; three older women use their societal invisibility to rescue a little girl from a horrifying fate, and a god from Olympus disguised as a human offers a young gay man a way to escape the home town that scorns him.

Three of the stories recount the doings of the International Tarts Society, a group of young women whose mission is to save the world through sex. Although they execute their mission with enthusiasm, their yearly conference affords them the vacation break they all enjoy.

D. M. Read was born in the American Southwest but spent five years of her early childhood in the Far East―two in Tokyo and three in Singapore. Brought up by a father who loved English literature and a mother who adored opera, Read has always been interested in books, both reading them and writing them. Her first effort at writing occurred at age eight, when she wrote and published a neighborhood newspaper called "Freedom and Torment."

Later Read held a variety of jobs, both paid and freelance, ranging from proofreader to proposal manager to newsletter editor for several minor publications. She marched for the ERA in the 1970s and defended women's clinics in the 1990s. Read volunteered for the Howard Dean campaign in 2003, learned to blog, and has been blogging and volunteering ever since.

Published works include a novel, Layoffs; The Deer at Lammastide―Nine Sabbat Tales; Long, Long Way to Run; Witchfire; Somewhere a Drum Waits for Me; Saving the World Through Sex, and Turnabout. Read's next novel will be Iron and Scarlet, set at Hadrian's Wall in Roman Britain.