The New York Times–bestselling author “proves himself a master of both outsider and speculative fiction, rising above mere genre to ask the big questions” (Shelf Awareness). Merge and Disciple are but two of six fragments in the Crosstown to Oblivion short novels in which Mosley entertainingly explores life’s cosmic questions . . .  Merge When a heartbroken Raleigh Redman hits the lotto for twenty-four million dollars, he quits his minimum wage job and sets his sights on one goal: reading the entire collection of lectures in the Popular Educator Library, the only thing his father left behind after he died. As Raleigh is trudging through the eighth volume, he notices something in his apartment that at first seems ordinary but quickly reveals itself to be from a world very different from our own. This entity shows Raleigh joy beyond the comforts of twenty-four million dollars . . . and merges our world with those that live beyond. Disciple Hogarth “Trent” Tryman, a forty-two-year-old man working a dead-end data entry job, has grown quite content in his quiet life, burning away time with television, the internet, and video games. That all changes the night he receives a bizarre instant message on his computer from a man who calls himself Bron. At first he thinks it’s a joke, but in just a matter of days Tryman goes from a data-entry clerk to the head of a corporation. His fate is now in very powerful hands as he realizes he has become a pawn in a much larger game with unimaginable stakes—a battle that threatens the prime life force on Earth.