While on his computer, Victor Hastings admires the provocative pictures of girls he's dating. Meanwhile, these girls are posting more and more on Facebook and all the social sites. Now, all the young men in his cramped fraternity are competing for the attention of these online, amateur pinups. And the institution of the college fraternity itself is beginning to be threatened by this emerging, online phenomenon that, in the fall of 2007, has yet to be identified as "Social Media." Three women will make an impact on Victor. Erin Masters is an alluring yet naïve co-ed. Despite outward modesty, she has no reservations about letting friends plaster her provocative images across various social websites. Emily Green-Portsmith comes from wealth and is comparatively more aware of her effect on young men, both on and offline. Technological reliance, however, does not sit well with the house mother of these fraternity boys. She is affectionately known as Ma Red. This feisty, former Vietnam correspondent from the old-school of etiquette and discipline is prepared to make a fight for her traditional values. And throughout these technological and romantic discoveries, Victor wonders: What kind of love is this? ... the wired kind. He explores the pharmaceutical, social and sexual habits of the digital age. Pills are popped, rebellions spark - a young man matures against a set of difficulties unknown to generations past. Can Victor find meaning in the close sensations of a woman from the real world?

The Freeze-Dried Groom is one of the nine stories in Margaret Atwood's fantastic new collection Stone Mattress. A collection of highly imaginative short pieces that speak to our times with deadly accuracy. Vintage Atwood creativity, intelligence, and humor: think Alias Grace. Margaret Atwood turns to short fiction for the first time since her 2006 collection, Moral Disorder, with nine tales of acute psychological insight and turbulent relationships bringing to mind her award-winning 1996 novel, Alias Grace. A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband in "Alphinland," the first of three loosely linked stories about the romantic geometries of a group of writers and artists. In "The Freeze-Dried Groom," a man who bids on an auctioned storage space has a surprise. In "Lusus Naturae," a woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. In "Torching the Dusties," an elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. And in "Stone Mattress," a long-ago crime is avenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.

I am only fifteen...how could this happen to me? I am nerdy-straight 4.0 GPA, never smoked, never done drugs, never had a boyfriend, never had sex, never tasted alcohol, so why did he have to kidnap me? And how does One Direction fit into this mess?