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Folk Tales of the Night: Stories for Campfires, Bedtime and Nocturnal Adventures
By Chris Salisbury. 2023
'An enchanting treasury of magical tales handed down through the ages. Infectious and soul-stirring, these are stories crying out to…
be shared.' - Ben Hoare, award winning wildlife journalist and nature nerdHave you heard the tale of Black Annis, the witch-demon that lurks beneath a Leicester housing estate? Do you know the legend of the Hunting of the Great Bear, or how the crow brought daylight? Why should you be careful to never insult the moon?Star stories and creature tales, good-old-fashioned ghost stories together with traditional narratives about how the night became kindle the fires of our imagination and deepen our acquaintance with the dark in this compendium of stories to tell out loud.Filtered through the wild imaginations and indigenous tongues of storytellers from all over the world, this collection is rewritten and re-presented here by a master storyteller from the UK, who has been spinning nocturnal narratives around the campfire for three decades. This is a delicious midnight feast of 'tales from the dark side’ to fascinate, terrify, enchant and inform about the night-time realm.Sentimental Tales (Russian Library)
By Mikhail Zoshchenko. 2018
&“Dralyuk&’s new translation of Sentimental Tales, a collection of Zoshchenko&’s stories from the 1920s, is a delight that brings the author&’s…
wit to life.&”—The EconomistMikhail Zoshchenko&’s Sentimental Tales are satirical portraits of small-town characters on the fringes of Soviet society in the first decade of Bolshevik rule. The tales are narrated by one Kolenkorov, a writer not very good at his job, who takes credit for editing the tales in a series of comic prefaces. Yet beneath Kolenkorov&’s intrusive narration and sublime blathering, the stories are genuinely moving. They tell tales of unrequited love and amorous misadventures among down-on-their-luck musicians, provincial damsels, aspiring poets, and liberal aristocrats hopelessly out of place in the new Russia, against a backdrop of overcrowded apartments, scheming, and daydreaming. Zoshchenko&’s deadpan style and sly ventriloquy mask a biting critique of Soviet life—and perhaps life in general. An original perspective on Soviet society in the 1920s and simply uproariously funny, Sentimental Tales at last shows Anglophone readers why Zoshchenko is considered among the greatest humorists of the Soviet era. &“A book that would make Gogol guffaw.&”—Kirkus Reviews &“If you find Chekhov a bit tame and want a more bite to your fiction, then you need a dose of Zoshchenko, the premier Russian satirist of the twentieth century . . . Snap up this thin volume and enjoy.&”—Russian Life &“Mikhail Zoshchenko masterfully exhibits a playful seriousness. . . . Juxtaposing joyful wit with the bleakness of Soviet Russia, Sentimental Tales is a potent antidote for Russian literature&’s dour reputation.&”—Foreword Reviews &“Superb.&”—Los Angeles Review of Books100 Years of the Best American Short Stories (The Best American Series)
By Lorrie Moore. 2015
Witness the ever-changing history and identity of America in this collection of 40 stories collected from the first 100 years…
of this bestselling series.For the centennial celebration of this annual series, The Best American Short Stories, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls &“all its wildnesses of character and voice.&”These forty stories represent their eras but also stand the test of time. Here is Ernest Hemingway&’s first published story and a classic by William Faulkner, who admitted in his biographical note that he began to write &“as an aid to love-making.&” Nancy Hale&’s story describes far-reaching echoes of the Holocaust; Tillie Olsen&’s story expresses the desperation of a single mother; James Baldwin depicts the bonds of brotherhood and music. Here is Raymond Carver&’s &“minimalism,&” a term he disliked, and Grace Paley&’s &“secular Yiddishkeit.&” Here are the varied styles of Donald Barthelme, Charles Baxter, and Jamaica Kincaid. From Junot Díaz to Mary Gaitskill, from ZZ Packer to Sherman Alexie, these writers and stories explore the different things it means to be American.Heart of the Storm: Heart Of The Storm/ Seeing Red/land's End
By Shannon Stacey. 2014
Brody Rollins is back in Tucker's Point, Maine, for the first time in five years, but he's not staying long.…
His plan is to go in, meet his new baby nephew, and get out. Then a winter storm takes a turn for the worse, and Brody can't escape…from former neighbors, old regrets or painful glimpses of his ex-fiancée.When Delaney Westcott runs into Brody at the town's emergency shelter, she's shaken. She wants nothing to do with the man who left her—and Tucker's Point—without so much as a goodbye. Being cooped up with him in a high school gym is stirring up more than just bad memories, though, and soon Delaney finds herself confiding in Brody. But will he have any reason to stay once the blizzard ends?War by Candlelight: Stories
By Daniel Alarcon. 2005
Something is happening around the globe: mass movements of peoples, dislocations of language and culture in the wake of war…
and economic crises -- simply put, our world is changing.In this exquisite collection, Daniel Alarcón takes the reader from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people. Wars, both national and internal, are waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments. These are lives at the margins of the globalized and not-yet-globalized worlds, the stories of those who shuttle between them and never quite feel at home in the cities where they were born: an unrepentant terrorist remembers where it all began, a would-be emigrant contemplates the ramifications of leaving and never coming back, a reporter turns in his pad and pencil for the inglorious costume of a street clown.War by Candlelight is a devastating portrait ofa world in flux, and Daniel Alarcón is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.Man V. Nature: Stories
By Diane Cook. 2014
A refreshingly imaginative, daring debut collection of stories that illuminates with audacious wit the complexity of human behavior, and the…
veneer of civilization over our darkest urges.Told with perfect rhythm and unyielding brutality, these stories expose unsuspecting men and women to the realities of nature, the primal instincts of man, and the dark humor and heartbreak of our struggle to not only thrive, but survive. In "Girl on Girl," a high school freshman goes to disturbing lengths to help an old friend. An insatiable temptress pursues the one man she can't have in "Meteorologist Dave Santana." And in the title story, a long-fraught friendship comes undone when three buddies get impossibly lost on a lake it is impossible to get lost on. Below the quotidian surface of Diane Cook's worlds lurks an unexpected surreality that reveals our most curious, troubling, and bewildering behavior. Other stories explore situations pulled directly from the wild, imposing on human lives the danger, tension, and precariousness of the natural world: a pack of "not-needed" boys takes refuge in a murky forest where they compete against one another for their next meal; an alpha male is pursued through city streets by murderous rivals and desirous women; helpless newborns are snatched from their suburban yards by a man who stalks them. Through these characters Cook asks: What is at the root of our most heartless, selfish impulses? Why are people drawn together in such messy, needful ways? When the unexpected intrudes upon the routine, what do we discover about ourselves? As entertaining as it is dangerous, this accomplished collection explores the boundary between the wild and the civilized, where nature acts as a catalyst for human drama and lays bare our vulnerabilities, fears, and desires.The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 (Best American Ser.)
By 826 National. 2017
&“Turning the pages of The Best American Nonrequired Reading to find Tweets or sheet music creates the kind of unexpected surprise that's…
often encountered in digital space, but seldom in print…The eclecticism of the sources can be an awakening for the reader who seeks the best writing in books and literary journals…[and] the variety of genres is an apt reflection of contemporary reading culture: not just paragraphs and chapters but expressions in so many different forms…The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 lead[s] the reader to a variety of launching points for thinking more about who and where we are."—PopMatters —Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories
By Deborah Eisenberg. 2018
“[Eisenberg] reminds us in every line of certain saving virtues: wit, wild intelligence, great heart, the beauty of the inquiring…
human voice. If our culture can produce a writer this wonderful, there must be something beautiful about us yet.” — George SaundersInstead of forcing her characters’ stories into neat, arbitrary, preordained shapes, [Eisenberg] allows them to grow organically into oddly shaped, asymmetrical narratives—narratives that possess all the surprising twists and dismaying turns of real life.” — New York Times“Deborah Eisenberg, one of America’s finest writers, offers new ways of seeing and feeling, as if something were being perfected at the core.” — San Francisco Chronicle“Reading [Eisenberg] makes you wish, as you study the family in front of you in the grocery line, that you could see their thoughts rendered as one of Eisenberg’s stunning inner monologues.” — Los Angeles Times“...[S]uperlative and entertaining...Eisenberg is funny, grim, biting, and wise, but always with a light touch and always in the service of worlds that extend far beyond the page. A virtuoso at rendering the flickering gestures by which people simultaneously hide and reveal themselves, Eisenberg is an undisputed master of the short story.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)“[Eisenberg] is always worth the wait...so instantly absorbing that it feels like an abduction...This book offers no palliatives to its characters or to its readers — no plan of action. But it is a compass.” — The New York Times“Eisenberg is a gorgeous writer...I thank my stars that there’s a writer in the increasingly imperiled world as smart and funny and blazingly moral and devastatingly sidelong as she is.” — New York Times Book Review“Every character is memorable, every situation seizes our attention, and not a single word is out of place...It’s my fervent hope...that someday we’ll have the opportunity to look back on the many more stories that Deborah Eisenberg has yet to write.” — Financial TimesPaper Trails: The Life and Times of Pete Dexter
By Pete Dexter. 2007
“[A] literary feat—when Dexter gets going he crawls under the skin and stays there.” — New York Times Book Review[Dexter’s…
pieces] read like finely honed short stories....Their spare, haunting scenes echo Hemingway, their insights Faulkner. — Cleveland Plain DealerPAPER TRAILS is what great newspaper writing is all about. — Washington Post Book World“Pete Dexter is a master story teller in all forms... This is the work of a great American writer.” — Michael Connelly“A jewel box of muscular writing…” — Denver PostSuperb...Remarkable...The simple clarity of [Dexter’s] prose is like an Edward Hopper painting. — New York SunWith authority and a strange grace, Dexter has crafted a powerful true portrait of the underbelly of the American Dream. — Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Lovers of fine writing ought to give a serious consideration to Pete Dexter’s new book.” — Seattle Post-Intelligencer“Paper Trails is a master class in tight, effective writing.” — St. Petersburg Times“The author’s true eye for detail makes for easy reading.” — Kirkus Reviews“Laugh-out-loud stories…Ideal for... writers and any book lover who appreciates a good story.” — Library Journal“Compact and illuminating…” — Sunday Oregonian“Paper Trails will stir nostalgia for those who remember a time when newspapers prided themselves on cutting loose, colorful writers…” — Columbus Dispatch“A book full of good reading…” — Rocky Mountain NewsThe Architect of Flowers
By William Lychack. 2011
"[Lychak's] pieces cover an impressive range of emotional and imaginative territory... The disciplined storytelling and barbed wit strike a fine…
balance."-Kirkus Reviews "In this dazzling collection William Lychak moves with equal ease between fabulism and realism as he conjures up his alluring characters, their troubles and delights. The resulting stories are precise, exhilarating, sometimes wonderfully funny and always beautiful. I love being transported to so many different worlds." - Margot Livesey, The House on Fortune Street"The Architect of Flowers is a stunning collection. Each story is like a brilliant dream, evanescent, yet managing to linger in all the senses long after the last page has been turned. It is a poetry of narrative rarely ever found in fiction." - Mary McGarry Morris, The River Queen "Derek Walcott says he writes verse in the hope of writing poetry. Something similar might be said about the fiction in William Lychack's THE ARCHITECT OF FLOWERS. The prose rises to a level of intense lyricism that distinguishes this lovely, artful collection." - Stuart Dybek, Sailed With Magellan "The small failings between parents and children, the long-held secrets in married lives, the darkening of old age interrupted unexpected flashes of hope: with the hand of a master, William Lychack searches out the ignored moments of ordinary life and burnishes them into treasures. This collection is a treasury. I loved it." - Vestal McIntyre, You Are Not The One —A Tortoise For The Queen of Tonga: Stories
By Julia Whitty. 2002
Bringing a unique perspective and a singular voice to contemporary fiction, A TORTOISE FOR THE QUEEN OF TONGA features lush,…
poignant stories about the natural world. Here are mammals, historical figures, everyday people who discover the liberating properties of memory and knowledge in the face of captivity and loneliness. We meet a forlorn tortoise forced to live among humans. We witness orcas at Ocean World staging a revolt, using celibacy as their weapon. In a French cave, a young computer animator draws parallels between Cro-Magnon and modern women. One story even travels to heaven, where Charles Darwin seeks the source of human happiness. Whitty joins her authority about wildlife and her rich imagination to spectacular effect. Drawing on twenty years' experience with making nature documentaries, she takes readers inside the minds of animals and people struggling to overcome their limitations. In a voice as magical as it is informed, A TORTOISE FOR THE QUEEN OF TONGA bridges the mythical and the mundane, the animal and the human. Julia Whitty is a brilliant new storyteller in American short fiction.Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part Two—His Master's Blade
By Kyokutei Bakin. 2024
Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi Hakkenden is one of the monuments of Japanese literature. This multigenerational samurai saga was one of…
the most popular and influential books of the nineteenth century and has been adapted many times into film, television, fiction, and comics.His Master's Blade, the second part of Hakkenden, begins the story of the eight Dog Warriors created from the mystic union between Princess Fuse and the dog Yatsufusa and born into eight different samurai families in fifteenth-century Japan. The first is Inuzuka Shino, orphaned descendent of proud warriors. Left with nothing save a magical sword and the bead that marks him as a Dog Warrior, young Shino escapes his evil aunt and uncle and sets out to restore his family name. Unaware of their karmic bond, Shino and the other Dog Warriors are drawn into a world of vendettas and quests, gallants, and rogues, as each strives to learn his true nature and find his place in the eight-man fraternity.The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Volume 3 (The tiny Book Of Tiny Stories Ser.)
By Joseph Gordon-Levitt. 2012
The Barracks Thief
By Tobias Wolff. 1984
The Barracks Thief is the story of three young paratroopers waiting to be shipped out to Vietnam. Brought together one…
sweltering afternoon to stand guard over an ammunition dump threatened by a forest fire, they discover in each other an unexpected capacity for recklessness and violence. Far from being alarmed by this discovery, they are exhilarated by it; they emerge from their common danger full of confidence in their own manhood and in the bond of friendship they have formed.This confidence is shaken when a series of thefts occur. The author embraces the perspectives of both the betrayer and the betrayed, forcing us to participate in lives that we might otherwise condemn, and to recognize the kinship of those lives to our own.The Best American Short Stories 2019 (The Best American Series)
By Anthony Doerr, Heidi Pitlor. 2019
#1 New York Times best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr brings his&“stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors&” (San…
Francisco Chronicle) to selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. &“As soon as you complete a description of what a good story must be, a new example flutters through an open window, lands on your sleeve, and proves your description wrong,&” writes Anthony Doerr about the task of selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. The year&’s best stories are a diverse, addictive group exploring everything from America&’s rich rural culture to its online teen culture to the fragile nature of the therapist-client relationship. This astonishing collection brings together the realistic and dystopic, humor and terror. For Doerr, &“with every new artist, we simultaneously refine and expand our understanding of what the form can be.&” The Best American Short Stories 2019 includes Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Jamel Brinkley, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ursula K. Le Guin, Manuel Muñoz, Sigrid Nunez, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Jim Shepherd, Weike Wang, and others.Year's Best SF 4 (Year's Best SF Series #4)
By David G. Hartwell. 1999
Travel to the Farthest Reaches of the ImaginationAcclaimed editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell is back with his fourth annual…
high-powered collection of the year's most inventive, entertaining, and awe-inspiring science fiction. In short, the best.Here are stories from today's top name authors, plus exciting newcomers, all eager to land you on exotic planets, introduce you to strange new life forms, and show you scenes more amazing than anything you've imagined.So sit back and blast off for an amazing trip withStephen Baxter Gregory Benford David Brin Nancy Kress Bruce Sterling Michael Swanwick and many more...The Athens Solution: A Thriller (The Thriller Shorts #1)
By Brad Thor. 2006
In this action-packed story by a #1 New York Times–bestselling author, a covert agent faces off against a terrorist cell…
armed with a powerful weapon.A deadly betrayal is at the center of ”The Athens Solution.” When a game-changing weapon falls into the wrong hands, the US Ambassador to Greece must risk everything to recover it, even if it means participating in a ruse that costs his life. With the ambassador dead and the device still at large, covert counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath rushes to eliminate a terror cell about to sell the dangerous technology to Iran. As the sun sets on the Aegean Sea, Harvath must go head-to-head with a traitorous adversary in a confrontation that puts the fate of America and her allies at risk . . . Originally published in the short story anthology, Thriller, ”The Athens Solution” has been revised and includes a brand new, bonus afterword. This riveting addition to the Scot Harvath thrillers delivers all the pulse-pounding action and high stakes fans have come to know and love from Brad Thor. Without a doubt, ”The Athens Solution” will leave fans hungry for more!Praise for “The Athens Solution”“Nobody can pack as much action into fifty pages as Brad Thor . . . Undoubtedly the best short story I’ve ever read.” —The Real Book SpyGold: The Final Science Fiction Collection
By Isaac Asimov. 2003
Gold is the final and crowning achievement of the fifty-year career of science fiction's transcendent genius, the world-famous author who…
defined the field of science fiction for its practitioners, its millions of readers, and the world at large.The first section contains stories that range from the humorous to the profound, at the heart of which is the title story, "Gold," a moving and revealing drama about a writer who gambles everything on a chance at immortality: a gamble Asimov himself made -- and won. The second section contains the grand master's ruminations on the SF genre itself. And the final section is comprised of Asimov's thoughts on the craft and writing of science fiction.Give My Love to the Savages: Stories
By Chris Stuck. 2021
“A harrowing portrait of race relations in America, as beautiful as it is urgent.”—Entertainment Weekly“Black satire with bite, like Zora…
Neale Hurston used to do, with a smile and a sharp elbow. A touch of Paul Beatty, a dose of Dolemite, and a serving of Dorothy Parker, too. Give My Love to the Savages announces Chris Stuck as a fearless talent, a debut that'll make your sides and your heart hurt.”—Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling“Give My Love To The Savages is a wildly inventive collection of provocative stories about navigating the minefield of black masculinity in America. Stuck’s fresh and fearless perspective overturns assumptions about race and identity to reveal complex layers of absurdity. At times merciless, always darkly funny, these are stories of unexpected communion, connection, and compassion.”—Chanelle Benz, author of The Gone DeadA provocative and raw debut collection of short fiction reminiscent of Junot Diaz’s Drown. A Black man’s life, told in scenes—through every time he’s been called nigger. A Black son who visits his estranged white father in Los Angeles just as the ’92 riots begin. A Black Republican, coping with a skin disease that has turned him white, is forced to reconsider his life. A young Black man, fetishized by an older white woman he’s just met, is offered a strange and tempting proposal. The nine tales in Give My Love to the Savages illuminate the multifaceted Black experience, exploring the thorny intersections of race, identity, and Black life through an extraordinary cast of characters. From the absurd to the starkly realistic, these stories take aim at the ironies and contradictions of the American racial experience. Chris Stuck traverses the dividing lines, and attempts to create meaning from them in unique and unusual ways. Each story considers a marker of our current culture, from uprisings and sly and not-so-sly racism, to Black fetishization and conservatism, to the obstacles placed in front of Black masculinity and Black and interracial relationships by society and circumstance.Setting these stories across America, from Los Angeles, Phoenix and the Pacific Northwest, to New York and Washington, DC, to the suburbs and small Midwestern towns, Stuck uses place to expose the absurdity of race and the odd ways that Black people and white people converge and retreat, rub against and bump into one another.Ultimately, Give My Love to the Savages is the story of America. With biting humor and careful honesty, Stuck riffs on the dichotomy of love and barbarity—the yin and yang of racial experience—and the difficult and uncertain terrain Black Americans must navigate in pursuit of their desires.The Brink: Stories
By Austin Bunn. 2015
A brilliant, inventive debut story collection in the vein of Kevin Wilson and Wells Tower.Brimming with life and unforgettable voices,…
the stories in Austin Bunn’s dazzling collection explore the existential question: what happens at “the end” and what lies beyond it? In the wry but affecting “How to Win an Unwinnable War,” a summer class on nuclear war for gifted teenagers turns a struggling family upside down. A young couple’s idyllic beach honeymoon is interrupted by terrorism in the lush, haunting “Getting There and Away.” When an immersive videogame begins turning off in the heartbreaking “Griefer,” an obsessive player falls in love with a mysterious player in the final hours of a world.Told in a stunning range of voices, styles, and settings—from inside the Hale-Bopp cult to the deck of a conquistador’s galleon adrift at the end of the ocean—the stories in Bunn’s collection capture the transformations and discoveries at the edge of irrevocable change. Each tale presents a distinct world, told with deep emotion, energizing language, and characters with whom we have more in common that we realize. They signal the arrival of an astonishing new talent in short fiction.