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And thereby hangs a tale
Summary:Fifteen short pieces are set in various world regions and include “Members Only,” in which a young man’s life is transformed by a Christmas cracker.
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Dark lies the island
Summary:This is a collection of stories about love and cruelty, crimes, desperation, and hope from the man Irvine Welsh has described as “the most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years.”
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From the listening hills
Summary: In peerless fiction spanning five decades and as many continents, Louis L’Amour has proven himself the preeminent storyteller of the American experience. Whether set aboard a ship trapped in enemy seas or amidst a showdown in the deserts of Death Valley, his stories brilliantly capture the heroic and indomitable spirit of our great land.
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Herman Melville : Complete shorter fiction
Summary: Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of “Moby-Dick.” In a story like “Bartleby, the Scrivener” — one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language — he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In “Benito Cereno,” he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime’s magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime.
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It’s beginning to hurt
Summary: The stories in this remarkable collection–including “An Anxious Man,” winner of the National Short Story Prize (UK)–are vibrant and gripping. James Lasdun’s great gift is his unfailing psychological instinct for the vertiginous moments when the essence of a life discloses itself. With forensic skill he exposes his characters’ hidden desires and fears, drawing back the folds of their familiar self-delusions, their images of themselves, their habits and routines, to reveal their interior lives with brilliant clarity.
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Ladies and gentlemen
Summary: After his widely celebrated debut, Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross now presents a darkly compelling collection of stories about brothers, loners, lovers, and lives full of good intentions, misunderstandings, and obscured motives. A hotshot lawyer, burdened by years of guilt and resentment, comes to the rescue of his irresponsible, irresistible younger brother. An unsettling story resonates between the dysfunctional couple telling it and their listening friends as well. A lonely professor, frequently regaled with unbelievably entertaining tales by the office handyman, suddenly fears he’s being asked to abet a murderous fugitive. An awkward but nervy adolescent uses his brief career as a child actor to further his designs on a WASPy friend’s seemingly untouchable sister. A man down on his luck closes in on a mysterious, much-needed job offer while doing a good turn for his fragile neighbor, with results at once surreal and hilarious. And when two college kids goad each other on in an escalating series of breathtaking dares, the outcome is as tragic as it is ambiguous.
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Long, last, happy : new and selected stories
Summary:Combines the best from the author’s four story collections as well as the final manuscript he left behind after his death.
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Monstress : stories
Summary: A luminous collection of heartbreaking, vivid, startling, and gloriously unique stories set amongst the Filipino-American communities of California and the Philippines. A luminous collection of heartbreaking, vivid, startling, and gloriously unique stories set amongst the Filipino-American communities of California and the Philippines, Monstress heralds the arrival of a breathtaking new talent on the literary scene: Lysley Tenorio.
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Mrs Dalloway’s party; a short story sequence,
Summary: The landmark modern novel Mrs. Dalloway creates a portrait of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she orchestrates the last-minute details of a grand party. But before Virginia Woolf wrote this masterwork, she explored in a series of fascinating stories a similar revelry in the mental and physical excitement of a party. Wonderfully captivating, the seven stories in Mrs. Dalloway’s Party create a dynamic and delightful portrait of what Woolf called “party consciousness.” As parallel expressions of the themes of Mrs. Dalloway, these stories provide a valuable window into Woolf’s writing mind and a further testament to her extraordinary genius.
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Nine inches : stories
Summary:A collection of stories focuses on suburban nuclear families, including “Senior Season,” “Nine Inches” and “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face.”
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Saints and sinners : stories
Summary: A woman walks the streets of Manhattan and contemplates with exquisite longing the precarious affair she has embarked on, amidst the grandeur and cacophony of the cityscape; a young Irish girl and her mother are thrilled to be invited to visit the glamorous Coughlan’s but find – for all the promise of their green gorgette, silver shoes and fancy dinner parties – they leave disappointed; an Irishman in north London retraces his life as a young lad with his mates digging the streets and dreaming of the apocryphal gold, an outside both in Ireland and England, yet he carries the lodestar of his native land. A collection characterised by all of Edna O’Brien’s trademark lyricism, powerful evocations of place and a glorious and an often heart-breaking grasp of people and their desires and contradictions.
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Selected stories of H.G. Wells
Summary: Le Guin’s selection of twenty-six stories showcases Well’s genius and reintroduces readers to his singular talent for making the unbelievable seem utterly plausible.
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The collected stories of Elizabeth Bowen.
Summary: Widely known for her much-admired novels, including The Heat of the Day, The House in Paris, and The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen established herself in the front rank of the century’s writers equally through her short fiction. This collection brings together seventy-nine magnificent stories written over the course of four decades. Vividly featuring scenes of bomb-scarred London during the Blitz, frustrated lovers, acutely obcerved children, and even vengeful ghosts, these stories reinforce Bowen’s reputation as an artist whose finely chiseled narratives—rich in imagination, psychological insight, and craft—transcend their time and place.
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The collected stories of Eudora Welty.
Summary:Stories are as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway’s. The breadth of Welty’s offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types–farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery–but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime’s vision.
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The complete stories of Truman Capote
Summary: A landmark collection that brings together Truman Capote’s life’s work in the form he called his “great love,” The Complete Stories confirms Capote’s status as a master of the short story.
Ranging from the gothic South to the chic East Coast, from rural children to aging urban sophisticates, all the unforgettable places and people of Capote’s oeuvre are here, in stories as elegant as they are heartfelt, as haunting as they are compassionate. Reading them reminds us of the miraculous gifts of a beloved American original.
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The cost of lunch, etc.
Summary:Marge Piercy’s debut collection of short stories brings us glimpses into the lives of everyday women moving through and making sense of their daily internal and external worlds. Keeping to the engaging, accessible language of Piercy’s novels, the collection spans decades of her writing along with a range of locations, ages, and emotional states of her protagonists. From the first-person account of hoarding and a girl’s narrative of sexual and spiritual discovery to the recounting of a past love affair, each story is a tangible, vivid snapshot in a varied and subtly curated gallery of work. Whether grappling with death, familial relationships, friendship, sex, illness, or religion, Piercy’s writing is as passionate, lucid, insightful, and thoughtfully alive as ever. — taken from front flap of dust jacket.
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The monkey’s wedding, and other stories
Summary:Joan Aiken’s stories captivated readers for fifty years. They’re funny, smart, gentle, and occasionally very, very scary. The stories in The Monkey’s Wedding are collected here for the very first time and include six never before published, as well as two previously published under the pseudonym Nicholas Dee. Here you’ll find the story of a village for sale . . . or is the village itself the story? There’s an English vicar who declares on his deathbed that he might have lived an entirely different life. After his death, a large, black, argumentative cat makes an appearance. . . . This hugely imaginative collection includes introductions by Aiken as well as by her daughter, Lizza Aiken.
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The stories of Ray Bradbury
Summary:In this collection are an imaginative group of stories that often bridge the gap between fantasy and science fiction. The collection includes one hundred of the author’s science fiction, fantasy, horror, and midwestern short stories.
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Up all night : a short story collection
Summary:Presents five short stories about teens who stay up all night, written by award-winning authors.
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What is not yours is not yours : stories
Summary:The stories collected here are linked by more than the exquisitely winding prose of their creator: Helen Oyeyemi’s ensemble cast of characters slip from the pages of their own stories only to surface in another. The reader is invited into a world of lost libraries and locked gardens, of marshlands where the drowned dead live and a city where all the clocks have stopped; students hone their skills at puppet school, the Homely Wench Society commits a guerrilla book-swap, and lovers exchange books and roses on St Jordi’s Day. It is a collection of towering imagination, marked by baroque beauty and a deep sensuousness.
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While mortals sleep : unpublished short fiction
Summary:An anthology of sixteen previously unpublished works includes selections from the iconic writer’s early literary career and is complemented by more than a dozen of his original works of art.
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