Short Stories
In the mood for a quick read?
August 8, 2023
If you’re in the mood for a quick read that still packs a punch, you’ve come to the right place. This book list features a variety of genres and authors, all with one thing in common: they know how to tell a great story in just a few pages.
This book list includes:
Tales of American Life
The Accomplished Guest
Ann Beattie
Set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, this collection of stories explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging.
Skinship
Yoon Choi
A long-married couple is forced to confront their friend’s painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town… A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years… A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims… Through the lives of an indelible array of individuals–musicians, housewives and pastors, children and grandparents, the men and women who own the dry cleaners and the mini-marts–Yoon Choi explores the Korean-American experience at its interstices: where first and second generations either clash or find common ground where meaning falls in the cracks between languages where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment where displacement turns to heartbreak.
Astray
Emma Donoghue
A collection of short stories featuring a cross-section of society including runaways, drifters, gold miners, counterfeiters, attorneys, and slaves from Puritan Massachusetts and revolutionary New Jersey to antebellum Louisiana.
The Office Of Historical Corrections
Danielle Evans
Danielle Evans brings her signature voice and insight to the subjects of race, grief, apology, and American history. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multi-racial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief–all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history – about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.
Tales Of Two Americas Of Inequality In A Divided Nation
John Freeman
In Tales of Two Americas, some of the literary world’s most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation. Their extraordinarily powerful stories, essays, and poems demonstrate how boundaries break down when experiences are shared, and that in sharing our stories we can help to alleviate a suffering that touches so many people.
Don’t Cry
Mary Gaitskill
A collection of stories unfolding against the backdrop of of American life over the last thirty years and reflecting the profound enrichment of life experience
Uncommon Type
Tom Hanks
A gentle Eastern European immigrant arrives in New York City after his family and his life have been torn apart by his country’s civil war. A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game–and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN’s newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves. An eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant venture into America looking for acquisitions and discover a down and out motel, romance, and a bit of real life. These are just some of the tales Tom Hanks tells in this first collection of his short stories. They are surprising, intelligent, heartwarming, and, for the millions and millions of Tom Hanks fans, an absolute must-have!
Hitting A Straight Lick With A Crooked Stick From The Harlem Renaissance
Zora Neale Hurston
In 1925, Zora Neale Hurston was living in New York as a fledgling writer. This collection of stories, found in archives after her death, reveal African American folk culture in Harlem in the 1920s. This book includes eight of Hurston’s lost Harlem gems.
My Monticello
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
An irresistibly accessible yet startlingly bold book of short stories and a novella, inspired by Black lives in America and featuring the gripping eponymous work My Monticello.
The Refugees
Viet Thanh Nguyen
A collection of stories, written over a twenty-year period, examines the Vietnamese experience in America as well as questions of home, family, and identity.
Dear Husband
Joyce Carol Oates
In these 14 melancholic stories, Oates unearths the unsettling and morbid side of American life. ‘Special’ shows us the extremes of childhood sibling rivalry, while in ‘The Blind Man’s Sighted Daughters,’ grown sisters face the inequities of their relationship. ‘Suicide by Fitness Center’ and ‘Mistrial’ both explore how middle-aged women cope with loneliness in ‘The Glazers’ and ‘Vigilante’ we meet two young adults in over their heads. The collection is wintry and dark, best read by the emotionally stable, as Oates spirals into the realities of death and the sadness of life. Although the stories are unsettling, Oates maintains intimacy and empathy with her characters. From the
It Occurs To Me That I Am America
Jonathan Santlofer
In time for the one-year anniversary of the Trump Inauguration and the Women’s March, this provocative, unprecedented anthology features original short stories from thirty bestselling and award-winning authors–including Alice Walker, Richard Russo, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Mary Higgins Clark, and Lee Child–with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Afterparties
Anthony Veasna So
A debut story collection about Cambodian-American life-immersive and comic, yet unsparing-that marks the arrival of an indisputable new talent in American fiction.
Heads Of The Colored People
Nafissa Thompson-Spires
This collection of moving, timely, and darkly funny stories examines the concept of black identity in this so-called post-racial era. A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous–from two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids’ backpacks, to the young girl contemplating how best to notify her Facebook friends of her impending suicide–while others are devastatingly poignant–a new mother and funeral singer who is driven to madness with grief for the young black boys who have fallen victim to gun violence, or the teen who struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with black culture.
International Short Stories
Tell Tale
Jeffrey Archer
A collection of short tales features a series of protagonists reflecting the author’s experiences with the people he has met and the cultures he has visited throughout the past decade. Find out what happens to the hapless young detective from Naples who travels to an Italian hillside town to find out Who Killed the Mayor? and the pretentious schoolboy in A Road to Damascus, whose discovery of the origins of his father’s wealth changes his life in the most profound way. Revel in the stories of the 1930’s woman who dares to challenge the men at her Ivy League University in A Gentleman and A Scholar while another young woman who thumbs a lift gets more than she bargained for in A Wasted Hour.
A Manual For Cleaning Women
Lucia Berlin
With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday–uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City. The women of Berlin’s stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. They are hitchhikers, hard workers, bad Christians. With the wit of Lorrie Moore and the grit of Raymond Carver, they navigate a world of jockeys, doctors, and switchboard operators. They laugh, they mourn, they drink. Berlin, a highly influential writer despite having published little in her lifetime, conjures these women from California, Mexico, and beyond.
Notwithstanding From An English Village
Louis de Bernieres
As the world around it marches forward, the bucolic English village of Notwithstanding remains unchanged. It is, as it always has been, a place of pubs and cricket pitches, where local eccentrics—a retired colonel who has eschewed clothes, a spiritualist living with the ghost of her husband, and a dog named Archibald Scott-Moncrieff—almost fit in. In this delightfully evocative collection of stories, in which a young couple falls in and out of love by letter alone, an eleven-year-old boy battles a monstrous fish, and a man of the cloth has a premonition of death, Louis de Berni�res conjures up a rural idyll long since forgotten. Funny, bittersweet, and deeply felt, Notwithstanding is the bestselling author of Corelli’s Mandolin at his most enchanting.
Tales Of Two Planets Of Climate Change And Inequality In A Divided World
John Freeman
The effects of global warming are especially disruptive in less well-off nations, sending refugees to the US and elsewhere in the wealthier world, where they often encounter the problems that perennially face outsiders: lack of access to education, health care, decent housing, employment, and even basic nutrition. But the problems of climate change are not restricted to those from the less developed world. American citizens are suffering too, as the stories of distress resulting from recent hurricanes testify. Galvanized by his conversations with writers and activists around the world, Freeman has engaged with some of today’s most eloquent writers, many of whom hail from the places under the most acute stress.
The American Lover
Rose Tremain
Trapped in a London apartment, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster’s cottage, miles from Moscow. A young woman who is about to marry a rich aristocrat instead begins a torrid relationship with a construction worker. A father, finally free of his daughter’s demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. A middle-aged woman cares for her injured mother at Christmas. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor, Daphne du Maurier.
The Lives of Women and Men
Roar
Cecelia Ahern
Cecelia Ahern gives us thirty stories, all titled ‘The Woman Who…’, that capture the different facets of women’s lives. Humorous, moving and poignant, the stories capture the moments the characters are overwhelmed by guilt, confusion, frustration, intimidation, exhaustion the private moments when they feel the need to roar.
Almost Famous Women
Megan Mayhew Bergman
The fascinating lives of the characters in Almost Famous Women have mostly been forgotten, but their stories are burning to be told. Now Megan Mayhew Bergman resurrects these women, lets them live in the reader’s imagination, so we can explore their difficult choices. Nearly every story in this dazzling collection is based on a woman who attained some celebrity—she raced speed boats or was a conjoined twin in show business, a reclusive painter of renown, a member of the first all-female integrated swing band. We see Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughter, Oscar Wilde’s troubled niece, West With the Night author Beryl Markham, Edna St. Vincent Milla’s sister Norma. These extraordinary stories travel the world, explore the past (and delve into the future), and portray fiercely independent women defined by their acts of bravery, creative impulses, and sometimes reckless decisions.
A Lucky Man
Jamel Brinkley
In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history. Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class–where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.
Cat Brushing
Jane Campbell
Cat Brushing, the provocative first book of stories by Jane Campbell, vigorously explores the sensual worlds of thirteen older women, unearthing their passions, libidinal appetites, integrity, and sense of self as they fight against prevalent misconceptions and stereotypes of the aging. Written in spikey, incisive prose, this alluring cast of characters overcomes the notion that elder women’s behavior must be in some way monitored and controlled. Jane Campbell’s timeless wisdom and dark wit inspires and challenges, shocks and comforts as she examines the inner lives of women who fight to lead the rest of their lives on their own terms.
American Housewife
Helen Ellis
Meet the women of ‘American Housewife’ they wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it’s cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. They pump the salad spinner like it’s a CPR dummy. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven. These twelve irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation ritual of a book club to the getaway car of a pageant princess on the lam, from the gallery opening of a tinfoil artist to the fitting room of a legendary lingerie shop. Vicious, fresh, and nutty as a poisoned Goo Goo Cluster, ‘American Housewife’ is an uproarious, pointed commentary on womanhood.
Difficult Women
Roxane Gay
Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and must negotiate the elder sister’s marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls’ fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America.
Shit Cassandra Saw
Gwen E Kirby
Cassandra may have seen the future, but it doesn’t mean she’s resigned to telling the Trojans everything she knows. In this ebullient collection, virgins escape from being sacrificed, witches refuse to be burned, whores aren’t ashamed, and every woman gets a chance to be a radioactive cockroach warrior who snaps back at catcallers. Gwen E. Kirby experiments with found structures–a Yelp review, a WikiHow article–which her fierce, irreverent narrators push against, showing how creativity within an enclosed space undermines and deconstructs the constraints themselves. When these women tell the stories of their triumphs as well as their pain, they emerge as funny, angry, loud, horny, lonely, strong protagonists who refuse be secondary characters a moment longer. From The Best and Only Whore of Cwm Hyfryd, 1886 to the Midwestern Girl [who] is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories, Kirby is playing and laughing with the women who have come before her and they are telling her, we have always been this way. You just had to know where to look.
To Be A Man
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all. o Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss’s stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.
Back Talk
Danielle Lazarin
A beautiful and unapologetic collection of stories about women’s unexpressed desires and needs, and the unexpected ways they resurface.In ‘Floor Plans,’ a woman at the end of her marriage tests her power when she inadvertently befriends the neighbor trying to buy her apartment. In ‘Appetite,’ a sixteen-year old grieving her mother’s death experiences first love and questions how much more heartbreak she and her family can endure. In ‘Dinosaurs,’ a recent widower and a young babysitter help each other navigate how much they have to give—and how much they can take—from the people around them. Through stories that are at once empathetic and unexpected, these women and girls defiantly push the boundaries between selfishness and self-possession. With a fresh voice and bold honesty, Back Talk examines how narrowly our culture allows women to express their desires.
Her Body And Other Parties
Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
Men Without Women
Haruki Murakami
Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.
Dis Mem Ber
And Other Stories Of Mystery And Suspense
Joyce Carol Oates
At the heart of this meticulously crafted, deeply disquieting collection are girls and women confronting the danger around them, and the danger hidden inside their turbulent selves. In the title story, a precocious eleven-year-old named Jill is in thrall to an older male relative, the mysterious, attractive black sheep of the family. Without telling her parents Jill climbs into his sky-blue Chevy to be driven to an uncertain, and unforgettable, fate. In ‘The Drowned Girl,’ a university transfer student becomes increasingly obsessed with the drowning/murder of another female student, as her own sense of self begins to deteriorate. In ‘Great Blue Heron,’ a recent widow grieves inside the confines of her lakefront home and fantasizes about transforming into that great flying predator—unerring and pitiless in the hunt. And in the final story, ‘Welcome to Friendly Skies,’ a trusting group of bird-watchers is borne to a remote part of the globe, to a harrowing fate.
Look How Happy I’m Making You
Polly Rosenwaike
The women in Polly Rosenwaike’s Look How Happy I’m Making You want to be mothers, or aren’t sure they want to be mothers, or – having recently given birth – are overwhelmed by what they’ve wrought. Sharp and unsettling, wry and moving in its depiction of love, friendship, and family, this collection expands the coversation about what having a baby looks like. One woman struggling with infertility deals with the news that her sister is pregnant. Another, nervous about her biological clock, forgets to take her birth control while dating a younger man and must confront the possibility of becoming a single parent. Four motherless women who meet in a bar every Mother’s Day contend with their losses and what it would mean to have a child. Witty, empathetic, and precisely observed, Look How Happy I’m Making You offers a rare, honest portrayal of pregnancy and new motherhood in a culture obsessed with women’s most intimate choices.
Romance, In Short
Reader, I Married Him Inspired By Jane Eyre
Tracy Chevalier
This collection of original stories by today’s finest women writers–including Tracy Chevalier, Francine Prose, Elizabeth McCracken, Tessa Hadley, Audrey Niffenegger, and more–takes inspiration from the opening line in Charlotte Bronte’s most beloved novel, Jane Eyre. A fixture in the literary canon, Charlotte Brontë is revered by readers all over the world. Her novels featuring unforgettable, strong heroines still resonate with millions today. And who could forget one of literature’s best-known lines: Reader, I married him from her classic novel Jane Eyre? Part of a remarkable family that produced three acclaimed female writers at a time in nineteenth-century Britain when few women wrote, and fewer were published, Bronte has become a great source of inspiration to writers, especially women, ever since. Now in Reader, I Married Him, twenty of today’s most celebrated women authors have spun original stories, using the opening line from Jane Eyre as a springboard for their own flights of imagination.
This Is How You Lose Her
Junot Diaz
Diaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love–obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness–and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that ‘the half-life of love is forever.’
Chance Developments
Alexander McCall Smith
A collection of thematically linked short stories on the subjects of love and art, each inspired by an evocative old photo, includes the stories of a nun who leaves the sisterhood to discover big-city life and a romance between a circus ventriloquist and animal handler.;” While gathering material for a photography book about Edinburgh, Alexander McCall Smith found himself inspired to create stories about the people captured in a number of particularly striking photos. A smiling girl leading a younger girl astride a pony, and a boy in a kilt on a tricycle beside them, gives rise to a story of a lifelong romance between the two riders. A dapper, roguish-looking man perching on a lady’s knee sparks the story of a ventriloquist and an animal handler who work in a circus, and who, under the most delightfully unexpected circumstances, fall in love. The image of a woman haloed by light in a train station becomes the lighthearted tale of a nun’s decision to leave the sisterhood and discover what the big city has to offer. Charming and poignant, this collection is brimming with the flourishes of grace and humor that could only come from the pen of Alexander McCall Smith.
Paris For One And Other Stories
Jojo Moyes
A collection of eight short stories is complemented by a novella in which a young woman abandoned during a romantic mini-vacation gathers the courage to embark on an independent tour of Paris.
Portraits Of A Few Of The People I’ve Made Cry
Christine Sneed
Ten finely delineated tales featuring protagonists entangled in less-than-ideal romantic scenarios constitute this year’s winner of the Grace Paley Prize. The best stories feature women caught up in liaisons with men either much younger or older. In Quality of Life, a 26-year-old woman begins seeing a wealthy man more than double her age, Mr. Fulger, who takes her out infrequently and presses money on her, which she takes because it made her life more easeful. She dates other men her age, but can’t seem to stop seeing Mr. Fulger, whose solicitousness eventually has unexpected consequences. In the title story, the granddaughter of a late, famous artist becomes involved with a young artist who may be playing her to obtain the precious notebooks bequeathed to her. Teetering on the brink of self-possession, Sneed’s protagonists aren’t sure they trust themselves, such as the 55-year old narrator of By the Way who can’t admit to her much younger lover her fears of faltering memory and mortality. Sneed writes with the care of a fine stylist and the heart of a sympathetic reader.
Short and Speculative
The Relive Box And Other Stories
T Coraghessan Boyle
From the title story, which features a so-called relive box that allows users to experience anew almost any moment from their past, to ‘The Five-Pound Burrito,’ the tale of a man aiming to build the biggest burrito in town, the twelve stories in this collection represent a whole new way of looking at the world.
Hex Life
Wicked New Tales Of Witchery
Christopher Golden and Rachel Autumn Deering
Brand-new stories of witches and witchcraft written by popular female fantasy authors, including Kelley Armstrong, Rachel Caine and Sherrilyn Kenyon writing in their own bestselling universes! These are tales of witches, wickedness, evil, and cunning.
If It Bleeds
Stephen King
In If it Bleeds, King gives readers four brilliant new stories sure to prove as iconic as their predecessors. Once again, King’s remarkable range is on full display. In the title story, reader favorite Holly Gibney (from the Bill Hodges Trilogy and The Outsider) must face her fears and possibly another outsider-this time on her own. In ‘Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,’ an intergenerational friendship has a disturbing afterlife. ‘The Life of Chuck’ explores, beautifully, how each of us contains multitudes. And in ‘Rat,’ a struggling writer must contend with the darker side of ambition.
Old Mars
George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois
Of all the planets orbiting that G-class star we call the Sun, none was so steeped in an aura of romantic decadence, thrilling mystery, and gung-ho adventure as Mars. This new anthology of all original stories embraces an older, more welcoming, more exotic Mars: a planet of ancient canals curring through red deserts studded with the ruined cities of dying races.
Ghostly
Audrey Niffenegger
A unique and haunting anthology of some of the best ghost stories of all time. From Edgar Allen Poe to Kelly Link, M.R. James to Neil Gaiman, H. H. Munro to Audrey Niffenegger herself, this book reveals the evolution of the ghost story genre with tales going back to the eighteenth century and into the modern era, ranging across styles from Gothic Horror to Victorian, with a particular bent toward stories about haunting–haunted children, animals, houses. Every story is introduced by Audrey Niffenegger, an acclaimed master of the craft, with some words on its background and why she chose to include it.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
Helen Oyeyemi
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 lostlibraries 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 roseson St Jordi’s Day. It is a collection of towering imagination, marked by baroque beauty and a deep sensuousness.
Vampires In The Lemon Grove
Karen Russell
Six short stories with subjects ranging from a dejected teenager who discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull’s nest to two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove who try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood.
Liberation Day
George Saunders
A masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, that cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose–wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned–Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention as Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.
Children Of The New World
Alexander Weinstein
Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago. In The Cartographers, the main character works for a company that creates and sells virtual memories, while struggling to maintain a real-world relationship sabotaged by an addiction to his own creations. In Saying Goodbye to Yang, the robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child malfunctions, and only in his absence does the family realize how real a son he has become.
Guardian Angels & Other Monsters
Daniel H Wilson
From the New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse comes a fascinating and fantastic collection that explores complex emotional and intellectual landscapes at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human life.
Fast Thrilles
Shots Fired From Joe Pickett Country
C.J. Box
From C. J. Box, the New York Times-bestselling author of the Joe Pickett novels, comes a thrilling book of suspense stories about the Wyoming he knows so well–and the dark deeds and impulses that can be found there.
Flight Or Fright
Stephen King, Bev Vincent
An anthology about all the things that can go horribly wrong when suspended six miles in the air, hurtling through space at more than 500 mph and sealed up in a metal tube with hundreds of strangers. All the ways a trip into the friendly skies can turn into a nightmare, including some never thought of before. Featuring brand new stories by Joe Hill and Stephen King, as well as fourteen classic tales and one poem from the likes of Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, and Dan Simmons.
Dolphin Junction
Mick Herron
In Dolphin Junction, devoted fans and future converts alike will find much to amuse, delight, and terrify them. Five standalone nerve wrackingly thrilling crime fiction stories are complemented by four mystery stories featuring the Oxford wife-and-husband detective team of shrewd Zoe Boehm and hapless Joe Silvermann. The collection also includes a peek into the past of Jackson Lamb, irascible top agent at Slough House .
The Jealousy Man And Other Stories
Jo Nesbo
A dark, thrilling short-story collection about twisted minds and vengeful hearts, from a true master of suspense. A detective with a nose for jealousy is on the trail of a man suspected of murdering his twin a bereaved father must decide whether vengeance has a place in the new world order after a pandemic brings about the collapse of society a woman finally overcomes her intimacy issues through a dark encounter with her Peeping Tom neighbor a hired assassin pits his wits against his greatest adversary, another assassin, in a dangerous game for survival and an instantly electric connection between passengers on a flight to London may spell romance, or may spell something more sinister.
The Doll-Master And Other Tales Of Terror
Joyce Carol Oates
Six terrifying tales to chill the blood from the unique imagination of Joyce Carol Oates. A young boy plays with dolls instead of action figures. But as he grows older, his passion takes on a darker edge … A white man shoots dead a black boy creating a media frenzy. But could it be that it was self-defense as he claims? A nervous woman tries to escape her husband. He says he loves her, but she’s convinced he wants to kill her … These quietly lethal stories reveal the horrors that dwell within us all.
Night-Gaunts And Other Tales Of Suspense
Joyce Carol Oates
In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper’s Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In The Long-Legged Girl, an aging, jealous wife crafts an unusual game of Russian roulette involving a pair of Wedgewood teacups, a strong Bengal brew, and a lethal concoction of medicine. Who will drink from the wrong cup, the wife or the dance student she believes to be her husband’s latest conquest? In The Sign of the Beast, when a former Sunday school teacher’s corpse turns up, the blighted adolescent she had by turns petted and ridiculed confesses to her murder–but is he really responsible? Another young outsider, Horace Phineas Love, Jr., is haunted by apparitions at the very edge of the spectrum of visibility after the death of his tortured father in Night-Gaunts, a fantastic ode to H.P. Lovecraft. Reveling in the uncanny and richly in conversation with other creative minds, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense stands at the crossroads of sex, violence, and longing–and asks us to interrogate the intersection of these impulses within ourselves.
Inspired by Classic Mysteries
The Whole Art Of Detection
Lost Mysteries Of Sherlock Holmes
Lyndsay Faye
Internationally bestselling author Lyndsay Faye was introduced to the Sherlock Holmes mysteries when she was ten years old and immediately became enamored. She began spinning these quintessential characters into her own works of fiction. The Whole Art of Detection is a stunning collection that spans Holmes’s career, from self-taught young upstart to publicly lauded detective, both before and after his faked death over a Swiss waterfall in 1894. In ‘The Lowther Park Mystery,’ the unsociable Holmes is forced to attend a garden party at the request of his politician brother and improvises a bit of theater to foil a conspiracy against the government. ‘The Adventure of the Thames Tunnel’ brings Holmes’s attention to the baffling murder of a jewel thief in the middle of an underground railway passage. With Holmes and Watson encountering all manner of ungrateful relatives, phony psychologists, wronged wives, plaid-garbed villains, and even a peculiar species of deadly red leech, The Whole Art of Detection is a must-read for Sherlockians and any fan of historical crime fiction with a modern sensibility.
Observations By Gaslight From The World Of Sherlock Holmes
Lyndsay Faye
A new collection of Sherlockian tales that shows the Great Detective and his partner, Watson, as their acquaintances saw them. The peripheral characters– Irene Adler, Geoffrey Lestrade, even his cook and housekeeper, Martha Hudson– what did they think of the man and his methods? Discover aspects of Holmes and Watson that you have never seen before.
In League With Sherlock Holmes Inspired By The Sherlock Holmes Canon
Laurie R King, Leslie S Klinger
The latest entry in Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger’s popular Sherlock Holmes-inspired mystery series, featuring fifteen talented authors and a multitude of new cases for Arthur Conan Doyle’s most acclaimed detective. The stories are funny, haunting, thrilling, and surprising. All are unforgettable.
For The Sake Of The Game Inspired By The Sherlock Holmes Canon
Laurie R King, Leslie S Klinger
King and Klinger have a simple formula: ask some of the world’s greatest writers–regardless of genre–to be inspired by the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. The results are surprising and joyous. Some tales are pastiches, featuring the recognizable figures of Holmes and Watson; others step away in time or place to describe characters and stories influenced by the Holmes world. Some of the authors spin whimsical tales of fancy; others tell hard-core thrillers or puzzling mysteries. One beloved author writes a song; two others craft a melancholy graphic tale of insectoid analysis.
In The Shadow Of Agatha Christie
Classic Crime Fiction By Forgotten Female Writers
Leslie S Klinger
This new anthology brings the female crime writers who inspired Agatha Christie out of her shadow and back into the spotlight they deserve. The success of writers like Anna Katherine Green in America L. T. Meade, C. L. Pirkis, the Baroness Orczy, and Elizabeth Corbett in England and Mary Fortune in Australia opened doors for the women authors who followed them. While Agatha Christie may still reign supreme, the genre would be much poorer without the bold, fearless work of her predecessors.
Marple
Twelve New Stories
Naomi Alderman
For the first time in 45 years, Agatha Christies beloved character returns to the page for a globe-trotting tour of crime and detection Join Marple as she travels through her sleepy English village and around the world. In St Mary Mead, a Christmas dinner is interrupted by unexpected guests the Broadway stage in New York City is set for a dangerous improvisation bad omens surround an untimely death aboard a cruise ship to Hong Kong and a bestselling writer on holiday in Italy is caught in a nefarious plot. These and other crimes committed in the name of love, jealousy, blackmail, and revenge are ones that only the indomitable Jane Marple can solve.”;”Bringing a fresh twist to the hallmarks of a classic Agatha Christie mystery, these twelve esteemed writers have captured the sharp wit, unique voice, and droll ingenuity of the deceptively demure detective. A triumphant celebration of Christies legacy and essential reading for crime lovers.