Short stories

From the unique standpoint of an American woman who married into a Japanese family and has lived in Japan for more than thirty years, Rebecca Otowa weaves enchanting tales of her adopted home that portray the perspective of both the Japanese and the...

Written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the uncontested master of the short story in modern Japanese literature, the stories in this anthology are perfect examples of the decadent aesthetic, with the gorgeous and the grotesque, the splendid and the sordid...

First published in 1686, Five Women Who Loved Love was an immediate bestseller in the bawdy, life-loving world that was Genroku Japan. And the novel's popularity has, if anything, increased with the years, making it today a classic like Boccaccio's...

WINNER OF THE 2023 RELIT AWARD FOR SHORT FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARDSLONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZEFor fans of Chuck Palahniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, and Karen Russell, the stories in Francine Cunningham's debut...

"What magic, what beauty there is in these pages."-John Freeman, author ofWind, Trees In this adventurous debut lurk stories that are deep, lush, and full of wonder. While camping in the Kalahari Desert, a couple grows attached to a starving lion on the...

Kirkus Reviews, "Best Fiction Books of the Year" Kirkus Reviews, "20 Best Books to Read in January" Kirkus Reviews, "Yes, You Can Read Short Stories in Shuffle Mode" Book Riot, "15 Excellent 2023 Short Story Collections by Asian Authors"Liberty Hardy,...

In each of these stories, the reader is lured into a sinister shadow space, one both familiar and uncanny.Life is strange, beautiful, and terrible in the world of Victoria Dalpe's debut short story collection. Her characters run the gamut from nosy...

In his debut collection, Marston Hefner brings a unique voice and playful style to meditations on self-acceptance, the folly of youth, and how love can lead to actualization and destruction.Through moments of family intimacy, work presentations,...

Across a Vast Distance or 5.9 Billion Kilometers or the Equivalent of 39.5 Astronomical Units... At Mercury, the massive solar satellite Heliopolis and its heroic station commander battle both renegades and enemies from within to steer the course of...

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICEAn incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longingIn fifteen masterful stories, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse...

The eleven stories in Sweetlust interweave feminist critique, intertextuality, and science fiction tropes in an irreverent portrait of our past, present, and future.In a dystopian world with no men, women are "rehabilitated" at an erotic amusement park...

Informed by the author's experience in and between genders, this debut story collection blurs fantasy and reality, excavating new meanings from our varied dysphorias.Misfit mothers, prodigal "undaughters," con artists, and middle-aged runaways populate...

Selected and Most Anticipated Lists: BuzzFeed, The Millions, BITCH Magazine, The Rumpus, The Irish Times, BUSTLE, Entropy Magazine, BIG OTHER Magazine, Bay City News Foundation, 7x7 MagazineIn the Event of Contact chronicles characters profoundly...

A short story collection exploring cultural complexities in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and the world at large.In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai's latest...

Loss and rediscovery occupy the heart of this adventurous collection. The characters in Eternal Night at the Nature Museum find refuge in strange, repurposed spaces: a middle-aged addict emcees a demolition derby, which transforms into a hostel, then a...

A collection of twelve of J.S. Breukelaar's darkest, finest stories with four new works, including the uncanny new novella Ripples on a Blank Shore. Introduction by award winning author, Angela Slatter. Relish the Gothic strangeness of Union Falls,...

Set within the resilient Great Plains, these stories are marked by the region's people and landscape, and the distinctive way it is both regressive in its politics yet also stumbling toward something better. While not all stories are explicitly set in...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLISTThe first English-language story collection from "one of Iran's most important living fiction writers" (Guardian), "a playful, whip-smart literary conjuror: a Kundera or Rushdie of post-Khomeini Iran" (Wall Street Journal)In...

From the moment of its founding, the USSR was reviled and admired, demonised and idealised. Many Jews saw the new society ushered in by the Russian Revolution as their salvation from shtetl life with its deprivations and deadly pogroms. But Soviet Russia...

This collection acts as compendium of George Singleton'swork forboth devoteess and readers who may not have encountered his stories before.These are deeply funny stories that will make you laugh out loud, butalso hit on sad, human truths. Singleton is a...

Triangle Ray is a collection of short stories linked by the character of Ray Fielding, introduced first as a young black man coming of age in the 1980s and infatuated with his schoolmate, Marie. Against the wishes of their families, the two marry just...

Calloustown, the seventh collection from master raconteur George Singleton, who's been praised by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as the "unchallenged king of the comic Southern short story," finds the author at the absolute top of his game as he traces...

Unapologetic and resilient, these women challenge monolithic assumptions of black identity.A TSA agent who has never flown, a girl braving new worlds to play piano, a teacher caught up in a mayoral race. In this debut collection of stories, each of them...

A new story collection focused on the Heartland from Michael Martone, one of America's most prolific and important contemporary authors.In Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana, Michael Martone places steady fingers on the arrhythmic pulse of the...

Age range 8 to 12Thirteen very short stories from acclaimed musician John Southworth will tweak your mind and peak your imagination. Meet the boy with grey hair who spends his days on a cargo ship peeling potatoes, a strange man who...

Free agents or captives of our past? In Life, Bound, characters find themselves caught in situations not of their own making, or trapped by ingrained habits, walking in grooves carved out by past events.An artist's progress is pleasingly channeled into a...

A young man can't make love. A pedantic father spots a blemish in his new shorts and returns to the shop to demand their exchange. A girl rocks up to a Tinder date wearing a helmet.In nineteen short stories, No Neat Endings pits its characters against...

**Shortlisted, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2023, Multicultural NSW Award***Runner-Up, 2021 Carmel Digital Literary Award*The Bonesetter's Fee and Other Stories brings light to the growing pains of the migrant experience. Murphy explores themes...

This is a collection of contemporary stories from the Queer community. It is about love, sex and identity told through diverse stories from buying a double bed, meeting neighbourhood witches and early morning swims. They talk about freedom and misery,...

WINNER OF THE 2018 CARMEL BIRD DIGITAL LITERARY AWARDBeth Spencer's new and expanded edition of her award-winning collection, The Age of Fibs, crosses boundaries of genre, time, history and desire; meditating on how we create ourselves through culture...

Set in different cities around the world - Hong Kong, Miami, New York, London, Ipoh and Singapore - Elaine Chiew's award-winning stories travel into the heart of the Singaporean-Malaysian diaspora, and ask what it means to be 'Chinese' or 'Asian' within...

These are stories of people caught up in a world that tilts seductively, sometimes dangerously, between south and north, between ambition and tradition, between light and dark. Her characters are poised to leave or on the point of return - often caught...

Two schoolgirls in Bolton take acid just before their English class. A film journalist shares tea and a KitKat with Marcel Proust, more or less, during a long train journey. An afterparty turns into a crime scene. Colleagues, maybe in love, have lunch...

An underemployed chef is pulled into the escalating violence of his neighbour's makeshift porn channel. An elderly piano student is forced to flee her home village when word gets out that she's had sex with her thirty-something teacher. A hose pumping...

'Kings, lords, liars, usherettes, goal-hangers, gun-men and prostitutes. Whether or not these stories bear any relation to life as it is lived in Endland (sic) is not my problem and good riddance to all those who prefer to read about truly good, lucky...

Godzilla's in a twelve-step program. A soul-sucking Mummy stalks Elvis and John F. Kennedy. Joe Bob Briggs has a moral dilemma: If your girlfriend turns zombie on you, what do you do? And that's the tame stuff. In this red-hot collection from...

From the legendary author of the Elric saga, a Science Fiction Grand Master, a platinum albumreceiving rock star, and the controversial editor of the new wave's New Worlds, this definitive collection captures the incomparable short fiction of one of...

The world's first UNESCO city of literature, Edinburgh is steeped in literary history. It is the birthplace of a beloved cast of fictional characters from Sherlock Holmes to Harry Potter. It is the home of the Writer's Museum, where quotes from writers...

In Pianos and Flowers we are invited, through the medium of sepia images, to glimpse a world long departed. In these stories, inspired by long-lost photographs, the lives of the people in the frame are imagined and then explored, layer by layer. What...

George Mackay Brown was a master of the short story form and produced a steady stream of short fiction collections, starting with A Calendar of Love (1967) and include A Time to Keep (1969) and Hawkfall (1974), as well as his poetry collections and...

The woman who can see all the possible branching futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a...

Fifteen all-new stories by science fiction's top talents, collected by bestselling author George R. R.Martin and multiple-award winning editor Gardner Dozois. This new anthology of fifteen all-original science fiction stories, edited by George R. R...

Seventeen stories traverse borderlines, mythic and real, in the lives of Filipino and Filipino American women and their ancestors.Moving from small Philippine villages of the past to the hurricane-beaten coast of near-future Florida, When the Hibiscus...

Winner of the 2022 ReLit Awards Finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award A Gothic collection of stories featuring carnivorous beavers, art-eaters, and family intrigue, for fans of Alice Munro and Shirley JacksonThe small southern Ontario town known as...

Frank depictions of family, mental health, youth, ageing, love and lust speak to the fragility of life, and to the dangerous games we play when we cross boundaries. Hidden beneath the mundanity is violence and decay, mirroring the natural environment so...

One of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Espanol, Cockfight explores the power of the home to both create and destroy those within it. The stories shed light on the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and...

In this anthology of microliterature over forty writers explore the theme of travel, from the confusing variety of toilets found around the world to adrenaline-inducing bus trips, the surprise child of a holiday romance, and a businessman's...