Short stories Books

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...

From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four and Among the Hedges comes a collection of unsettling, captivating stories.The eleven stories in this collection approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom...

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...

A virtuosic debut collection that roves across genres and styles, by a finalist for the Caine Prize.In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti's virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of...

Revenge sometimes causes people to act blindly through anger, rather than reason. The characters in this devilishly delightful book are pushed to the point of no return and seek retribution. We meet an author taking part in a game show who will go to...

Stories do not have to be long. In the space of a couple of sentences - or even a page or two- we may see the human heart exposed in a way that is more powerful than occurs in many much longer narratives.In Tiny Tales Alexander McCall Smith explores...

A gritty and thrilling anthology of 28 new short stories in tribute to pulp noir master, Cornell Woolrich, author of 'Rear Window' that inspired Alfred Hitchock's classic film. Featuring Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, James Sallis, A...

The Stoker Award-winning chilling anthology of 18 short stories in tribute to the genius of Shirley Jackson, collecting today's best horror writers.Featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones,...

Now in its sixteenth year, the Caine Prize for African Writing is Africa's leading literary prize, and is awarded to a short story by an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere. This collection collects the five 2015...

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2023 One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023 100's Best Books of 2023 "To say Heighton is an immensely talented writer is true enough but insufficient ... As good a writer as Canada has ever produced." -National PostThe...

"Blaise is probably the greatest living Canadian writer most Canadians have never heard of." -Quill & Quire"If you want to understand something about what life was like in the restless, peripatetic, striving, anxiety-ridden, shimmer cultural soup of...

Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Short Fiction In ten vividly told stories, Shimmer follows characters through relationships, within social norms, and across boundaries of all kinds as they shimmer into and out of each other's lives.Outside a...

A 2022 BRAM STOKER AWARD NOMINEEA TOR NIGHTFIRE MOST EXCITING HORROR BOOK OF 2022 "In range alone, Richard Thomas is boundless. He is Lovecraft. He is Bradbury. He is Gaiman." -Chuck PalahniukWith a Foreword by Brian EvensonIn this new collection,...

The American Dream is actually a nightmare. Navigate the cynicism, irony, and satire of the modern American Dream with "Banana Factory and Other Stories."

This collection of short stories begins with the Kentucky Tragedy, the state's first death penalty case... with a man who may have been wrongfully convicted. Another story covers a woman's rise from the sex industry to a businesswoman in a loving...

Love, Lies, Bleeding is an epic collection of eleven stories, from very short to very long, with a variety of approaches-both traditional and experimental-and the common theme of romantic love. From infatuation to obsession, from bliss to...

Has your cat been plotting to take over command of your spaceship? This and other important questions are tackled in the 11 science fiction and fantasy stories in this volume, told variously from the perspectives of humans and cats. A bicycle designer...

**Winner, Albertine Prize 2018****Finalist, Lamba Literary Awards 2018****Finalist, French American Foundation Translation Prize 2018**Available in a new edition, Anne Garrta's sensual portrayal of trysts past.Not One Day begins with a maxim:...

A bold, imaginative collection of short stories set in Southern Iraq from prolific, award-winning novelist Diaa Jubaili. Influenced in turn by the long tradition of Arabic folktales and the magical realism of Latin America, the stories in No Windmills in...

'One of Russia's best living writers . . . Her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next.' -The New York TimesAt first glance, the stories in The New Adventures of Helen seems simple, even child-like, but a deep reading...

"What exquisite stories these are, each of them immaculately composed, each of them powerfully transporting... This book deserves prizes." -Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They CarriedEach of the ten stories in Have Mercy on Us is an illuminating...

From F. Scott Fitzgerald to John Cheever, the swimming pool has long held a unique place in the mythos of the American idyll, by turns status symbol and respite. The fourteen stories that comprise NO DIVING ALLOWED fearlessly plunge the depths of the...

"I write stories that are only one sentence long," I explain to you as I plant this book like a time-bomb in your public library, "because imperfection is easier to tolerate in small doses." With unparalleled wit and wisdom, Gary Lippman'sWe Loved the...

In Urban Creatures, Sarah Gray's short stories shift from the unsettling to the surreal to the frightening, all cut through with her characteristic black humour. Urban survival makes creatures of us all. Urban Creatures skirts the edge of...

James Kelman's inimitable voice brings the stories of lost men to light in these twenty-one tales of down on their luck antiheroes who wander, drink, hatch plans, ponder existence, and survive in an unwelcoming and often comic world.Keep Moving...

Jack Proctor, a celebrated older writer and curmudgeon, goes off to residency where he is to be an honored part of teaching and giving public readings, he soon finds the atmosphere of the literary world has changed since his last foray into the public...

One of contemporary SF's most original and compelling voices, Vandana Singh is a professor of physics who weaves the ancient wisdom of her native India and the hard truths of quantum science into stories that speak to the complex wonders of today's world...

Every night when she goes to sleep, a woman dreams of erotic encounters with different men. She dreams of being the sponge squeezed to foaming in a gas station attendant's hand, and of twining her bare skin with a sea lion's thick pelt under the watchful...

Finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards Finalist, National Translation Award in Prose An exquisitely original collection of darkly funny stories that explore the panorama of Jewish experience in contemporary Poland, from a world-class contemporary...

"Flawless. . . . Readers of John Crowley, Ray Bradbury, and Sally Rooney alike will find a home."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)Remember the girl you once knew, the theater kid? Now she's become the Queen, and you might need to rescue her. There's...

In the newest volume of her World Fantasy Award-winning short story collections, beloved author Jane Yolen's dark side has fully emerged. Her vivid, startling, and thrilling tales and poems of the supernatural - from icy-hearted witches to...

Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the half century since The Left Hand of Darkness, her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender,...

As the editor of London's revolutionary New Worlds magazine in the swinging sixties, Michael Moorcock has been credited with virtually inventing modern Science Fiction: publishing such figures as Norman Spinrad, Samuel R. Delany, Brian Aldiss and J.G...

The appearance of Zo Wicomb's first set of short stories, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, precipitated the founding of a fan club that has come to include Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Bharati Mukherjee, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and writers at The New...

A beloved short story collection-now in a new paperback edition with a never-before published story and an afterword by the author.In nine interlinking stories, the town of Abbot Falls reacts as Ernie Whitten, pipefitter, builds an ark in his backyard...

An Orphanage of Dreams is a collection of stripped down visitations-flash fictions of smoke breaks and long drives and friends who finally stop showing up. The acidic tang of disappointment is here, and sparks of biting insight, in portraits of...