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Short stories

  • Auteur:
    Labozzetta, Marisa
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    Births mark beginnings, while funerals toll in endings. Yet there resides so much in-between drama in the timeline of an extended family: moments of intense joy, times of heart-wrenching grief, and the day-to-day plodding of ups and downs that color the struggle with loss in all of human existence. In a series of linked short stories that superbly capture the emotions her characters' experience, the author deftly chronicles the personal episodes that transform the lives of five Italian-American cousins during the final years before the death of one of the family patriarchs.

  • Auteur:
    MUIR, Frank
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    A collection of the best of the `My Word!' stories, including `You can't have your kayak and heat it' and `Upon my word'.

  • Auteur:
    WRIGHT, Geoffrey
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    Humorous Australian short stories.

  • Auteur:
    Henry, O.
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    The collected stories of O. Henry make entertaining listening.

  • Auteur:
    London, Jack
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    A collection of some of Jack London's stories are brought together here.

  • Auteur:
    Simak, Clifford D.
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    Two classic novels and a short story collection from the legendary Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author in one volume. This volume from an icon of the Golden Age of science fiction includes: City: In this International Fantasy Award-winning novel, millennia have passed since humankind abandoned Earth, leaving their most loyal animal companions alone. Granted the power of speech centuries earlier, the intelligent, pacifist dogs are the last keepers of human history. With the aid of Jenkins, an ageless service robot, the dogs live in harmony and peace. But now they're threatened by the reawakened remnants of a warlike race called "Man." A Heritage of Stars: More than a thousand years have passed since humankind intentionally destroyed its treacherous technology. The scant knowledge that has survived is kept in monastery-like "universities" where Tom Cushing learns of the legendary "Place of Going to the Stars." On an amazing trek across what was once America, Tom and a band of misfits seek the source of the myth, only to discover an astonishing revelation at the end of their journey. Grotto of the Dancing Deer: Ten tales of wonder, danger, and the future, including the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning "Grotto of the Dancing Deer," in which a man carrying an ancient secret finally speaks up, unable to bear any longer the loneliness he has experienced for millennia; "Over the River," where children from an embattled future are sent back for safekeeping to their ancestors in the peaceful past; "Day of Truce," about the inhabitants of a suburban subdivision who must barricade themselves against bands of roving attackers who invade when the gates open wide one day every year; and seven more stories from a master of speculative fiction.

  • Auteur:
    McMillan, Amber
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    "The Woods is the cure-all to Perfect Island Getaway nostalgia. It's a story of everyday domestic survival, peopled by both loveable eccentrics and possibly murdersome cranks, foregrounding the little-known history of violence on Protection Island. Amber McMillan's writing balances an eye for the unusual and resiliently beautiful with a sympathy for the frailties common to all her islanders."'Kevin Chong, author of Baroque-a-Nova, Neil Young Nation and Beauty Plus Pity * The Woods: A Year on Protection Island is a book of non-fiction stories that probes and witnesses the unique and sometimes unsettling atmosphere of small town-island life in the Georgia Strait. The measure of one's success here doesn't rely on status or income, but on the skillful handling of neighbours, the resourcefulness for survival, and the adaptation to both the rigorous outdoors of the Pacific Northwest and equally challenging human community of need, trade, and negotiated civility. These are stories of the people and families who sought refuge here, for different reasons and with different outcomes: Keith, a cross-dressing retired sea captain who can't overcome the death of his wife; Steve, the contractor who escapes his deaf wife and the silence of his domestic life by perfecting his physical property, using only the loudest of electric chainsaws and lawnmowers from morning until dusk; Cris, the seventy-six-year-old library curator who has recently discovered scotch whiskey and sex again after twenty-five years; and of various other transplants making their way through the murky terrain of living on an island. Like no other community on Earth, this small place is packed with secret corners, eerie histories and a whispering darkness. This is the complicated convergence of human capacities: from homicides (both in the same house, unrelated and years apart) to some of the greatest gestures of generosity, social reform and equality. This is the place of the close-up encounter of who we are stripped of distractions and escapist entertainment; who we are in the woods.

  • Auteur:
    Slavin, Julia
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    A New York Times Notable Book: Darkly comic fables of modern life from a "major discovery" whose "writing gets in your bloodstream like a fever" (The Washington Post Book World). A housewife with a ravenous lust for the adolescent boy who mows her lawn swallows him whole. A woman nonchalantly hacks off her leg at a posh private club. A father babyproofs his house so thoroughly he never sees his wife and child. And a businessman passing through an airport risks it all to save a giant lobster from death. In these "brisk, funny, stylish, original" stories, the award-winning author of Carnivore Diet merges the mundane with the unimaginable, and peels back the squeaky-clean facade of suburbia to expose the strangeness underneath (Elle). Combining biting wit, wild imagination, and "unsettling, hallucinatory" prose, Julia Slavin masterfully satirizes the world of upscale families and young professionals as they confront their greatest fantasies and most grotesque fears in unexpected, and often hilarious, ways (The New York Times Book Review).

  • Auteur:
    Malla, Pasha
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    The Withdrawal Method is a remarkably inventive, assured, and smart collection from one of our best young writers, one who pairs emotional depth with great technical skill. These extraordinary stories peel back layers to reveal the strange, the wondrous, the unexpected.

  • Auteur:
    Pratchett, Terry
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    A follow-up to Dragons at Crumbling Castle, this second batch of storytelling gems features short stories written when Sir Terry Pratchett was a seventeen-year-old junior reporter.

  • Auteur:
    Dubus, Andre
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    This volume brings together Andre Dubus' third and fourth collections of short stories and novellas--Finding a Girl in America and The Times Are Never So Bad--with a thought-provoking new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo.

  • Auteur:
    Kuipers, Melissa
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    Original, witty, and subtle, these stories feature characters who must navigate life in a small town, and will appeal to fans of Miriam Toews and Kathleen Winter. This collection of beautifully crafted short stories features complex characters whose internal struggles manifest in their most intimate relationships, told by a writer with a compassionate eye. A narrator watches her social sphere deteriorate after her boyfriend’s rough-housing leads to his best friend’s tragic paralysis. Childhood sweethearts, finally united later in life, find that they are not the soulmates they believed themselves to be. After her mother becomes depressed after a miscarriage, a daughter takes on the role of caregiver.Set in fictional small rural towns, these stories explore young people who grow up against a religious backdrop, mothers who baulk against society’s imposed identities, and characters who explore their individual roles within their families as they navigate sexuality, suffering, and shame. These narrators are blunt and sometimes obsessive, but bravely optimistic as they strive to be the best versions of themselves. As her characters struggle to discern deception from reality, using their limited resources to parse charm and charisma from credibility, Kuipers understated style is full of dark wit and detailed observation.

  • Auteur:
    Chong, Corinna
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    A refreshingly original debut collection of short stories that grapple with the self-alienation and self-discovery that make us human. For fans of Souvankham Thammavongsa, Lynn Coady, and Lisa Moore comes a striking debut collection of short stories that explore bodies both human and animal: our fascination with their strange effluences, growths, and protrusions, and the dangerous ways we play with their power to inflict harm on ourselves and on others. Throughout The Whole Animal , flawed characters wrestle with the complexities of relationships with partners, parents, children, and friends as they struggle to find identity, belonging, and autonomy. Bodies are divided, often elusive, even grotesque. In "Porcelain Legs," a pre-teen fixes on the long, thick hair growing from her mother's eyelid. In "Wolf-Boy Saturday," a linguist grasps for connection with a young boy whose negligent upbringing has left him unable to speak. In "Butter Buns," a college student sees his mother in a new light when she takes up bodybuilding. With strange juxtapositions, beguiling dark humour, and lurid imagery, The Whole Animal illuminates the everyday experiences of loneliness and loss, of self-alienation and self-discovery, that make us human.

  • Auteur:
    Croza, Laurel, Garrity-Riley, Kelsey
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    Charity takes small steps to escape her controlling father. Jasmine endures the rumors about her at school, even though no one really knows what happened last summer. The Oh! So Perfect Hair Dolly wishes for just the right child to take her home from the store. Nicola has a run-in with a classmate on her first day at a new school in the big city - or is the classmate a wolf in disguise? A squirrel ruminates on the nature of life and death. Dani fights for her dream, in spite of her father's insistence that her older brother should be the one to play hockey. Mike finds the kind of family he has longed for in his coworkers at the restaurant where he works. In these seven stories by Laurel Croza (author of the award-winning picture books I Know Here and From There to Here), five teenagers, a doll and a squirrel break out of the expectations placed upon them. Featuring beautiful black-and-white illustrations by Kelsey Garrity-Riley.

  • Auteur:
    Ward, Donald
    Sommaire:

    Donald Ward’s stories are written in a straight-ahead narrative style that offers conceptual and philosophical underpinnings. Despite this intentional layering, he maintains the kind of economy of description and simplicity of exposition that is perfectly suited to the short story genre. Throughout his stories he likes to explore the human willingness to carry on in the face of often hostile and baffling circumstances, where nothing is as it first appears, and where endings are not predicable. These are stories that gently prod the reader to consider serious human foibles and balance that with a wicked humour. In Ward’s universe readers will find a race of superior chickens who investigate their earthly origins, a badger who shares his fears with a monk, a listless professor roused into life through a late-night dialogue with his distraught female student, and a female dwarf from the seventeenth century pursuing the love of an octogenarian at Starbucks. Always bubbling just below the surface of these stories with their oddities of plot and character is something unexpected and frequently profound.

  • Auteur:
    Urrea, Luis Alberto
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    From one of America's preeminent literary voices comes a new story collection that proves once again why the writing of Luis Alberto Urrea has been called "wickedly good" (Kansas City Star), "cinematic and charged" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), and "studded with delights" (Chicago Tribune). Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar Award-winning "Amapola" and his now-classic "Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses", which had the honor of being chosen for NPR's Selected Shorts not once but twice. Suffused with wanderlust, compassion, and no small amount of rock and roll, The Water Museum is a collection that confirms Luis Alberto Urrea as an American master.

  • Auteur:
    Liu, Cixin
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    A short story collection from New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu. The title story, "The Wandering Earth," was a blockbuster international film, currently streaming on Netflix. These 11 stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners, are a blazingly original ode to planet Earth, its pasts, and its futures. Liu's fiction takes the listener to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate, and above all, survive in a desolate cosmos. A Macmillan Audio production from from Tor Books.

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    Travel has become the world’s favourite pastime, and this collection of stories and essays is sure to fuel your wanderlust. Let renowned Canadian writers including Susan Musgrave, Stephen Henighan, and Pauline Holdstock transport you to the relaxing beaches of the Caribbean islands, the lush forests of South America, the busy streets of Asia, and the edgy clubs of Eastern Europe. With poignant descriptions of faraway places and thoughtful examinations of cultural difference, these writers present fresh realizations about the complexities of foreign culture in tales of unexpected adventure and self-discovery. Enjoy this collection while commuting, drinking your morning coffee, or even while travelling, and indulge your need to get away from it all!

  • Auteur:
    Munro, Alice
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    The author's fictional tales about her Scottish ancestors' immigration to Canada in 1818. Stories follow the pioneers' life on the frontier and the family's progress through the generations. 2006.

  • Auteur:
    Bushkowsky, Aaron
    Sommaire:

    The Vanishing Man is a collection of linked short stories about a man trying to come to terms with his past, a religious upbringing, in an ever-changing personal world that constantly throws him into self-doubt. He marries, finds happiness, only to go through a terrible divorce. He recovers, finds true love, marries, and goes through another terrible divorce and family death. He goes into therapy and tries to make sense of his failures and unhappiness by attempting to reclaim his past life. But this only partly succeeds. It’s not until the man discovers his true self that he is finally able to find hope, and his love of life again.

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