Main content

Short stories

  • Author:
    Farnsworth, Vanessa
    Summary:

    The stories in Farnsworth’s The Things She’ll Be Leaving Behind explore what it means to be a woman in the modern world, struggling against circumstances that are often unfair, inexplicable, and destructive. The women in this book don’t always behave in ways that are sensible or advisable or, for that matter, likely to result in success, but there’s a warped logic to what they do and the reasons they do it are intrinsically human. These women have nothing in common except that they all find themselves trying to find their footings, preserve their sanity, and just generally survive in circumstances they never thought they would encounter. They don’t always do it gracefully. Occasionally alcohol or firearms are involved. Just like in real life. The twenty-eight stories in the collection vary in length, intensity and impact. The short pieces that fluctuate between flash fiction and apologue are interspersed with events where women explore how to pick up a man, with more surreal episodes that deconstruct office reality, or even experimenting with rainfall with God and the devil. The longer stories in The Things She’ll Be Leaving Behind stray into the deep and dark territories of women’s suffering, guilt, and survival. In these tales, anxiety, restlessness and volatility are tapped like raw nerves, and the dangers and menace of events only mitigated by Farnsworth’s savvy use of black comedy and irony. Here women go toe-to-toe with chronic liars, dead grandfathers, beleaguered sons, mysterious voices, unfaithful husbands, midnight callers, spiteful sisters, and hallucinated clowns. Husbands go crazy or wayward or missing. Life hits walls and somersaults and does breathless, tactless things. The end result is fascinating inventive fiction.

  • Author:
    Simak, Clifford D.
    Summary:

    A mind-opening collection of short science fiction from one of the genre's most revered Grand Masters. Legendary author Robert A. Heinlein proclaimed, "To read science fiction is to read Simak. A reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all." The remarkably talented Clifford D. Simak was able to ground his vast imagination in reality, and then introduce readers to fantastical worlds and concepts they could instantly and completely dig into, comprehend, and enjoy. In the title story, a man's newfound ability to walk in the past allows him to dwell among dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers...And something even more timeless. In "Construction Shack," the first manned expedition to Pluto reveals that no matter how advanced aliens may be, even they don't always get everything right. And in "Univac 2200," the thin line between humans creating technology and humans becoming technology is about to be crossed-and there may be no going back. Each story includes an introduction by David W. Wixon, literary executor of the Clifford D. Simak estate and editor of this ebook.

  • Author:
    Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
    Summary:

    In these twelve riveting stories, the award-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.

  • Author:
    Algren, Nelson
    Summary:

    Written over the course of four decades, this collection of 12 stories centers around Depression-era Texas. Characterized by small-town strife, political corruption and frontier-style justice, each tale is a testament to the struggles of the working poor. Also among the stories is a retelling of the myth of Bonnie and Clyde.

  • Author:
    Riordan, Rick
    Summary:

    In this Percy Jackson mini adventure first published in The Demigod Files, the goddess Persephone summons Percy, Thalia, and Nico to the Underworld to retrieve Hades's powerful sword before it falls into the wrong hands. Easier said than done in a realm full of daimons, ghosts, and monsters. Not to mention Iapetos-brother of the powerful Titan lord, Kronos. Will the demigods manage to find and return the sword before it's too late? Includes an excerpt from the upcoming novel The Sun and the Star: A Nico di Angelo Adventure by Rick Riordan and Mark Oshiro.

  • Author:
    Yalfani, Mehri
    Summary:

    Mehri Yalfani’s stories in The Street of Butterflies feature Iranian women dealing with displacement, cultural change, and struggles for survival and adaptation as immigrants in North America. At the same time, the challenges they face also reveal the racial, gendered and cultural anxieties of these same individuals who carry with them the biases of their country of origin to the norms of the new land. “Soleiman’s Silence,” “Felicia,” “If You Were I,” “Geranium Family,” and “Line,” all portray many dimensions of the migrant’s strive (or the refusal) to build a home, away from home. The stories that are set in Iran contain the complexity of the social and political context after the revolution that deposed the shah. These stories provide a glimpse of life in post-revolutionary Iran, where the new regime that replaced the old one continues the suppression and prosecution of political activists, only more harshly and mercilessly. Anyone who has lived under a brutal dictatorship can easily identify with the paralyzing fear of Sara and Nazar in the story, “Books,” the agonizing wait of Zinat for her disappeared son in “Unexpicable Story,” or the narratives of the ten-year-old child whose activist parents have perished in notorious prisons of the Islamic regime in “Where is Paradise?”

  • Author:
    Farrant, M. A. C.
    Summary:

    Broken into three sections, Farrant's work is a fusion of fragmented prose, probing questions and caustic satire. The result is both a meditation on absence and a commentary on the human penchant for complacency.

  • Author:
    Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri
    Summary:

    Fourteen stories that illuminate the strange workings of the human heart.

  • Author:
    Uppal, Priscila
    Summary:

    This short story is taken from the collection Cover Before Striking. The most common phrase in print is “cover before striking,” a warning to those about to innocently strike a match to be careful not to burn their fingers. Uppal’s characters in Cover Before Striking are all people pushing their lives to new levels of intensity, danger, or passion as they test their limits and those of the world. Implacable and just a little unhinged, the stories of Cover Before Striking each move toward that moment of contact when the sparks begin to fly, when destruction and beauty seem to blur together. With this collection, Priscila Uppal offers the literary equivalent of playing with fire. “The Still Body is the Perfect Body” was originally published in Smoke.

  • Author:
    Scieszka, Jon.
    Summary:

    A collection of sports stories featuring everything from fighting to friendship, set everywhere from the tennis court to the hockey rink.

  • Author:
    Riordan, Rick
    Summary:

    In this e-book short story by Rick Riordan, Carter Kane is investigating rumored sightings of a monster on Long Island when he runs into something else: a mysterious boy named Percy Jackson. And their meeting isn't exactly friendly. . . . Includes a sneak peek chapter from HOUSE OF HADES, Book Four in the Heroes of Olympus series.

  • Author:
    Bonny, Sandy Marie
    Summary:

    The stories in Sandy Bonny’s collection take place in settings from the Arctic Circle to Alberta’s badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the grasslands of the prairies, and the characters that we meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd. There are children who live in the magical territory between their imagination and their parents’ realities; road builders from China and Australia who know the ghostly secrets at road’s end; men who shape their lives with the predictability of beehives; women who try to grieve for their unborn children; and those who play at suicide. At the vortex of these surprising plots churns Bonny’s keen interest in science and its unexpected effect on human action and emotion.

  • Author:
    Gasparini, Len
    Summary:

    Len Gasparini is a master of the dark, hard-edged, densely layered story. In his latest story collection, The Snows of Yesteryear, he charts the climate of the human heart with compassion, humor, nostalgia, and irony. His characters are shaped as much by fate as by the hungry ghosts of their own pasts. A desperate publisher dreams up a clever hoax to save his weekly newspaper from going under. Life and art are crucially juxtaposed when a painter sees his ideal model in a young black stripper. A cynical pensioner finds a new purpose in life when his lady friend adopts an ageing Siamese cat. Other stories are comic and nightmarish by turns.

  • Author:
    Irving, Washington
    Summary:

    A collection of 34 essays and short stories written by American author Washington Irving. It was published serially throughout 1819 and 1820. The collection includes two of Irving's best-known stories, attributed to the fictional Dutch historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle."

  • Author:
    Riordan, Rick
    Summary:

    The trouble starts when Apollo introduces Percy and his friend Grover the satyr to the Chryseae Celedones. Three golden women-living statues-appear in front of them, and sing one blissful chord. Apollo has a concert tonight at Mount Olympus, and he needs the Celedones as his backup singers. But there should be a quartet, not a trio-one of the singers has gone rogue. It's up to Percy and Grover to find the missing Celedon somewhere in New York City before she causes any problems. Capturing an attention-seeking automaton in a crowd of mortals is going to require some cagey thinking. Will Percy and Grover succeed, or hit a sour note?

  • Author:
    Summary:

    Presents six short stories by the masters of mystery and horror.

  • Author:
    Crane, Stephen, Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, Henry, O.
    Summary:

    This group of four classic stories from the 19th century includes works that appear in many collections of European literature. Offering tantalizing revelations and unforgettable characters, these tales have delighted readers ever since they were first published. In Stephen Crane's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, glowing newlyweds find an unexpected ally on the dusty streets of an American frontier town. Ill-fated Christmas gifts cross paths in O.Henry's touching The Gift of the Magi. A bohemian artist uses a colorful image to save a young woman's life in another tale by O.Henry: The Last Leaf. And in The Lady With a Toy Dog, Anton Chekhov examines the terrible, tender snares of memory and desire. These classic short stories are narrated by two of the most critically-acclaimed readers in the audiobook field: George Guidall and Frank Muller. Their performances bring fresh emotional nuances to the tales while highlighting the wonderful strands of irony that wrap up each work.

  • Author:
    Simak, Clifford D.
    Summary:

    Nine tales of imagination and wonder from one of the formative voices of science fiction and fantasy, the author of Way Station and City. Named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, Clifford D. Simak was a preeminent voice during the decades that established sci-fi as a genre to be reckoned with. Held in the same esteem as fellow luminaries Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury, his novels continue to enthrall today's readers. And his short fiction is still as gripping and surprising now as when it first entertained an entire generation of fans. The title story is just one example of this. Cheviot Sherwood doesn't believe in miracles. They never seem to pay off. So when he's marooned on a planet with no plan for escape and no working radio, he takes it in stride and prepares for a long stay gathering food, making shelter, and collecting all the diamonds the world has to offer. But when a ship like none he's ever encountered lands, he sees his salvation-and an opportunity to take the priceless craft for himself. Unfortunately, his "rescuer" has the same idea...'his volume also includes the celebrated short works "Eternity Lost," "Shotgun Cure," and "Paradise," among others. Each story includes an introduction by David W. Wixon, literary executor of the Clifford D. Simak estate and editor of this ebook.

  • Author:
    Deaver, Jeffery
    Summary:

    For years Frederick Lowell has quietly managed the estate of the revered novelist Edward Goodwin. Though the author of only one novel, that book has gone on to sell hundreds of millions of copies, keeping Lowell comfortable as well as Goodwin's ne'er-do-well and feckless children. Then word comes that a sequel to the novel may in fact exist, and Lowell becomes a detective, navigating a series of startling twists that take him from a Hamptons retreat to a state penitentiary, from a Westchester homestead to a decaying Southern hotel. The Sequel is Jeffrey Deaver at his finest, diabolically plotted and filled with rich characterizations. The Sequel by Jeffrey Deaver is one of 20 short stories within Mulholland Books' Strand Originals series, featuring thrilling stories by the biggest names in mystery from the Strand Magazine archives. View the full series list at mulhollandbooks.com, and listen to them all!

  • Author:
    Moore, Lisa, Urquhart, Jane
    Summary:

    Lisa Moore's stories are bright, emotionally engaging, tangible. She marks out the precious moments of her characters' lives against deceptively commonplace backdrops — a St. John's hospital cafeteria lit only by the lights in the snack machines; a half-built house "like a rib cage around a lungful of sky" -- and the results linger long in the memory. The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore shows us that love, alongside desire, can sometimes come as a surprise, sometimes an ambush. She splices moments and images together so adroitly, so vividly, you'll swear you've lived them yourself. This new volume, bringing together Lisa Moore’s first two books of stories, Open and Degrees of Nakedness, is the very best way to encounter one of the finest short-story writers in the country. This edition features a brilliant new introduction by Jane Urquhart on the importance of Moore’s work.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Short stories