Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Anthologies & Short Stories

The unabridged, digital audiobook edition of "Rummins", a short, sharp, chilling story from Roald Dahl, the master of the shocking tale, read by the actress Jessica Hynes. In "Rummins", Roald Dahl, one of the world’s favourite authors, tells a macabre story about the darker side of human nature. Here, the men building a hay rick one summer find that the heat and rats are the least of their worries.... "Rummins" is taken from the short story collection Someone Like You.

The unabridged, digital audiobook edition of "Neck", a short, sharp, frightening story from Roald Dahl, the master of the shocking tale, read by the actor Julian Rhind-Tutt. In "Neck", Roald Dahl, one of the world’s favourite authors, tells a sinister story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a sculpture comes between a scheming wife and her put-upon husband.... "Neck" is taken from the short story collection Someone Like You, which includes 17 other devious and shocking stories.

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of 'The Wish', a short, sharp, chilling story from Roald Dahl, the master of the shocking tale. Read by the actor Stephen Mangan. In 'The Wish', Roald Dahl, one of the world’s favourite authors, tells a sinister story about the darker side of human nature. Here, an imaginative boy plays a game that quickly gets out of hand.

Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where they'd applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities - and envies - the other. A young woman responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.

Once upon a time, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories - fantastical yarns of wondrous creatures in faraway places-bewitched children across the world. But times change. Today, Kipling's writing tells us a different tale; of a love of Empire, and the troubling legacy of British colonialism. In Not So Stories, writers of colour from around the world reclaim these stories and remake them into something new. Something different.

No one has a better perspective on life on both sides of the channel than Julian Barnes. In these exquisitely crafted stories spanning several centuries, he takes as his universal theme the British in France: from the last days of a reclusive English composer, the beef consuming 'navvies' labouring on the Paris-Rouen railway to a lonely woman mourning the death of her brother on the battlefields of the Somme.

A vitally alive and ever-surprising collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to Be Both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet. Individually lucid and luminous, these tales resonate subtly together. In examining the distances and connections between ourselves and others, expertly inching us closer to the bone, Ali Smith's storytelling has never seemed so necessary, so moving or so joyous.

Stories for people who've grown up being told time is running out - and don't want it to.... How do you ever know the whole story? How do you ever know even part of the story? How do you find meaning when chance and coincidence could, after all, just be chance and coincidence? In a celebration of connections and missed connections, an inquiry into everything from flies and trees and books to sex, art, drunkenness and love, Smith rewrites the year's cycle into a very modern calendar.

One of the greatest of all horror writers, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) also composed pioneering tales that seized upon the scientific developments of an era marked by staggering change. In this collection of 16 stories, he explores such wide-ranging contemporary themes as galvanism, time travel and resurrection of the dead.

As she walks out of her marriage, a woman remembers the day her husband rescued a boy from drowning. A blind man on his wedding day celebrates the pursuit of love. And a young man leaves prison with only one desire - to see his son again. With power and precision, humanity and insight, Supporting Cast captures the extraordinary moments in our ordinary lives and the darkness and the joy of the everyday.

From New York Times bestselling author Maisy Yates comes a collection of three novellas in the Silver Creek Romance series—together for the first time.

From Sunday Times bestselling author Simon Kernick - the UK's answer to Harlan Coben - come two electrifying novellas and three gripping short stories published in book form for the very first time. Fans of David Baldacci, Stuart MacBride and Peter James will not be disappointed.

A hard drinking, hard fighting builder has a nasty accident when in bed with his best-mate's sister. Little does he know what 'punishment' awaits him on the other side.... Hilarious, shocking and hugely entertaining, 'Catholic Guilt' has all the classic Irvine Welsh ingredients.

As a dense yellow fog swirls through the streets of London, a deep melancholy has descended on Sherlock Holmes, who sits in a cocaine-induced haze at 221B Baker Street. His mood is only lifted by a visit from a beautiful but distressed young woman - Mary Morstan, whose father vanished 10 years before. Four years later, she began to receive an exquisite gift every year: a large, lustrous pearl. Now she has had an intriguing invitation to meet her unknown benefactor and urges Holmes and Watson to accompany her.

Reimagining each of the traditional carol's gifts, and written in tribute to Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, The Twelve Days of Christmas is a collection of festive tales filled with seasonal cheer and heart-warming characters. Will the challenges and mysteries that the Viscount’s guests encounter be resolved by the night of the ball?

There is no other anthology that brings together similar stories of ancient women in power. All of these stories were written by men, and none of them can be interpreted as affirmations or celebrations of women in power. They are instead misogynistic tales that aim to shore up masculine authority by exposing the consequences when women rather than men wield it.

Leonora Brito was a writer of exceptional stories. In Dat's Love, she soaks up the sights, sounds and colours of Cardiff to boldly explore race and history. With each electric story, Brito introduces a unique cast of characters, vibrantly elevating their everyday lives. From 59-year-old Dorothy taking up nude modelling to black aristocrat Dido Elizabeth Belle, from the assassination of JFK to what's going down at the Blue Bayou, Brito blends the surreal and the mundane to redress history and immerse the reader in a vibrantly painted world.

Bubbling with an urgent rage that occasionally tips over into vengeance, Radojevic deftly charts the moments that make a life: from the warmth of first love to the recognition of anger, and the possibilities that take shape as we find or lose our ability to speak. A Beautiful Lack of Consequence explores the ways in which the world bends and breaks women with the pressure it puts on them – and what happens when those women snap back.

When Four Stories by American Women was first published by Penguin Classics in 1990, it understandably reflected the second-wave feminist interpretations of that time—a period marked by an impressive recovery of what were then considered to be minor American writers. This updated and expanded volume, Twelve Stories by American Women edited by Arielle Zibrak, offers a more diverse selection of writers—including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, María Cristina Mena, Zitkala-Ša, Sui Sin Far, and Barbara E. Pope.