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

In this short story collection of courage, adventure, and magic, heroes—ordinary people who do the right thing—bravely step forward. But running toward danger might cost them everything.

There's a whole world of Dahl still to discover in a newly collected audiobook of his deliciously dark tales for adults.... How underhand could you be to get what you want? In these 10 tales of dark and twisted trickery Roald Dahl reveals that we are at our smartest and most cunning when we set out to deceive others - and, sometimes, even ourselves.

In these stories an excellent host finds himself turned out of home by his own guests; a woman spends her wedding day frantically searching for her husband-to-be; and in Shirley Jackson's best-known story, a small farming village comes together for a terrible annual ritual. The creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost is chillingly captured in these tales of wasted potential and casual cruelty by a master of the short story.

There's a whole world of Dahl still to discover in a newly collected audiobook of his deliciously dark tales for adults. In war, are we at our heroic best or our cowardly worst? Featuring the autobiographical stories from Roald Dahl's time as a fighter pilot in the Second World War as well as seven other tales of conflict and strife, Dahl reveals the human side of our most inhumane activity.

‘Stories are like Russian dolls; open them up, and in each one you’ll find another story.’ Conjured from a wickedly imaginative pen, here is a new collection of short stories that showcases Joanne Harris’s exceptional storytelling art. Sensuous, wicked, mischievous, uproarious and wry, here are tales that combine the everyday with the unexpected; wild fantasy with bittersweet reality.

A shopping mall where droids sell organs harvested from street trash. A murderous imaginary friend. A psychotic composer drafting music from pain. All in a day's work for the Lawman of the Future. Edited by and with an introduction by Dredd veteran Michael Carroll, Judge Fear's Big Day Out and Other Stories gathers the very best short stories from more than a decade of the Judge Dredd Megazine, including stories by legends Alan Grant, Gordon Rennie and Simon Spurrier, among countless others.

Our lives are digital, exposed and always on. We track our friends and family wherever they go. We have millennia of knowledge at our fingertips. We know everything about our world. But we know nothing about theirs. We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They've simply adapted and innovated, found new channels to reach us. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect. To live amongst us. To remind us. To tempt us. To take their revenge.

Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these 15 stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life. Many are set in the author's native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience - from the blackly comic 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel' and the short, sharp sketch 'Miss Brill', in which a lonely woman's precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed, to the vivid impressionistic evocation of family life in 'At the Bay'.

A haunting, magical fairy tale collection, in which Oscar Wilde beautifully evokes (amongst others) 'The Happy Prince', who was not so happy after all; 'The Selfish Giant', who learned to love little children; and 'The Star Child', who did not love his parents as much as he should.

Magical listening for young and old, narrated by John Moffatt.

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected audiobook of his darkest stories, read by Juliet Stevenson, Cillian Murphy, Adrian Scarborough, Tamsin Greig, Stephanie Beacham and Andrew Scott. 'There is a pleasure sure in being mad, which none but madmen know.' Our greatest fear is of losing control - of our lives, but, most of all, of ourselves. In these 10 unsettling tales of unexpected madness master storyteller Roald Dahl explores what happens when we let go our sanity.

An expedition to Mars goes terribly wrong. A seaside pier collapses. A 30-stone man is confined to his living room. One woman is abandoned on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. Another woman is saved from drowning. Two boys discover a gun in a shoebox. A group of explorers find a cave of unimaginable size deep in the Amazon jungle. A man shoots a stranger in the chest on Christmas Eve.

The stories in The Vanishing Point are both exotic and domestic, their settings ranging from Hawaii to Africa and New England. Each focuses on life’s vanishing points—a moment when seemingly all lines running through one’s life converge, and one can see no farther, yet must deal with the implications. With the insight, subtlety, and empathy that has long characterized his work, Theroux has written deeply moving stories about memory, longing, and the passing of time, reclaiming his status, once again, as a master of the form.

The Tsar of Love and Techno begins in 1930s Leningrad, where a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day he receives an antique painting of a dacha inside a box of images due to be altered. The mystery behind this painting threads together the stories that follow, which take us through a century and introduce a cast of characters including a Siberian beauty queen and many others.

Mark Gatiss ( Sherlock, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones) reads chilling tales by the unsung master of the classic ghost story: E. F. Benson. There's nothing sinister about a London bus. Nothing supernatural could occur on a busy train platform. There's nothing terrifying about a little caterpillar. And a telephone, what could be scary about that? Don't be frightened of the dark corners of your room. Don't be alarmed by a sudden inexplicable chill.

The father has a story he needs to share before it's too late. As he tells his son about a courageous little girl lying in a hospital bed a few miles away, he reveals even more about himself - his past regrets, his hopes for the future. Now, on Christmas Eve, he has been given the chance to do something remarkable that could change the destiny of the little girl he hardly knows. But before he can make the deal of a lifetime, he must find out what his own life has actually been worth, and only his son can reveal the answer.

Cassandra may have seen the future, but it doesn't mean she's resigned to telling the Trojans everything she knows. In this ebullient collection, virgins escape from being sacrificed, witches refuse to be burned, whores aren't ashamed, and every woman gets a chance to be a radioactive cockroach warrior who snaps back at catcallers.

Prepare to be terrified with C. J. Tudor's first collection of short stories, featuring eleven twisted tales of the macabre, including: The Lion at the Gate in which a strange piece of graffiti leads to a terrifying encounter for four school friends; Butterfly Island which tells the story of a group of survivors who wash up on a deserted island and make a horrifying discovery; Gloria where a cold-hearted killer encounters a strange young girl at a motorway service station with unexpected consequences.

From the incomparable Tessa Hadley, a masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships. In each of the twelve stories in After the Funeral, small events have huge consequences. As psychologically astute as they are emotionally dense, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams.

The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth depicts the random encounters that bring the past bubbling to the surface, the impulsive decisions that irrevocably shape a life and the endless hesitations and loss of nerve that wickedly complicate it. These funny, surprising and strangely moving stories are a resounding confirmation of Boyd's powers as one of our most original and compelling storytellers.

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected audiobook of his darkest stories, read by Richard Griffiths, Andrew Scott, Derick Jacobi, Mark Heap, Juliet Stevenson and Stephen Mangan. Why do we lie? Why do we deceive those we love most? What do we fear revealing? In these 10 tales of deception, master storyteller Roald Dahl explores our tireless efforts to hide the truth about ourselves.