Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Anthologies

Forget the French perfume and the boxes of candy, the Hallmark cards and the gift certificates. The birthdays in this collection are observed in more carnal ways, with suitably sexy presents for all. In Simone Harlow's "Happy Birthday", a tough policewoman gets the tables turned when naked Nick arrives to tame her. In Marilyn Jaye Lewis's "The Birthday Party", an unexpected menage a trois in the dark proves the perfect gift.

These nineteen stories follow the paths of men and women, immigrants, minorities, and the poor, suffering from injustice and inequality. Written in the 1940s, Fast's clear-eyed and lively tales examine a world reeling from war and plagued by social unrest. With stories set in New York City, Europe, and India, this collection shares a remarkable global vision. Written during the rising Communist scare, Departure is a defiantly leftist portrait of a complex and ever-changing world.

Drawing on her own memories of alienation and exile, a Cuban lesbian writer tells stories of men and women searching for love and fulfillment - Latino immigrants, lesbians, gay and straight men, people with AIDS, addicts, and many others. Simultaneous. Tour. IP.

Explore an Earth being devoured by entropy, in the ultimate runaway environmental crisis. Dive the depths of the sea to prevent the mother of all oil spills. Rocket into space as a tourist. Mine the asteroids with your enhanced border collie, in the can-do spirit of classic science fiction. These stories appeared in publications as varied as Science Fiction Age, F&SF, and the Boston Sunday Herald.

Relationships and extreme adventures collide with deadpan humor and female wisdom in Pam Houston's transcendent follow-up to her bestselling Cowboys Are My Weakness. Through eleven interlinked stories, we follow roving photographer Lucy O'Rourke as she survives a home life where her parents engage in rather peculiar feeding rites for the family cat in a "title story that deserves to be anthologized into eternity" (The Washington Post Book World), a near-drowning on a white water rafting trip, and a grand cayman attack in the Amazon.

"Three years ago, when my son was still in college and my daughter lived across the Bay, my wife packed her car with her clothes and things, discussed with me her reasons for taking half the savings and, after a farewell which I cannot recall verbatim, she left..." In this short story, which won a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, a retired schoolteacher in his sunset years, gets his first glimpse at the failures in his life, cracking a window open to everything and everyone outside.

Lovingly handpicked by Violet Blue, these stories are erotic gems, polished to perfection by an expert in erotica. The Best of Women's Erotica 2 is wildly sexy, super smart, and, highly listenable.

Real musicians don’t sign autographs, date models, or fly in private jets. They spend their lives in practice rooms and basement clubs or toiling in the obscurity of coffee-shop gigs, casino jobs, and the European festival circuit. The 10 linked stories in Power Ballads are devoted to this unheard virtuoso: the working musician. From the wings of sold-out arenas to hip-hop studios to polka bars, these stories are born out of a nocturnal world where music is often simply work, but also where it can, in rare moments, become a source of grace and transcendence, speaking about the things we never seem to say to one another.

Have you ever had one chance - or one night - to have hot, reckless sex? One Night Only is a compendium of the most refined zipless f*ckfantasies imaginable. Chance encounters, secret oral sex, frenzied public sex.... The expertly crafted characters in these riveting stories gotta have it, and they need it now.

When Jill McCorkle feels a short story coming on, she goes right ahead and "wastes" wonderful ideas instead of hoarding them for a novel. The result is another extraordinary collection of stories and characters. In "It's a Funeral! RSVP," the storyteller is a woman who takes up self-styled "careers" that suit her circumstances. Now she's stumbled onto one that's so successful that she just can't quit. It's planning funerals, what she calls Going Out Parties, in which the clients are the soon-to-be-deceased themselves.

Jamie Quatro's stories are uncensored, sometimes eccentric explorations of life - its darkness and brilliance - written in a voice that David Means describes as "bright, sharp, startling, utterly distinctive, passionate, and secretive". Quatro writes from Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where she lives with her husband, Scott, and their children. "Wave Function Collapse" is a stand-alone story narrated by the author, and is a great introduction to her writing. Download her new collection, I Want to Show You More, also available at Audible.

In this heartbreakingly beautiful book of disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning, beloved and celebrated author Andre Dubus III explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love. In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of one story and into the next, love is "dirty" - tangled up with need, power, boredom, ego, fear, and fantasy.

An explicit collection of young-adult erotica, Boy Crazy explores in heady detail the "first time": the first time feeling lustful toward another boy, the first time falling into bed with a peer, the first time discovering love with another young man. This youthful collection relishes the thrill of being crazy for a certain boy, for a moment or for a lifetime.

Laura and Sam are obsessed with film noir. In their sun-drenched apartment in Miami, they watch 1940's black and white movies, whose characters move in shadows and narrow slats of light. They're fascinated by a Hollywood genre without happy endings, where everyone is corrupt, where lovers betray one another, where the war might be over and the boys might be home, but where nothing is going back to the way it was.

The stories in this reissued version of Cara Bruce's popular anthology explore the irresistible lure of the sexual fetish, from leather and lingerie to shoes and shaving accessories. Nearly two dozen of today's top erotica authors feature characters getting in and out of corsets and girdles, cross-dressing, giving or enduring spankings, playing with knives and rubber balls, and engaging in a host of other taboo yet tantalizing activities.

Here, in her first collection in eight years, McCorkle collects 11 brand-new stories bristling with her characteristic combination of wit and weight. In honeymoon shoes, mud-covered hunting boots, or glass slippers, all of the women in these stories march to a place of new awareness, in one way or another, transforming their lives. They make mistakes, but they don’t waste time hiding behind them. They move on. They are strong. And they’re funny, even when they are sad.

Showcasing the work of literary giants like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and authors whom listeners may be surprised to learn were "in the life", Black Like Us is the most comprehensive collection of fiction by African American lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers ever published.

Scott Snyder’s protagonists inhabit a playfully deranged fictional world in which a Wall Street trader can find himself armed with a speargun, guarding a Dumpster outside a pawnshop in Florida; or an employee at Niagara Falls (his job: watching for jumpers) will take off in a car after a blimp in which his girlfriend has escaped. But in Snyder’s wondrous imagination there’s a thin membrane between the whimsical and the disturbing....

Cleis Press's Best Lesbian Erotica and Best Women's Erotica series top bestseller lists, raising and exceeding the standards and expectations of readers of erotic fiction with each new edition. Now the African-American women's erotica market will discover the same level of literate, provocative sex writing in this debut collection of a new series. Best Black Women's Erotica showcases the hottest, most arousing, and most surprising erotic literature by African-American women writers.

These fifteen genre-bending stories are set against a backdrop of sudden violence and profound regret, populated by characters whose circumstances and longings drive them to the point of no return... and sometimes even further. Traversing the back roads of the south and beyond, these stories probe the boundaries of imagination, taking the listener to the fringes of a society where the world looks different, and once you visit, you won't ever be the same.