Showing titles in Short Stories

A vivid love story and adventure tale, Oroonoko is a heroic slave narrative about a royal prince and his fight for freedom. The eponymous hero, Oroonoko, deemed royalty in one world and slave in another, is torn from his noble status and betrayed into slavery in Surinam, where he is reduced to chains, fetters, and shackles. But his high spirit and admirable character will not be suppressed.

"Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: give me leave to do my utmost." This line from "Babette's Feast" lends itself to both of the stories in this audio collection, which tell of unbreakable human spirit and total commitment to life choices. "Babette's Feast," now an award-winning film, takes a humorous look at a pure-spirited community in which love, lost youth, self-denial, and creative urges contribute to making the right choices. And "Sorrow-Acre," the most anthologized of Isak Dinesen's stories, challenges the most profound choice of all. Emmy and Tony Award-winning actress Colleen Dewhurst's warm, sensitive interpretation reveals the subtle beauty of Dinesen's prose.

I once served with her older brother and when she ran into some trouble, she came looking for me. She shows up at the gate to the club begging for my help. Of course, I’m going to help her - I would never turn away a woman in trouble. But with her, its more. I’m going to claim her. Make her mine...and never let her go.

Jane Austen commenced writing in her adolescence and continued right up to her untimely death in 1817. Her novels are reflections of the socially constricted world in which she lived, and the plots are built around the search of one or more young women for a suitable spouse. Austen’s works are noted for the perceptive elegance of her prose and for vigor and detail of characterization. Celebrated critic F. R. Leavis considered Austen as one of the four great English novelists, along with George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad.

From Lydia Millet—“the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves” (Chicago Tribune)—comes an inventive new collection of short fiction. Atavists follows a group of families, couples, and loners in their collisions, confessions, and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses, and medieval role-playing festivals.

Nathaniel Holliday and Justin Cromwell are the number one bull riders and sexy as sin men who could get any girl that they want. To top it off, for whatever reason they want me, and I can’t fight my attraction for them. It doesn’t matter. But can I really accept the both of them? Or was it a bad idea to deal with men like them?

The crux of this story lies in the concept of "superiority"--not just in terms of technology but in understanding how that technology can be effectively employed. Clarke explores the hubris inherent in underestimating one's enemies and the danger of overreliance on assumed technological advantages. The protagonist reflects on their miscalculations, emphasizing that true military prowess extends beyond mere possession of advanced weaponry.

Few authors can claim to have marked a genre so thoroughly and personally that their words have leaked into every aspect of modern pop culture. Clive Barker is such an author, and the Books of Blood marked his debut - his coming out to the world - in brilliant, unforgettable fashion. Crossroad Press is proud to present Clive Barker's Books of Blood in digital for the first time.

In this collection are found stories of gay romantic love, the love between a father and his gay son, and old lovers returning from the beyond. There are stories within this book about a magical Christmas tree that appears of its own accord every year, angels, ghosts, and a century-old hotel that miraculously reappears during the holiday season. Most of the stories are written for gay listeners, but some are just cozy Christmas tales. There are stories in this volume for all true lovers of Christmas.

Billie and Vero are getting married and the gang's all here, even the only two members left of the Singles Girl's Club, Isla and Freya. When the wedding planner mixes up reservations for the wedding, party girl Isla and jaded artist Freya find that they're either sharing the very last room available or one of them is sleeping out on the beach. There's just one teeny-tiny problem—the room has one bed. But they're mature adult friends who can handle a sleepover.

A place of myths, rumours and secrets, The Hotel looms over the dark Fens, tall and grey in its Gothic splendour. Built on cursed land, a history of violent death suffuses its very foundations - yet it has a magnetism that is impossible to ignore. Here are the stories of The Hotel: stories of children, mothers, monsters, cult film-makers, thrill-seekers and workers on the night shift, all with their own tales of its strange power, of the horrors of Room 63, and of desperate but failed attempts to escape its seductive pull.

Ficciones es posiblemente la obra más reconocida de Jorge Luis Borges y un hito en la historia de la literatura. Aquí se encuentran lo policiaco («La muerte y la brújula») y lo fantástico («La lotería en Babilonia»), lo irreal («Las ruinas circulares») y lo imaginario («Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius»), el que Borges consideró acaso su mejor cuento («El Sur») y uno de los comienzos más cautivadores de un relato jamás escrito («Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche»).Cada uno de los dieciséis cuentos reunidos en este libro es, en sí, pieza fundacional y celebración del universo borgeano.

At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.

From Sunday Times best-selling author Ben Kane comes a collection of short stories.

Spanning four decades in the mid-19th century, the interconnected novellas of Old New York lay out in vivid detail the complex and inscrutable codes, customs, and taboos of New York society in classic Wharton style.

“One of the great … American short-story writers” exposes the darkness of the human heart in these speculative tales of terror and tragedy (George R. R. Martin).

F. Scott Fitzgerald makes antebellum Baltimore his setting for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a fantastical tale with some Poe-like overtones about a baby born at age 70 who then lives life in reverse, his hair turning "in the dozen years of his life from white to iron-gray, the network of wrinkles on his face becoming less pronounced". What ramifications that creates for Benjamin's relationship with his father first and then later with his wife and his own son makes for some fantastical situations.

A strikingly original collection of short stories and accompanying vignettes that marked Ernest Hemingway’s American debut. When In Our Time was first published in 1925, it was widely praised for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and earned...

“Kirby has mastered the art of short fiction…A stunning collection from a writer whose talent and creativity seem boundless.” —NPR “Kirby takes joy in subverting the reader’s expectations at every turn. Her characters might be naïve, even reckless, but they aren’t about to be...

From the claustrophobic confines of a secret government bunker to the infinite, starry abyss found at the bottom of a water park pool, this collection is a showcase of unflinching, imaginative horror.