Showing titles in Short Stories

After 25 years serving as the human Monitor of the Interstellar Ark, Hermes, Orion is scheduled to be placed back into hibernation with the other crewmembers. Knowing he'll die there and be replaced before the ship's voyage is over, he decides that he won’t — can’t — accept that fate. Whatever it takes, Orion will escape Hermes and see what's beyond, even if it means defying the regulations of his only friend — the ship-wide artificial intelligence known as Dan.

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'.

On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.

Lena has just moved to a new city with her cat, Scully, so when she finds little gifts on her doorstep every day, she thinks they're from her neighbors. Caroline, who lives next door, can't figure out how her stuff keeps disappearing until she catches a cat in the act of stealing from her. She follows the feline felon home—and meets its cute owner.

June Tremblay is struggling to find herself as a painter when she accepts a summer job as assistant to renowned artist Hiram Lammergeier on his private island off the Maine coast. The reclusive legend has one peculiar rule: under no circumstances is June to create any art of her own. Caught between her need to paint and her desire for Lammergeier, June rebels, and her transgression sets off a chain of retaliation that will shape the rest of her life.

Before he gained wide fame as a novelist, Ernest Hemingway established his literary reputation with his short stories. Set in the varied landscapes of Spain, Africa, and the American Midwest, this definitive audio collection traces the development and maturation of Hemingway's distinct and revolutionary storytelling style - from the plain bold language of this first story to his mastery of seamless prose that contained a spare, eloquent pathos, as well as a sense of expansive solitude.

It is said that dreams are harmless, that they are nothing more than the meaningless fancies of an unconscious mind. It’s only a dream. It’s only a dream. It’s only a dream. This, of course, is something we tell ourselves when we wake up screaming in the dead of night. We repeat the mantra in order to bring ourselves back to reality, in order to remind ourselves that there is nothing to fear.

It’s an offer Grace Logan can’t refuse: ghostwrite the memoir of Claudia Blackwood, a successful novelist once accused of a ghastly triple murder. Did she really do it? In self-imposed exile in her island mansion, the frail Claudia is finally bringing her notorious past to a close. But for Grace, the end of Claudia’s story may be more than a sinister reveal…

Five haunting tales from Benedict Ashforth, the best-selling author of Abbot's Keep.

When Elmore Leonard died in 2013, he left behind a 60-year legacy of crime novels that, through their trademark wit and grit, transcended genre fiction. He also left behind a treasure trove of unpublished early stories. Their razor-sharp dialogue and headlong pacing reveal a master who honed his craft from a young age.

Best friends since second grade, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen explore the lonely freeways and seedy bars of Los Angeles together through their teenage years, surviving unfulfilling romantic encounters, and carrying with them the scars of their families' tumultuous pasts. Fiona was always destined to leave, her effortless beauty burnished by fierce ambition—qualities that Jane admired and feared in equal measure. When Fiona moves to New York and cares for a sick friend through a breakup with an opportunistic boyfriend, Jane remains in California.

First published fifteen years ago, shortly after his death, inside this collection are some of the finest short stories of science fiction writing from one of the genre’s greatest writers, Isaac Asimov. Isaac Asimov was the Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the founder of robot ethics, and one of the world's most prolific authors of fiction and non-fiction. The Good Doctor's short fiction has been enjoyed by millions for more than half a century. Now the definitive Asimov collection is underway with Volume One of The Complete Stories.

Jake Wethers' life is perfect. He's married to the woman he's always loved, and they have three beautiful children. The Mighty Storm is still going strong, and his record label is thriving. But not so long ago, Jake's life wasn't perfect. The unexpected and untimely death of his best friend, Jonny Creed, had sent an already out-of-control Jake spiraling down further.

Lord Arthur Saviles's Crime is a masterpiece of polished cynicism, in which poison, explosive clocks and finally murder forerun married bliss. Each of the eight stories here were published in the heyday of Wilde's career, between 1887 and 1891.

The theme that unites these stories in this dazzling first collection by Curtis Sittenfeld is how even the cleverest people tend to misread others and how much we all deceive ourselves. Sharp and tender, funny and wise, this collection shows Sittenfeld’s knack for creating real, believable characters while also skewering contemporary mores with brilliant dry wit.

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.

In electric prose T. C. Boyle explores myriad facets of society: greed and excess, parenthood and responsibility, the digital world and the way we understand our mortality. Roaming unrestrainedly through the present and near future, he inhabits his characters’ minds with a ventriloquist’s flair, skewering human motivations and revealing us to ourselves with empathy and wry humour.

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.

Leo Tolstoy: The Short Stories includes unabridged recordings of Leo Tolstoy's 5 greatest short stories in one audiobook.

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected audiobook of his darkest stories, read by Will Self, Adrian Scarborough, Stephanie Beacham, Andrew Scott, Richard E Grant, Tamsin Greig, Mark Heap, Juliet Stevenson and Jessica Hynes. Even when we mean to be kind we can sometimes be cruel. We all have streaks of nastiness inside us. In these ten tales of cruelty, master storyteller Roald Dahl explores how and why it is we make others suffer.