Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Short Stories

"Break all rules, including these." So advises one of the stories in this audiobook collection. These stories jump - conscientiously - from a homage to Alexandre Dumas to an action-packed adventure set in the near future. There’s also an epic fantasy or space opera - take your pick - told in aphorisms, a contemplation on death, and a tale of what happens when walls begin to divide a place.

is a stunning fiction debut by one of the most promising new writers in Canada. The novella and stories in these pages startle and engage the reader with their humour, warmth and grace. The novella traces one week in the life of a young, unmarried Irish woman about to give birth. The heroine is a hip, independent woman who muses on memory, love, loss and inheritance in a clever, wry and moving way.

Without Absolution is the first collection from science-fiction and fantasy writer Amy Sterling Casil. It contains nine stories and four poems in which a new disease causes birth defects; a father clones himself; and a lonely man uploads the personalities of his former wife and his mother, creating a horrifying "motherwife".

Nancy Jane Moore wrote her first flash fiction many years ago when everyone in her writing group decided to enter a contest for one-page stories. None of them won, but she got hooked and has been writing short-shorts ever since. Her first project for Book View Café was posting a free flash fiction every week for a year. Some were reprints, others older stories that needed one more revision, but quite a few were written in the week they went up. This 52-story collection includes most of those stories and a few new ones as well.

First published nearly a quarter-century ago and one of the very few short-story collections to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, this is American fiction at its most vital - each narrative a masterpiece of sustained power and seemingly effortless literary grace.

In Almost Tall, 14-year-old Dinah finds herself plucked from her provincial midwestern ballet class and dropped in her uncle’s glittering New York penthouse. What starts out as a lonely summer quickly becomes a whirl of cocktails and haute couture under the mercurial attention of her uncle’s bombastic and insecure partner, Eddie. With remarkable poise, she struggles against a city that seems determined to turn innocence into cynicism and the young into “strangers to youth.”

Spanning centuries and continents, Mamet uses war and its players to explore, among other themes, redemption and forgiveness as they unfold in the context of conflict in the form of three novellas. Finely wrought, Mamet eloquently depicts the psychological brutality conflict raises in the landscape of the mind.

"If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that logic is the sworn enemy of grief," writes Halimah Marcus, co-editor of Electric Literature, in her introduction to “Firewood," a hilarious and devastating story by J. Robert Lennon. "When the narrator’s wife (expectedly) leaves him, too devastated to admit the obvious, he concocts an impossible explanation for her disappearance. All I’ll say is that it involves the woodpile. The invented story is more horrible than the truth, but somehow easier to manage."

The Cottage on the Hill is a horror story, but it’s a J. Robert Lennon horror story, in which the characters’ loneliness - their disconnectedness, their inability, at times, even to speak or listen to one another - is more chilling than any of the supernatural elements.

Do not let Etgar Keret deceive you. The Israeli writer who's worked in film, illustration, animation, and radio, is a storyteller in all senses of the word. Like a conman, he'll promise you a simple story and then the next thing you know your emotional reserves have been completely emptied. It's a literary bait and switch, and he'll get you every time.

"My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." If you just heaved a contented sigh at Mr. Darcy's heartfelt words, then you, dear listener, are in good company. Here is a delightful collection of never-before-published stories inspired by Jane Austen - her novels, her life, her wit, her world.

Fresh, accomplished, and fearless, Vida marks the debut of Patricia Engel, a young author of immense talent and promise. Vida follows a single narrator, Sabina, as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of her strong, protective, but embattled family.

In these 11 stories - and the weird spaces in between - men, women, and monsters struggle to free themselves from conventions and constraints. Landscapes ranging from the farthest reaches of outer space to a sinister and abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere become battlegrounds in which personal and political change comes at enormous cost. Tyranny takes many shapes: Some more subtle than others

The Hunter and The Trap presents two thrilling and suspenseful stories by Howard Fast, one of the most prolific authors of the 20th century. In “The Hunter,” celebrated but down-on-his-luck novelist Andrew Bell returns to New York from an African safari only to find himself the prey in someone else’s big game hunt. Bell must seek the help of an old friend in order to escape with his life.

Edward Swift's latest work, is this novel recounting of the remarkable life of Miss Spellbinder - the love child of adventurer Lord Andrew Spellbinder and the tempestuous Spanish coloratura, Amelita de la Luna. Miss Spellbinder shares her voyeuristic adventures and remarkable journey. This audiobook is unlike anything you have ever heard before.

Charlie Caine has been to too many Hollywood funerals. The studio system is long gone, and its stars - some forgotten, some preserved for display on a late-night show - are beginning to pass on, as well. Only a few turn out for the final performance of Babe Austrian, a peroxide-blond beauty whose red hot talkies changed the way America thought about sex. As he gazes into her coffin, Caine remembers Babe as she was: a dynamite beauty with secrets that could have burned Hollywood to the ground.

Fedora is dead, and movies will never be the same. A star since the early days of Hollywood, she survived the business for an unprecedented four decades before retiring to Crete. As the years wore on and her costars turned wrinkled and worn, Fedora's perfect features never faded. Now that she has finally passed, the secret to her longevity will be told - a shocking revelation that will raise her to the level of myth.

In the title novella, a third-rate American playwright named Landau attends a literary conference in Prague, where an organized group excursion to a former concentration camp degenerates into a battle of wills and an exercise in egomania and public humiliation. Nina, the heroine of the second novella, "Three Pigs in Five Days," is sent to Paris to write an article for her lover's travel journal - a dizzying, erotic pilgrimage that forces her to see how sex has distorted her view of the world.

Big bugs, cloned cats, and feral star-children play leading roles in the seven stories that make up Fast’s unconventional and thought-provoking collection. The Edge of Tomorrow is a significant foray into science fiction by one of the 20th century’s most prolific novelists. In looking beyond our universe, Fast reveals much about the America of his time - where the Cold War and a nascent civil rights movement stoked unconscious fears and desires.

In the Hugo Award nominee Forty, Counting Down, computer genius Justin Kloster travels to the past to stop himself from making a terrible mistake. But all actions have their consequences. Then, in Twenty-One, Counting Up, Kloster's college life and romantic dreams are rudely interrupted when the 40-year-old Justin arrives from the future to save him from himself.