Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Short Stories

Quinton Thorn has always wanted to own a bakery and share his love of food with as many people as possible. His passion for taking regular recipes and turning them into something special is what makes his food unique. When he meets Enzo Reid the first day of culinary school, he has no reason to question why he’s there. He accepts that Enzo is just as passionate about baking as he is. He soon realizes he has feelings for Enzo that go beyond friendship, but for the sake of their business, he keeps his feelings to himself.

Smee is a crackling ghost story about a guest in a haunted house telling other visitors of the death of a young girl, years ago, playing a game of hide-and-seek.

Immerse yourself in a world where the wonderful Stephen Fry reads some of the more memorable short stories of our time. A brilliant combination of reader and writer come together in these seven short stories available on digital download only. Stephen writes “Saki remains, from a distance of a...

A short ghost story from the best-selling author of Abbot's Keep. A photographer reluctantly agrees to take images of an abandoned manor house on the Dorset clifftops only to find the building is not completely empty.

Nate Temple and his pal, Alucard, just want a little peace and quiet after the events of Tiny Gods, but it just isn't in the cards for them. Tory leaves town and asks them to watch over the rebellious Reds. But they have other plans. When love is in the air, there is nothing a teenager wouldn't do. And there is nothing a dad wouldn't do to keep them safe. Even if it involves a Johnson Beaver concert, a magical djinn, and a herd of centaurs.

Hasty for the Dark is the second short story collection from the award-winning and widely appreciated British writer of horror fiction, Adam L. G. Nevill. The author's best horror stories from 2009 to 2015 are collected here for the first time.

New Yorkers Paul and Darren have planned a winter holiday in Venice. But when their five-year marriage suddenly unravels, Paul endeavors to make the trip alone, despite his heartbreak and anxiety. Far outside his comfort zone, Paul has a mission: to see if he can be adventurous, fearless, free. In short, to become someone new. Soon after arriving in Italy, he notices a small, scruffy, self-assured dog trotting alongside a canal with the confidence he so desperately wants for himself. This street dog and his instincts for survival lend Paul’s trip a singular purpose.

This could be the most important mission of Nameless’s life. Because it’s putting him on a collision course with his own past and the nation’s future. The target: a fortified redoubt in the golden hills of California, the hub of a new world order that’s unthinkably close at hand. The time has come for Nameless to face its designer: the nihilist mastermind behind the One Solution. It’s also time for Nameless to discover who he is and was, and what brought him to this fateful endgame. But will the truth be a breaking point? Or a turning point?

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'.

Nothing says romance more than a wedding at Christmas. Marrying the love of your life, surrounded by your nearest and dearest at the most festive time of the year? What could be more perfect? For Brayden Riley and Addison Ridge, it’s their dream wedding. 'Tis the season. Love and peace reign. Right? A waylaid maid of honor, a mischievous family member, and a father having trouble letting go are all typical blips in an otherwise ordinary wedding.

"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine.

While renovating her Victorian home, Ana Clementine finds an ornate door buried under forty years of earth. Once she restores it to the attic, she starts hearing whispers, her loving husband has become a stranger, and her baby daughter learns a chilling new word. Maybe Ana has unlocked the house’s secrets. Or maybe she’s becoming just a little unhinged herself.

A man gets into a car that can take him anywhere he can imagine—including the past, into the worst mistake of his life, a memory he does not want to relive, cannot escape, and is even more afraid to alter. A seemingly harmless, forgettable film about “alien hand syndrome” inspires a wave of self-harm among viewers—and even stranger things among those who become obsessed with it.

Brian Carr believes in fairy tales — princes, castles, once upon a times, happily ever afters. He's been that way since we were kids, and no matter how many times it all goes wrong, Brian's never given up hope of finding his one true love. It's beautiful. Adorable. Charming. It's also annoying as hell, because I've spent decades standing on the sidelines while guy after guy crushed my best friend's heart, leaving me to pick up his pieces. The truth is, for as long as Brian has dreamed of fairy tales...I have dreamed of Brian.

In his debut collection of short stories, Robert Sheehan disappears into characters, challenging the complacencies of everyday experience, often from entirely unexpected angles. Informed by the author’s peripatetic life, Disappearing Act reflects on the absurdity of human behaviour. Sheehan delves deep into his characters’ streams of self-talk and self-imposed delusions, exploring the dark impulses that lurk below the shiny surfaces of many outwardly normal lives.

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025 In Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Written originally in Kannada, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a...

Roger Ferris is one of the CIA's soldiers in the war on terrorism. He has come out of Iraq with a shattered leg and an intense mission: to penetrate the network of a master terrorist known only as "Suleiman". Ferris' plan for getting inside Suleiman's tent is inspired by a masterpiece of British intelligence during World War II: he prepares a body of lies, literally the corpse of an imaginary CIA officer who appears to have accomplished the impossible by recruiting an agent within the enemy's ranks.

Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion, and prisoners eat, work, and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket, or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes.

This collection shows a vibrant young writer with a wide-ranging imagination, ferocious creative energy, devastating wit, and an eye for the wonderful and terrifying and tragic. Among the gems are "All the Sounds of Fear", "The Sky Is Burning", "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman", and "In Lonely Lands". Though they stand tall on their own merits, they also point the way to the sublime stories that followed soon after and continue to come even now, more than 50 years later.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Hounded—“a superb urban fantasy debut” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)—comes an Iron Druid Chronicles short story in the captivating Carniepunk anthology. The ancient Druid Atticus O’Sullivan gets more than greasy corn dogs and flat...