Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Short Stories

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.

Madison Smartt Bell’s celebrated debut story collection about the daily struggles of life in America. Engrossing and brimming with insight, Bell’s early stories are remarkable for their ambition of scope and the author’s deft rendering of human diversity.

Nearly forty years after the publication of his first story, "The Wrath of Purple," in the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, Howard Fast returned to the genre with a set of nine supremely entertaining tales. In this collection, a Vietnam general shoots down what appears to be an angel, a man sells his soul to the devil for a copy of the next day's Wall Street Journal, and a group of alien beings bestow a mouse with human thought and emotion.

Quiet As They Come is a beautiful and at times brutal portrait of a people caught between two cultures. Set in San Francisco from the 1980s to the present day, this debut collection explores the lives of several families of Vietnamese immigrants as they struggle to adjust to life in their new country, often haunted by the memories and customs of their old lives in Vietnam. While some are able to survive and assimilate, others are crushed by the promise of the "American Dream."

From the dark depths of the past to the bright hopes of the future, Pati Nagle's stories range across the palette of human emotion. Named for her Theodore Sturgeon Award Finalist story, Coyote Ugly includes fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, romance, mystery, and a few surprises. The rhythms, colors, and flavors of New Mexico enrich many of the stories. Curl up with this collection and your favorite hot cuppa, and prepare to escape the ordinary.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, French Jesuits erected a mission deep in the uncharted Canadian wilderness, till they were brutally murdered by a band of renegade Iroquois.Or so the legends say. Today Ste-Claire College stands near the legendary massacre site, the mission's memory now more folklore than fact. Then Ste-Claire professor Karl Desbiens, who's soon to be a Jesuit priest himself, sets off to locate the mission ruins along with a group of eager college students. But after ten days of searching, they find nothing...until an old world evil is uncovered.

Celebrated for her award-winning political columns, criticism, and poetry, Katha Pollitt offers something new in this poignant, hilarious, and sometimes outrageous collection of stories drawn from her own life.

Whether breathlessly enthusiastic serenely calm, or really concentrating on their personal zombie issues, Crane's happy cast explore the complexities behind personal satisfaction. You Must Be This Happy to Enter exists in a world very much like our own but infused with more joy and magic. It's a place where the happy are jailed, the sincere cause confusion, and pop culture so seamlessly melds with real life that characters can walk right out of the television and come live with you.

The women in When the Messenger Is Hot are fierce and kind, damaged and optimistic. They are recovering from loss or addiction or betrayal; they are on the fringes of reality or sanity or a "conventional" life. From a woman who decides to live on the patio rooftop of her friend's apartment building, to the best-selling memoir writer who finds her identity overtaken by the actress cast in the movie version, to the daughter convinced her dead mother is in fact simply stuck at a North Dakota bus depot, their experiences of loss and love are both uniquely theirs and universal.

Demons in the Spring is a collection of 20 short stories by Joe Meno, author of the smash hits The Boy Detective Fails and Hairstyles of the Damned. In these stories, oddly modern moments occur in the most familiar of public places.

Pieces of terror, pieces of suspense, pieces of darkness combine to create Pieces of Hate, master storyteller Ray Garton's short story collection. Nine works, including "A Gift From Above", a new novel that will surely hit you from below, are here compiled for the sole purpose of scaring you onto the next page. Garton illuminates the dark corners in us all and highlights the depths of the human condition. He takes our ordinary, daily assumptions and turns them on the reader to frightening effect.

Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction is a collection of M.A.C. Farrant’s work dating from 1985 to 2009. Satiric and philosophical in approach, indelibly marked by wit, humor, irony, playfulness, a blend of parody and science fiction, irreverent analysis and comic existentialism, these stories celebrate the literary imagination as an antidote to the stranglehold the popular media now has on the public’s imagination.

In her critically acclaimed debut story collection, Elisa Albert boldly illuminates an original cross section of disaffected young Jews. With wit, compassion, and a decidedly iconoclastic 21st-century attitude, in prose that is by turns hilarious and harrowing, Albert has created characters searching for acceptance, a happier view of the past, and above all the possibility of a future.

In 1943, a young soldier named James Jones returned from the Pacific, lightly wounded and psychologically tormented by the horrors of Guadalcanal. When he was well enough to leave the hospital, he went AWOL rather than return to service, and began work on a novel of the World War II experience. Jones’s AWOL period was brief, but he returned to the novel at war’s end, bringing him to the attention of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe.

Here is a collection of darkly humorous short stories previously published in magazines such as Adbusters and Apex Digest of Science Fiction and Horror.

Jill McCorkle's new collection of 12 short stories is peopled with characters brilliantly like us - flawed, clueless, endearing. These stories are also "animaled" with all manner of mammal, bird, fish, reptile - also flawed and endearing. She asks, what don't humans share with the so-called lesser species? Looking for the answer, she takes us back to her fictional home town of Fulton, North Carolina, to meet a broad range of characters facing up to the double-edged sword life offers hominids.

"My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up" follows the narrator on a dizzying ride through past and present, from a group home for troubled adolescents in Chicago where he loses his virginity to shooting galleries and homeless encampments in San Francisco where he searches for deeper and darker thrills. In "Other Desires", a flood of unsettling memories backgrounds the narrator's involvement with a loose-knit family of lost souls. "Tears" explores the disturbing complexities of an S&M Internet hook-up.

Alison Tyler is a pioneer of a kind of erotica that's at once arousing and sophisticated, playful and explicit. A prolific author and editor in the field, with 15 novels, 20 anthologies, and more than 400 short stories to her credit, Tyler here assembles her very best short fiction. In Exposed, she spotlights women exploring their most vulnerable erotic moods and moments, often filigreed with humor and a BDSM slant. These stories cover the span of her career, from her first published effort ("Untouched") to her latest ("Well-Trained").