Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Short Stories

Gilbert saw Mary Ann first, but the second time he sees her she is dancing with his best friend, Rafe. The three of them begin hanging out all the time, driving around in the car Rafe got as a present for getting into Yale. But when Rafe goes out of town, Gilbert and Mary Ann keep the tradition going, seeing movies and going on drives...in Rafe's car no less.

Containing forty-one stories and extensive author's notes, Collected Stories is the definitive compilation of Lewis Shiner's short work.

John T. Unger is a young southerner who goes to Montana for summer vacation with a wealthy college classmate. But the classmate's family proves to be much more than simply wealthy - they own a mountain made entirely of one solid diamond. And they've gone to dreadful lengths to conceal their secret, which means that John could be in danger.

When Gerald Loomis loses his wife, friends and neighbors try to rally him with food and suggestions for pets to keep him company. But Gerald has already picked a pet, a Burmese Python he's named Siddhartha. During a cold snap, Gerald ventures out to the pet store to pick up a rat to feed Siddhartha but finds he can't follow through with letting the rat die.

Lonnie is tired. He's tired of his job, the monotony of it, and tired of the predictability ofhis home life now that he's a father. It's a day like every other day, and hecan't face the inevitability of it all. So he lies. It's a small lie, but heknows small lies become big ones. He knows it as soon as he says his daughteris in the hospital. But he can't stop himself, and he can't stop the lie fromtaking on a life of its own.

One of F. Scott Fitzgerald's earliest short stories, "The Ice Palace" is about Sally Carrol Happer, a young Southern woman who is bored with her conventional life. She's engaged to Harry Bellamy, a young man from the North. Despite concern from her family and friends, Sally travels to Harry's hometown to meet his family. Hoping for an exciting adventure, she instead finds herself in a cold, unfamiliar place. There, in the dead of winter, she begins to question everything.

Kate Chopin is a widely considered a forerunner to the feminist authors of the twentieth century. Focusing on themes of race andgender, her short stories largely center on life in rural Louisiana. In "A Pair of Silk Stockings," a young woman unexpected finds herself with fifteen dollars.Inspired by her newfound wealth, she ignores her natural impulses and indulgesin a day of luxurious abandon. A wistful rumination on loss and the illusion ofcontrol, "A Pair of Silk Stockings" is Chopin at her absolute best.

A lesson on the power of vanity, "The Necklace" tells the story of Madame Mathilde Loisel and her husband. Mathilde always imagined herself as a socialite with beautiful gowns and wonderful jewels. Her husband, however, is a lowly clerk and the two have little money. Desperate to attend an important party, she borrows a friend's diamond necklace to match the dress her husband bought for her. But when Mathilde loses the expensive jewels, she nearly destroys her life in an effort to pay back the debt.

Sherwood Anderson's most enduring work, Winesburg, Ohio, is considered one of earliest works of modernistliterature. The sequence of short stories centers on the life of George Willardand those who live in the rural, pre-industrial town. "Adventure," a shortstory within the novel, tells the tale of Alice Hindman, a twenty-somethinggirl, and her continued devotion to her former lover Ned Currie, who left her toseek his fortune in Chicago.

This collection brings together 17 of Kipling's early stories, written between 1885 and 1888, when Kipling was working as a journalist in India. "The Man Who Would Be King" is the story of two British vagabonds who set off to establish a small kingdom among primitive tribesmen in Afghanistan. Only one of the men returns, and his condition is so bad that the newspaperman-narrator barely recognizes him.

Termed the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the southwestern Indians and the first protest novel of California, Ramona is the story of 3 cultures - Indian, Mexican, and Anglo - locked in combat. The upheaval and injustice are humanized through the romance of a beautiful half-Indian orphan who grow up as the ward of Señora Moreno in privileged surroundings, then falls in love with an Indian and joins him in a life of poverty and tragedy. The Ramona Pageant in Hemet, California, based on this romance, has played each year since 1923, reenacting the transition period between Mexican traditions and the new U.S. and state governments.

Award-winning author Pat Murphy takes us aboard a luxury cruise ship and into the strange confluence of time and space known as the Bermuda Triangle, in an engaging science-fiction romp that recalls the work of Kate Wilhelm.

First published in 1920, Flappers and Philosophers marked F. Scott Fitzgerald's entry into the realm of the short story, in which he adroitly proved himself "a master of the mechanism of short story technique" ( Boston Transcript).

In the setting of what is present-day Kazakhstan, Tolstoy examines two psychological problems. The first dilemma is that of a young man who desires both fulfilling love and a place as a respected member of society. The other is the difficulty of a primitive society to accept domination by a higher culture that has no understanding of the traditions it asks its colonists to cast aside.

Twenty years ago Martin Limón published his first mystery featuring Sergeant George Sueño, a young Mexican American army detective stationed on the US Eighth Army base in South Korea in the early 1970s, the heart of the Cold War. George and his investigating partner, the rowdy and short-fused Sergeant Ernie Bascom, are assigned cases in which the Eighth Army has come into conflict with local Korean law enforcement - often incidents in which American soldiers, who are not known for being on their best behavior in their Asian host country, have committed a crime.

Featuring 20 unabridged selections from the charitable anthology 100 Stories for Haiti, this special audio download will benefit the Red Cross, with all proceeds being donated to help those in need following the destruction and devastation caused by the recent earthquakes in Haiti.

This terse and startling novel is the story of a struggle for possession and of its devastating consequences. Three women seek to secure the affections of one man, while he, in turn, tries to satisfy them all. But in the middle of this contest of wills stands his unwitting and vulnerable young daughter. The conclusion of The Other House makes it one of the most disturbing and memorable of Henry James' depictions of the uncontrollable passions that lie beneath the polished veneer of civilized life.

Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of stories set in a fictitious town in the 1890s, has long been considered Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece. Haunting and powerful, it draws readers into the streets and houses of Winesburg - and into the darkly complex lives of each of Anderson's unforgettable "grotesques."

Through 23 connected short stories, the author looks into the lives of the inhabitants of a small town in the American heartland. In a simple and intense style, these psychological portraits of the sensitive and imaginative of Winesburg's population are seen through the eyes of a young reporter-narrator, George Willard. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon.

Since 1944, when she published her first story, Elizabeth Spencer has been acclaimed as a writer of short fiction in the great tradition of Welty, Chopin, and Mansfield. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, her first collection in almost fifteen years, again makes available the author's most masterful stories and novellas, including "The Light in the Piazza" and publishes more than ten new stories for the first time.