Showing titles in Short Stories

Elias B. Hopkins, aka "The Parson", is a new reverend at Jackman's Gulch, a small miner village in Australia. In the local bar, swearing and blasphemies are not uncommon. That's why he decides to recite the Bible aloud for each bad word he hears. So much that he who swears is now frowned upon by his peers for breaking the atmosphere.

The narrator of the story is passionate about writing. He decides to take a few weeks to write a masterpiece, but inspiration does not come. One evening after supper, he falls asleep and dreams that the greatest writers of the last few centuries are invited to his table to create a story: William Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Lawrence Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, William M. Thackeray, James Payn, Walter Besant, a lady known as "Ouida", Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Captain Marryat.

Recently unemployed, John Huxford accepts an offer to work at Sheridan & Moore, Montreal in Quebec. He agrees with his fiancée that he will first travel alone to prepare everything for a few weeks before she can join him. Unfortunately, weeks, months pass and she gets no news from John. Sheridan & Moore even say they never saw him in Montreal. Many years pass, and it seems that he has died somewhere or started a new life.

Mr. John Vansittart Smith is a student of Egyptology who travels to France to see some papyri in the Louvre Museum. Tired from his visit, he sits in a corner of the museum and dozes. When he wakes up, the museum is closed and he is locked inside...

Petra Delicado nunca ha sido una policía al uso. Feminista, mordaz e implacable, enfrenta cada caso con la intuición como arma y el humor como escudo. Junto con su inseparable Fermín Garzón, un subinspector tan leal como cascarrabias, se adentra en investigaciones donde lo grotesco y lo trágico se dan la mano.

Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth, Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories is a collection of acclaimed and awarded work from Amal El-Mohtar. With confidence and style, El-Mohtar guides us through exquisitely told and sharply observed tales about life as it is, was, and could be. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose.

Roald Dahl turns his pen to anything, twisting everyday life into powerful, and sometimes terrifying fantasies. Seven superb stories, full of Roald Dahl's usual magic, mystery and suspense: meet the boy who can talk to animals, the man who can see with his eyes closed, and find out about the treasure, buried deep underground on Thistley Green.

In these stories an excellent host finds himself turned out of home by his own guests; a woman spends her wedding day frantically searching for her husband-to-be; and in Shirley Jackson's best-known story, a small farming village comes together for a terrible annual ritual. The creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost is chillingly captured in these tales of wasted potential and casual cruelty by a master of the short story.

E rima tekau tau ki muri, ka puta mai a ‘Pounamu Pounamu’ hei kai mā te ao pānui reo Pākehā. Ko te whakataunga a ngā mana mātauranga o Aotearoa o taua wā, he pukapuka tēnei mā ngā tamariki i ngā kura o te motu whānui. Ka pēhea te kawe i te wairua o tēnei kohinga kōrero e rangiwhāwhā nei te pānuitia, kia rangona tonutia ai te kounga o te kupu Pākehā? Me kawe tonu i te pukuhohe o He Kēmu Kāri, i te ngau mamae o Tangi, i te hōhonu o te aroha o Te Tamaiti. Kua whakautua taua karanga e ngā kaiwhakawhiti reo Māori tekau mā tahi i noho rā hei pia i Te Panekiretanga o te Reo me ngā Kura Reo.

A captivating collection of six stories from Australia's master storyteller Judy Nunn. The Long Weekend, The Wardrobe, The Otto Bin Empire: Clive's Story, Changes, The House on Hill Street and Just South of Rome.

In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

Global phenomenon and Sunday Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman returns to dazzle, captivate, haunt, and entertain with this third collection of short fiction, following Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things, which includes a never-before published American Gods story, "Black Dog". In this new volume, Neil Gaiman pierces the veil of reality to reveal the enigmatic, shadowy world that lies beneath.

Adrift in outer space, a motley crew of human-made objects tell their tales, making real history sweeter and stranger. Starman, a lovelorn mannequin orbiting the Sun in his cherry-red car, pines for his creator. The first sculpture ever taken to the Moon is possessed by the spirit of Neil Armstrong. The International Space Station, awaiting deorbit and burial in a spacecraft cemetery beneath the ocean, farewells its last astronauts. A team of tamponauts sets off on a perilous mission to Mars inspired by the courage of their predecessors.

My Man Jeeves, first published in 1919, introduced the world to affable, indolent Bertie Wooster and his precise, capable valet, Jeeves. Some of the finest examples of humorous writing found in English literature are woven around the relationship between these two men of very different classes and temperaments. Where Bertie is impetuous and feeble, Jeeves is coolheaded and poised.

Reuben thought he’d spend the rest of his life with Beth, until she broke his heart six months ago. He’s not even remotely over her, so he’s devastated to hear she’s getting married—this weekend. Now he’s faced with the ultimate question: what should he do on the day of the wedding? Grieve? Disrupt the ceremony? Or do everything in his power to pretend it’s not happening? Enlisting the help of his friends, Reuben is all set to mark the occasion with distraction on a grand scale: Ferraris, champagne, and a VIP box at the races.

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter, sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Writers' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months", and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of "real life" that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them.

The correspondence between Carrie Allsop and David Mayer reveals, piece by piece, the painful details of a devastating affair between their spouses. With each commiserating scratch of the pen, they confess their fears and bare their souls. They share the bewilderment over how things went so wrong and come to wonder where to go from here. Told entirely through the letters of two comforting strangers and those of two illicit lovers, Evidence of the Affair explores the complex nature of the heart. And ultimately, for one woman, how liberating it can be when it’s broken.

In Matheson's vampire classic I Am Legend, a plague has decimated the world and transformed the unfortunate survivors into bloodthirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth. Every other man, woman, and child has become a vampire hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive in a world of vampires?

One of the world's great storytellers conjures a captivating new book. In this first full collection since Not the End of the World, we meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; and a man whose luck changes when a horse speaks to him. Witty and wise, with subtle connections between the stories, Normal Rules Don't Apply is a startling , and funny feast for the imagination. In Kate Atkinson's world nothing is over until 'the talking dog speaks'.

Emery Thompson hates Calvin Chamberlain. From the way he acts like he’s better than everyone to the way he moves through the world thinking his podcast is the cream of the crop, every little thing about the man gets to him. Even that dashing, oh-so-confident smile. He’d rather be caught dead than be around the man any longer than necessary—or admit that last part out loud.