Showing results by publisher "Wordwooze Publishing" in Short Stories

Blood ties. The family we’ve been given, the friends we make, the loves we keep, and those we lost. The 26 stories in Family and Other Ailments teeter on the brink, hover at the periphery, or even the possibility, of crime. Under a soft light and at an angle, they're all love stories. The collection opens with “Spy Head”, a tale of friendship after a crushing trauma. In “Texas Two-Step”, brotherhood leads to a wicked double-cross. “Razorbills” shows a young woman seeking freedom from the prison-like caring of her sibling.

In the Forests of the Night is a darkly sensual collection of erotic fairy tales, blending the magic and fantasy of traditional fables with carnality and lust!

From the Margins tracks the lives of people on the edge of society who find the strength to bind together and break free. These stories provide a bird's eye view of the inner lives of prostitutes, crazies, alcoholics, and oddballs, probe their humanity, and celebrate the redemption they find in each other and their own souls.

Spring Fever & Other Lesbian Encounters is a collection of stories about women-loving women getting acquainted, falling in love, losing their illusions, and regaining hope for the future.

These historical fiction stories take the listener on a journey into the most tragic time in our history—the Civil War. Arranged along a rough timeline of the period, they cover a broad area of mood and events and range from a young man’s escape from an outlaw gang in Missouri to join a North Carolina regiment back home, to the discovery of Lee’s lost orders by a Union sergeant, to a boy too curious about war, to a young woman who has dressed like a man to join her brother in the war, to enemies who become friends over a fishing hole.

Theodore Jerome Cohen's first serious attempt to write a short story for publication was in 1962 while he was working in Antarctica. The story he penned--about a man killed by a pod of orcas--was lost during his return to the United States. It wasn't until 2009, when he resurrected the tale and incorporated it in his post-modern novel, Frozen in Time: Murder at the Bottom of the World, that the horror of the episode, which was based on a real encounter by three Chilean Army enlisted men with a pod of orcas, appeared in print. Time did not dim the horror of what happened at sea that day.

In this collection of short stories the listener encounters ordinary people struggling with a variety of extraordinary problems that threaten to change their lives: an elderly widower confronting a life of regrets, precocious children threatened with separation, a middle-aged couple facing the loss of their generations-old general store, and many others. Listen to Town and Country and meet the people of the Mid-Ohio Valley—people you may very well recognize from your own hometown.

What if you had a chance to reconnect with a lost love (“Dusty’s Dilemma”), or you decided to give a homeless father and daughter a hot meal and a place to stay, only to have your life change beyond anything you could imagine? (“Love, Alice”)

Presenting ten tales with elements of mystery, horror, whimsy, fantasy, touches of romance, and some technology run amuck. From the story of a young newlywed couple targeted by a ghost in their chimney, a club of six where one member goes beyond just discussing how to commit a simple murder in a complicated way, a pair of virtual reality goggles that give the wearer a rather deadly experience, a privately owned library where you aren’t just fined when a book is overdue, to a mystery man who leads a young woman into a dangerous situation, each story stretches reality beyond the norm.

It’s their stories he wants to share with you in this book. Here, you’ll find unusual stories about a violinist and his wife who escaped the death camp at Treblinka, about a man who, because of his impatience, interrupted a meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill, and De Gaulle, and about a young woman’s descent into the darkness of schizophrenia—stories vividly brought to life in this, the second collection of short stories by Theodore Jerome Cohen.