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Sweet Home
Par Carys Bray. 2012
They say there's no place like home. It's where the heart is...Meet the little boy who believes in miracles.Meet the…
mother who loves to bring babies home from the newborn aisle of her supermarket.Meet the husband who carves a longed-for baby out of ice as a gift for his wife.Meet the widow who is reminded of romance whilst pegging out the washing.Awarded the Scott Prize for short story writing, Sweet Home weaves together moments of joy, heartache, sadness and unwavering love as told through seventeen very different notions of home.Fans of Rosamunde Pilcher, Maeve Binchy and Erica James will love this collection of stories to suit the reader's every…
mood - tender, funny, romantic, ironic, bitter-sweet, nostalgic - multi-million copy seller Elvi Rhodes has captured them all. Perfect to settle down with...READERS ARE LOVING SUMMER PROMISE AND OTHER STORIES!'A very easy and enjoyable read' -- ***** Reader review'Excellent' -- ***** Reader review'Wonderful' -- ***** Reader review**************************************************************These enchanting stories are guaranteed by turn to entertain, soothe, intrigue and touch you...The couple in Summer Promise are, at first glance, placed in an appalling situation, but nevertheless in the warmth of southern France, their relationship develops in an unexpected way.Be Your Age, Dear is a delightful tale of a generation gap which, in one family, seems non-existent - or has it gone into reverse?The Meeting describes the ten-yearly reunion of a group of friends which, for obvious reasons, dwindles each time. The two members most closely involved come to a decision that was, perhaps, inevitable.Model of Beauty is set in a painting class, where the temporary illness of the generously endowed model brings about surprising consequences.Summer Promise and Other Stories is a wonderful collection - the perfect dose of escapism and tonic to settle down with...The Three Button Trick and Other Stories
Par Nicola Barker. 2018
Nicola Barker weaves humor and tragedy through this fresh and original collection, as her characters struggle to find love, independence,…
and fulfillment in this new addition to the Ecco Art of the Story seriesNicola Barker's collection of her nineteen most brilliant stories exemplifies her ability to create daring, witty, and dynamic characters, all their idiosyncracies intact. Barker's stories often use wordplay and humor to stretch the boundaries of metaphor and reality as the outrageously original plots unfold. Through her confident and clever style, these short stories sling Barker to the forefront of fiction writing, as she is reminiscent of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Margaret Atwood.The collection begins with a smart tale of a teenage girl whose obsession with the size of her nose dangerously compromises her relationships with her friends and her family. "Inside Information" is a pun of a title, describing how the protagonist's unborn fetus is the only one able to reform his mother's compulsive shoplifting by pulling the ultimate prank. "G-String" and "Symbiosis: Class Cestoda" detail women who gain self-esteem, albeit through quirky methods, despite the cowardly men who try to suppress them. The title story, "Three Button Trick," is about a man who deliberately buttons his duffel coat incorrectly to attract sympathetic females. Carrie falls for this trick, and it takes twenty-one years, a curious friend, and an eighty-three-year-old widower for her to realize her mistake. Wesley is the protagonist of a three-part collection, "Blisters," "Braces," and "Mr. Lippy" who, traumatized by two unfortunate incidents as a young boy, is an eccentric obsessed with freedom and the sea.Barker skillfully intertwines humor with despair to stimulate any reader's interest; she taps into the psyches of her characters to create an authentic, original, and highly enjoyable read. The Three Button Trick and Other Stories is a resonant, audacious volume from a writer of immense talent and originality.Wifeshopping: Stories
Par Steven Wingate. 2008
Wifeshopping centers on the ultimate human quest: the search for companionship, love, and understanding. These captivating stories feature American men,…
love-starved and striving, who try and often fail to connect with the women they imagine could be their wives. Some of the women are fiancées, some are new girlfriends, some are strangers who cross the men’s paths for only a few hours or moments. In “Beaching It,” an artist traveling on the summer circuit begins an affair with a rich, married local. In “Me and Paul,” a lonely traveler adopts an alter ego to help him impress a single mother. In “Bill,” a trip to a flea market highlights the essential differences between a man and his fiancée. Throughout this thoroughly entertaining read, Wingate’s sympathetic characterizations reveal both the hopefulness and the heartache behind our earnest but sometimes misguided attempts at intimacy.The Record Set Right: A Short Story from Fall of Poppies
Par Lauren Willig. 2015
In a short story from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Willig, a woman discovers it’s never too late to…
make things rightShe's the widow of the Aviator in the Iron Mask-- a British World War I hero whose exploits both on the field and off of it made the papers on two continents. But was their Armistice Day engagement really the romantic fantasy it seemed? A lifetime later, Camilla Frobisher is forced to retrace the steps of her past-- all the way back to November 11, 1918, the day her life changed forever.Suicide's Girlfriend: A Novella and Short Stories
Par Elizabeth Evans. 2002
Elizabeth Evans traces the complex and often painful threads of human relationships in Suicide's Girlfriend, her most inspired work to…
date. In these richly textured stories, you'll meet:Oyekan, a confused young Nigerian student who wrestles with feelings his U.S. friends cannot understand.Marie, an adolescent who makes a carefully philosophized, end-of-the-rope stab at salvation for herself and her seven abused siblings.Jenny and Heather, two girls whose friendship has suffered from the distractions of adolescence and the cruelty of one moving on while the other must sit idly by and watch.A group of college boys, whose discovery of a dead body on the side of the road leaves one of them changed in ways he never thought possible.Elegant, acute, and engaging, Suicide's Girlfriend will introduce you to these characters and more, their stories, and an incredible new voice in fiction.Friendly Fire: Stories
Par Alaa Al Aswany. 2009
Friendly Fire, the first collection of short stories from Alaa Al Aswany, acclaimed author of Chicago and The Yacoubian Building,…
deftly explores the lives of contemporary Egyptians. Here are stories of generational conflict, corruption, repression, infidelity, and the dangerous clashing of western and Arab ideals, all beautifully rendered by Al Aswany, a true modern master and one of Egypt’s “most exciting literary exports” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).The Progress of Love (Vintage International Ser.)
Par Alice Munro. 1986
With the ease and mastery that have won extraordinary acclaim for her writing, these eleven stories by Alice Munro explore…
the most intimate and transforming moments of experience—moments when the shape of life is set, moments of realization about the burden, the power, and the nature of love. A divorced woman returns to her childhood home where she confronts the memory of her parents&’ confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes the fragility of the trust between children and parents. A young man, remembering a terrifying childhood incident, wrestles with the responsibility he has always felt for his younger brother.In these and other stories Alice Munro proves once again a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of our times. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, she reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.Fat Time and Other Stories
Par Jeffery Renard Allen. 2023
* LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION *A ferocious, innovative story collection about Black lives…
in the past, present, and future“A potentially transformative exhibition of visionary storytelling.”—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred*In Fat Time and Other Stories, Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along with them are characters of Allen’s invention: two teenagers in an unnamed big city who stumble through a down-low relationship; an African preachervisits a Christian religious retreat to speak on the evils of fornication in an Italian villa importedto America by Abraham Lincoln; and an albino revolutionary who struggles with leading his people into conflict.The two strands in this brilliant story collection—speculative history and tender, painful depictions of Black life in urban America—are joined by African notions of circular time in which past, present, and future exist all at once. Here the natural and supernatural, the sacred and the profane, the real and fantastical, destruction and creation are held in delicate and tense balance. Allen’s work has been said to extend the tradition of Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Henry Roth, and Ishmael Reed, but he is blazing his own path through American literature. Fat Time and Other Stories brilliantly shows the range and depth of his imagination.Forever, Finally: A Heartfelt Romance Novel (Logan's Legacy #3)
Par Susan Mallery. 2004
Let yourself be swept away by this emotional friends-to-lovers romance from #1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Mallery! Previously…
published as Lily&’s Expecting in 2004.Any woman who&’s been left at the altar has the right to go a little crazy. Pediatric nurse Lily Tyler handles her public humiliation by getting pregnant and buying a house. At 34, she&’s done waiting for Mr. Right to start the family she&’s always wanted.When her new house turns out to be a money pit, she moves in with her best friend, Jake Stone, and begins to see the gorgeous firefighter in a new light. Is it pregnancy hormones, or has she found forever, finally, in his arms?Death by a Thousand Cuts: Stories
Par Shashi Bhat. 2024
From the Governor General&’s Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth comes a breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday…
trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman.What would have happened if she&’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away. A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man&’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend&’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers. With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman&’s relationships with others and with herself.Five Hundred Poor
Par Noah Milligan. 2018
"An honest glimpse at how the other half lives and how the other half dies that should inspire us to…
try harder."—Jared Yates Sexton, author of The People Are Going To Rise Like The Waters Upon Your ShoreFrom acclaimed author, Noah Milligan, comes a short story collection, Five Hundred Poor. The title comes from Adam Smith&’s The Wealth of Nations, &“Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.&”These are ten stories of those five hundred poor, the jaded, the disillusioned, and the disenfranchised."Noah Milligan writes about Oklahoma in such an uncanny, dark, compelling way."—Brandon Hobson, author of Where The Dead Sit TalkingNoah Milligan's other books:An Elegant TheoryInto Captivity They Will Go.No Call Too Small
Par Oscar Martens. 2020
&“Martens&’ work would be impressive in any era, but it is particularly timely today. It is wonderful to come upon…
an author who faces into the horrific absurdities of modern life without flinching, a stylist who delivers his most powerful satiric points with laser sharp accuracy and lyrically beautiful language."—Vancouver Sun&“Haunting, darkly funny situations, captured in crisp, spare prose, will appeal to fans of George Saunders.&”—Publishers WeeklyBy the end of the day, a cop must choose between ethics and social death. A camp counsellor, stuck deep in the woods with a small group of boys, only has a few hours before the DTs kick in. Adult children scramble to get the best of what remains of their mother's estate, but funeral plans may be premature. Sandwiched between a depressed mother and a careless father, a young girl must help attract customers to the family business, no matter the cost.The stories in No Call Too Small represent micro-scale disaster tourism on a winding road that is long and dark. Driving too fast, weaving between flaming wrecks, and drifting through cliff-side curves, there's little choice but to hang on and meet whatever's over the rise head on.&“Marten&’s strong prose is a pleasure to read, with dark humour and lively storytelling that brings a quirky humanity to his characters.&”—Janie Chang, Globe and Mail bestselling author of Dragon Springs Road&“A beautifully crafted collection.&”—Marcia Butler, author of Pickle&’s ProgressBreak It Down: Stories (Fsg Classics Ser.)
Par Lydia Davis. 1986
The thirty-four stories in this seminal collection powerfully display what have become Lydia Davis's trademarks—dexterity, brevity, understatement, and surprise. Although…
the certainty of her prose suggests a world of almost clinical reason and clarity, her characters show us that life, thought, and language are full of disorder. Break It Down is Davis at her best. In the words of Jonathan Franzen, she is "a magician of self-consciousness."Cool for America: Stories
Par Andrew Martin. 2020
Expanding the world of his classic-in-the-making debut novel Early Work, Andrew Martin’s Cool for America is a hilarious collection of…
overlapping stories that explores the dark zone between artistic ambition and its achievementThe collection is bookended by the misadventures of Leslie, a young woman (first introduced in Early Work) who moves from New York to Missoula, Montana to try to draw herself out of a lingering depression, and, over the course of the book, gains painful insight into herself through a series of intense friendships and relationships.Other stories follow young men and women, alone and in couples, pushing hard against, and often crashing into, the limits of their abilities as writers and partners. In one story, two New Jersey siblings with substance-abuse problems relapse together on Christmas Eve; in another, a young couple tries to make sense of an increasingly unhinged veterinarian who seems to be tapping, deliberately or otherwise, into the unspoken troubles between them. In tales about characters as they age from punk shows and benders to book clubs and art museums, the promise of community acts—at least temporarily—as a stay against despair.Running throughout Cool for America is the characters’ yearning for transcendence through art: the hope that, maybe, the perfect, or even just the good-enough sentence, can finally make things right.Bad Characters: Stories
Par Jean Stafford. 1964
This book displays at their height the wit, sensibility and psychological penetration that distinguish Miss Stafford's work. There are nine…
stories and a novella. They range in mood from the title story, a comic portrait of a resourceful child-criminal named Lottie Jump, to "The End of a Career," an elegiac and ironic tale of the declining years of a great beauty. In "A Reasonable Facsimile" Dr. Bohrmann, a retired professor philosophy, is unexpectedly rescued from an aggressively boring young house guest. "Cops and Robbers" is a chilling story of childhood horror and lovelessness that revolves around a father's trip to the barber with his five-year-old daughter.Several of the stories have as their common setting Miss Stafford's fiction town of Adams, Colorado—including an amusing saga of a girl's frustrated attempts to find a quiet spot to read ("A Reading Problem"), and two stories of failure ("In the Zoo") and success ("The Liberation") in the effort to escape from one's family. "Caveat Emptor" is a satire on the academic life and sub-life at the Alma Hettrick College for Girls; and in "The Captain's Gift" the sheltered and lavender-scented existence of old Mrs. Ramsey is violated by the reality of war.The major piece in Bad Characters is "A Winter's Tale," a haunting and evocative novella set in Heidelberg just before the outbreak of the war. It is dominated by the diabolic character of Frau Professor Persis Galt. This portrait of a former Bostonian who poses as an excessively devout convert is one of Miss Stafford's most brilliant fictional creations.This collection by Jean Stafford will be warmly welcomed by the many and devoted admirers of her novels and stories. To new readers the work of one of the best writers of our time will come as a joyful discovery.Get Down: Stories
Par Asali Solomon. 2006
Asali Solomon's characters are vivid misfits—a heathen at Jesus camp, a scheming prep-school student, a middle-aged mom pining for her…
salsa-dancing salad days, a scheming twentysomething virgin, a college stud in love with his weight-lifting partner, a lonely girl in love with a yellow dress. The kids in Get Down are trapped between their own good breeding and their burning desire to join the house party of sex, romance, and bad behavior that seems to be happening on some other block, down some other more dangerous street. The adults in Get Down are just trying to hold it together.Here is a debut that will make you laugh and cringe in equal measure. Set mostly in middle-class black Philadelphia during the crack and Reagan years, the stories in Get Down are antic, poignant, and utterly universal—they'll bring back memories for anyone who has ever stood in the corner of a darkened school gym wondering whether to dance . . . or duck for cover. They announce a sparkling new talent, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop whose work has been featured in Vibe, Essence, and the anthology Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts.Orientation and Other Stories: And Other Stories
Par Daniel Orozco. 2011
Breakfast's boiled egg, the overhead hum of fluorescent lights, the midmorning coffee break—daily routines keep the world running. But when…
people are pushed—by a coworker's taunt, a face-to-face encounter with a woman in free fall from a bridge—cracks appear, revealing alienation, casual cruelty, madness, and above all a simultaneous hunger for and fear of the unknown. Daniel Orozco leads the reader through the hidden lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. He reveals the secret pleasures of late-night supermarket trips for cookie binges, exceptional data entry, and an exiled dictator's occasional piss on the U.S. embassy. A love affair blooms between two officers in the impartially worded pages of a police blotter; a new employee's first-day office tour includes descriptions of other workers' most private thoughts and actions; during an earthquake, the consciousness of the entire state of California shakes free for examination. Orientation introduces a writer at the height of his powers, whose work surely invites us to reassess the landscape of American fiction.Orientation is a Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 Short Story Collections title.You Are Having a Good Time: Stories
Par Amie Barrodale. 2016
Ema was in a bad situation with a married man. She was visiting him in Washington, D.C. His wife was…
out of town. He had gotten them an outrageously expensive hotel room, out of respect for his wife and their home. Ema took that as a sign of his decency, and as a sign of her doom.So begins "The Real Sloane Newman," one of the stories in Amie Barrodale's debut collection, You Are Having a Good Time. In these highly compressed and charged tales, the veneer of normality is stripped from her characters' lives to reveal the seething and contradictory desires that fuel them. In "Animals," an up-and-coming starlet harbors a complicated attraction toward her abusive director. In "Frank Advice for Fat Women," an ethically compromised psychiatrist is drawn into the middle of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. And in "The Imp," a supernatural possession ruins a man's relationship with his pregnant wife.Barrodale's protagonists drink too much, say the wrong things, want the wrong people. They're hounded by longings (and sometimes ghosts) to the point where they are forced to confront the illusions they cling to. They're brought to life in stories that don't behave as you expect stories to behave. Barrodale's startlingly funny and original fictions get under your skin and make you reconsider the fragile compromises that underpin our daily lives.Louisa Meets Bear: Stories
Par Lisa Gornick. 2015
When Louisa and Bear meet at Princeton in 1975, sparks fly. Louisa is the sexually adventurous daughter of a geneticist,…
Bear the volatile son of a plumber. They dive headfirst into a passionate affair that will alter the course of their lives, changing how they define themselves in the years and relationships that follow. Lisa Gornick's Louisa Meets Bear is a gripping novel in interconnected stories from an author whose work "starts off like a brush fire and then engulfs and burns with fury" (The Huffington Post).Reading Louisa Meets Bear is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, as we uncover the subtle and startling connections between new characters and the star-crossed lovers. We meet a daughter who stabs her mother when she learns the truth about her father, a wife who sees herself clearly after finding a man dead on her office floor, a mother who discovers a girl in her teenage son's bed. Each character is striking, each rendered with Gornick's trademark sympathy and psychological acuity. We follow them over the course of a half century, from San Francisco to New York City and from Guatemala to Venice, through pregnancies, tragedies, and revelations, until we return to Louisa and Bear.With flawed and deeply human characters, and piercing insight into the lives of women, Louisa Meets Bear grapples with whether we can--or can't--choose how and whom we love.