Short Stories

A masterful collection of stories that showcases one of the country's most beloved and acclaimed writers--award-winning author, Walter Mosley.

Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley's most accomplished short stories to showcase the full range of his remarkable talent.

Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories--heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved, and, on the whole, odd. He overturns the stereotypes that corral black male characters and paints a subtle, powerful portrait of each of these unique individuals. In "The Good News Is," a man's insecurity about his weight gives way to a serious illness and the intense loneliness that accompanies it. Deeply vulnerable, he allows himself to be taken advantage of in return for a little human comfort in a raw display of true need. "Pet Fly," previously published in the New Yorker, follows a man working as a mailroom clerk for a big company--a solitary job for which he is overqualified--and the unforeseen repercussions he endures when he attempts to forge a connection beyond the one he has with the fly buzzing around his apartment. And "Almost Alyce" chronicles failed loves, family loss, alcoholism, and a Zen approach to the art of begging that proves surprisingly effective.

Touching and contemplative, each of these unexpected stories offers the best of one of our most gifted writers.

"Ruiz Zafón's visionary storytelling prowess is a genre unto itself."--USA Today

Return to the mythical Barcelona library known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in this posthumous collection of stories from the New York Times bestselling author of The Shadow of the Wind and The Labyrinth of the Spirits.

Bestselling author Carlos Ruiz Zafón conceived of this collection of stories as an appreciation to the countless readers who joined him on the extraordinary journey that began with The Shadow of the Wind. Comprising eleven stories, most of them never before published in English, The City of Mist offers the reader compelling characters, unique situations, and a gothic atmosphere reminiscent of his beloved Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.

The stories are mysterious, imbued with a sense of menace, and told with the warmth, wit, and humor of Zafón's inimitable voice. A boy decides to become a writer when he discovers that his creative gifts capture the attentions of an aloof young beauty who has stolen his heart. A labyrinth maker flees Constantinople to a plague-ridden Barcelona, with plans for building a library impervious to the destruction of time. A strange gentleman tempts Cervantes to write a book like no other, each page of which could prolong the life of the woman he loves. And a brilliant Catalan architect named Antoni Gaudí reluctantly agrees to cross the ocean to New York, a voyage that will determine the fate of an unfinished masterpiece.

Imaginative and beguiling, these and other stories in The City of Mist summon up the mesmerizing magic of their brilliant creator and invite us to come dream along with him.

A beautiful hardcover edition of the collected stories of one of America's most revered and admired authors.

BBC Culture's Best Books of the Year
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, Best Short Fiction

Collected here for the first time in one volume are forty stories by Lorrie Moore--originally published in the acclaimed collections Self-Help, Like Life, Birds of America, and Bark and including three additional stories excerpted from her novels.

Moore is one of America's most revered writers, and this career-spanning collection showcases her exceptional talent for leavening tragedy with humor, for blending sorrow with subversive wit. Her keenly observed stories are peopled by a variety of lost souls--husbands, wives, lovers, tourists, professors, students, even a ghost--who are often grappling with pain or disappointment: a divorced man obsessed with self-help books, a washed-up Hollywood actress living in a hotel, a woman with a terminal illness.

But however lovelorn or dislocated the characters--from the wisecracking wedding guest in "Thank You for Having Me" to the self-deluded musicians in "Wings" to the complicated parent-child pairs in "How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)" and "The Kid's Guide to Divorce"--their stories are always grounded in insight and compassion. Moore's portraits of the parents of a seriously ill child in "People Like That Are the Only People Here" and of a woman haunted by guilt over the death of her friend's baby in "Terrific Mother" achieve a notably unsentimental and yet quietly devastating power.

Whether moving or darkly funny, all of these pieces channel the messiness of the human condition through Moore's characteristically knowing, wry voice, and together they confirm her as a master of the short story.

Casey Plett's 2018 novel Little Fish won a Lambda Literary Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award (Canada). Her latest work, A Dream of a Woman, is her first book of short stories since her seminal 2014 collection A Safe Girl to Love. Centering transgender women seeking stable, adult lives, A Dream of a Woman finds quiet truths in prairie high-rises and New York warehouses, and in freezing Canadian winters and drizzly Oregon days.

In "Hazel and Christopher," two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. In "Perfect Places," a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In "Couldn't Hear You Talk Anymore," the narrator reflects on past trauma and what might have been as she recalls tender moments with another trans woman.

An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.

In her new collection of stories, award-winning New York Times Notable author Leila Aboulela offers us a rich tableau of life as an immigrant abroad, and the challenges of navigating assimilation and difference. Elsewhere, Home draws us ineluctably into the lives of her characters as they forge new identities and reshape old ones.

A young woman's encounter with a former classmate elicits painful reminders of her former life in Khartoum. A wealthy Sudanese student studying in Aberdeen begins an unlikely friendship with a Scottish man. A woman experiences an evolving relationship to her favorite writer, whose portrait of their shared culture both reflects and conflicts with her own sense of identity.

Shuttling between the dusty, sunbaked streets of Khartoum and the university halls and cramped apartments of Aberdeen and London, Elsewhere, Home explores, with subtlety and restraint, the profound feelings of yearning, loss, and alienation that come with leaving one's homeland in pursuit of a different life.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was born in 1875 as Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans, LA. She resided in New Orleans through her teachers training program at Straight University and began teaching in New Orleans. Her first book, Violets and Other Tales, was published in 1897. She moved to Brooklyn in 1897 and ended up meeting and then marrying the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1898. They were divorced in 1902 and she then moved to Wilmington, Delaware. In 1916 she married Robert J. Nelson, a civil rights activist, journalist, and politician. In the early 1920's they both edited and published the Wilmington Advocate, a progressive Black newspaper. From the 1920's through the 1930's she was prominent as a political and social activist and in demand as a public speaker. She died in 1935 at the age of 60. These 14 short stories beautifully capture the time and place of the New Orleans of Dunbar-Nelson's youth and young adulthood . Afterword by Tim Murray, University of Delaware, where Alice Dunbar-Nelson's papers are archived.

A collection of flash fiction that feels seemingly arbitrary with an ache of human longing for connection peppered in. . . . These bizarre but beautiful stories transport you elsewhere with no intention of bringing you back. --Ashleah Gonzales, W magazine

In this collection of compact fictions, Nicolette Polek transports us to a gently unsettling realm inhabited by disheveled landlords, a fugitive bride, a seamstress who forgets what people look like, and two rival falconers from neighboring towns. They find themselves in bathhouses, sports bars, grocery stores, and forests in search of exits, pink tennis balls, licorice, and independence. Yet all of her beautifully strange characters are possessed by a familiar and human longing for connection: to their homes, families, God, and themselves.

Collection of short stories or flash fiction on a wide variety of topics.

From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Known World

"Original and arresting....[Jones's] stories will touch chords of empathy and recognition in all readers."
--Washington Post

"These 14 stories of African-American life...affirm humanity as only good literature can."
--Los Angeles Times

A magnificent collection of short fiction focusing on the lives of African-American men and women in Washington, D.C., Lost in the City is the book that first brought author Edward P. Jones to national attention. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and numerous other honors for his novel The Known World, Jones made his literary debut with these powerful tales of ordinary people who live in the shadows in this metropolis of great monuments and rich history. Lost in the City received the Pen/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction and was a National Book Award Finalist. This beautiful 20th Anniversary Edition features a new introduction by the author, and is a wonderful companion piece to Jones's masterful novel and his second acclaimed collection of stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children.

A ravishing, luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt, a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights (The New York Times Book Review). With an introduction by David Mitchell, best-selling author of Cloud Atlas

Mirrors shatter at the hairdresser's when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess, honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real.

Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets, and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and color. From ancient myth to a British candy factory, from a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, from a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace, Byatt transports her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary--even beyond the gloss of the fantastical--to places rich and strange and wholly unforgettable.

"When you look over your own library, who do you see?"

Since founding the beloved Well-Read Black Girl book club in 2015, Glory Edim has emerged as a literary tastemaker for a new generation. Continuing her life's work to brighten and enrich American reading lives through the work of legendary Black authors, she now launches her Well-Read Black Girl Library Series with On Girlhood. This meticulously selected anthology features a wide range of unique voices, finally illuminating a distinctly robust sector of contemporary literature: groundbreaking short stories that explore the thin yet imperative line between Black girlhood and womanhood.

Divided into four themes--Innocence, Belonging, Love, and Self-Discovery--the unforgettable young protagonists within contend with the trials of coming of age that shape who they are and what they will become. With this tradition in mind, Innocence opens with Jamaica Kincaid's searing "Girl," in which a mother offers fierce instructions to her impressionable daughter. This deceptively simple yet profound monologue is followed by Toni Morrison's first and only published short story, the now-canonical "Recitatif," about two neglected girls who come together in youth only to find themselves on opposite picket lines in adulthood.

In Belonging, Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson" follows rambunctious students on a field trip where they are exposed to a new world of luxury. In Love, Dana Johnson's "Melvin in the Sixth Grade" captures the yearning of a lovesick teen smitten with the only boy who looks her way. And in Self-Discovery, Edwidge Danticat's "Seeing Things Simply" charts the creative awakening of Princesse, a young woman with a hunger to be fully seen. These inspiring tales of world builders and rule breakers conclude with Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," a personal essay brimming with wit and strength: "When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again."

At times heartbreaking and at times hilarious, these stories boldly push past flat stereotypes and powerfully convey the beauty of Black girlhood. In bringing together an array of influential authors--past and present--whose work remains timeless, Glory Edim has created an indispensable compendium for every home library and a soul-stirring guide to coming of age.

Featuring stories by Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Dorothy West, Rita Dove, Camille Acker, Toni Cade Bambara, Amina Gautier, Alexia Arthurs, Dana Johnson, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edwidge Danticat, Shay Youngblood, Paule Marshall, and Zora Neale Hurston.

The perilously beautiful (Boston Globe) first story collection by the author of the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning #1 New York Times bestseller All The Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land.

The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr's debut collection take readers from the African Coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varieties--metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts--conjuring nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power. Some of the characters in these stories contend with hardships; some discover unique gifts; all are united by their ultimate deference to the ravishing universe outside themselves.