Short Stories
Afterparties: Stories
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK
WINNER OF THE FERRO-GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBTQ FICTION
Named a Best Book of the Year by: New York Times * NPR * Washington Post * LA Times * Kirkus Reviews * New York Public Library * Chicago Public Library * Harper's Bazaar * TIME * Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air * Boston Globe* The Atlantic
A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life--immersive and comic, yet unsparing--that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities
Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.
A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle's snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a "safe space" app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter.
The stories in Afterparties, "powered by So's skill with the telling detail, are like beams of wry, affectionate light, falling from different directions on a complicated, struggling, beloved American community" (George Saunders).
Awkward Black Man
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.
Black Sunday
Burning Girls and Other Stories
A Most Anticipated in 2021 Pick for The Independent Buzzfeed The Nerd Daily
When we came to America, we brought anger and socialism and hunger. We also brought our demons.
Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories
A welcome volume of stories from Russia's finest contemporary fiction writer, Mikhail Shishkin, full of his typical fusing of mysticism and modernist experimentation. --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
The first English-language collection of short stories by Russia's greatest contemporary author, Mikhail Shishkin, the only author to win all three of Russia's most prestigious literary awards.
Often included in discussions of Nobel Prize contenders, Shishkin is a master prose writer in the breathtakingly beautiful style of the greatest Russian authors, known for complex, allusive novels about universal and emotional themes. Shishkin's stories read like modern versions of the eternal literature written by his greatest inspirations: Boris Pasternak, Ivan Bunin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Bulgakov.
Shishkin's short fiction is the perfect introduction to his breathtaking oeuvre, his stories touch on the same big themes as his novels, spanning discussions of love and loss, death and eternal life, emigration and exile.
Calligraphy Lesson spans Shishkin's entire writing career, including his first published story, the 1993 Debut Prize-winning Calligraphy Lesson, and his most recent story Nabokov's Inkblot, which was written for a dramatic adaptation performed in Zurich in 2013.
Mikhail Shishkin (b. 1961 in Moscow) is one of the most prominent names in contemporary Russian literature. A former interpreter for refugees in Switzerland, Shishkin divides his time between Moscow, Switzerland, and Germany.
Cascade: Stories
Set in the Niagara Falls of Craig Davidson's imagination--known as Cataract City--the superb stories of Cascade shine a shimmering light on this slightly seedy, slightly magical, slightly haunted place. The six gems in this collection each illuminate familial relationships in a singular way: A mother and her infant son fight to survive a car crash in a remote wintry landscape outside of town. Fraternal twins at a juvenile detention center reach a dangerous crisis point in their entwined lives. A pregnant social worker grapples with the prospect of parenthood as a custody case takes a dire turn. A hardboiled ex-firefighter goes after a serial arsonist with a flair for the theatrical even as his own troubled sister is drawn toward the flames. These are just some of the unforgettable characters animating this stellar collection that crackles with Davidson's superb craft and kinetic energy: in the steel-tipped prose, in the psychological perspicacity, and in the endearing humor.
Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig
Five of Stefan Zweig's most powerful novellas, containing some of his most famous and best-loved work: - Burning Secret
- A Chess Story
- Fear
- Confusion
- Journey into the Past
(Stand alone paperback editions of individual novellas from Pushkin and New York Review of Books will remain in print.)
Collected Stories
Collected Stories includes both volumes of the National Book Award-winning author Shirley Hazzard's short-story collections--Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses--alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories
Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical send-ups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard's heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the twentieth-century world of office jobs and dreary marriages. After all, as she writes in The Picnic, It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn't cope with love. And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendor of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her protagonists seek. Hazzard once said, The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature. Her stories themselves are a supreme evocation of writing at its very best: probing, uncompromising, and deeply felt.Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas
Deception: Stories
"Easy as Pie, Parts I and II" are included in this anthology.
Dekalb, Illinois is a Paradise What Eats Its Own
Devil Takes One and other stories
Elsewhere Home
Finding Their Way - Short and Longer
First Person Singular: Stories
Five Tuesdays in Winter
"Five Tuesdays in Winter moved me, inspired me, thrilled me. It filled up every chamber of my heart. I loved this book." --Ann Patchett
By the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria comes a masterful new collection of short stories
Lily King, one of the most "brilliant" (New York Times Book Review), "wildly talented" (Chicago Tribune), and treasured authors of contemporary fiction, returns after her recent bestselling novels with Five Tuesdays in Winter, her first book of short fiction.
Told in the intimate voices of complex, endearing characters, Five Tuesdays in Winter intriguingly subverts expectations as it explores desire, loss, jolting violence, and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A reclusive bookseller begins to feel the discomfort of love again. Two college roommates have a devastating middle-aged reunion. A proud old man rages powerlessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. A writer receives a visit from all the men who have tried to suppress her voice.
Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, this wide-ranging collection of ten selected stories by one of our most accomplished chroniclers of the human heart is an exciting addition to Lily King's oeuvre of acclaimed fiction.
Fruiting Bodies: Stories
In stories that beckon and haunt, Fruiting Bodies ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters--mostly queer, mostly women--on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis.
In "The Changeling," two young cousins wait in dread for a new family member to arrive, convinced that he may be a dangerous supernatural creature. In "Endangered Animals," Jane prepares to say goodbye to her almost-love while they road-trip across a country irrevocably altered by climate change. In "Take Only What Belongs to You," a queer woman struggles with the personal history of an author she idolized, while in "Fiddler, Fool, Pair," an anthropologist is drawn into a magical--and dangerous--gamble. In the title story, partners Agnes and Geb feast peacefully on the mushrooms that sprout from Agnes's body--until an unwanted male guest disturbs their cloistered home.
Audacious, striking, and wholly original, Fruiting Bodies offers stories about knowledge in a world on the verge of collapse, knowledge that alternately empowers or devastates. Pulling beautifully, brazenly, from a variety of literary traditions, Kathryn Harlan firmly establishes herself as a thrilling new voice in fiction.
Ghost Lover: Stories
Goodness of Saint Roch
Imaginary Museums: Stories
In the Between: 21st Century Short Stories
Including contributions by Roxane Gay, Alice Hoffman, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Shivana Sookdeo, and Bryan Washington. In the Between presents characters of differing and mixed cultural backgrounds, genders, sexuality, and ableness, some affected by urban gentrification or the decline of their rural town--all striving to forge a future in today's divided America. Masterful and boldly intimate, these stories urge us to embrace a complex understanding of who we are as a nation and who we can be as individuals.
Other contributors are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Maria Anderson, Ryka Aoki, Joy Baglio, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Nancy Fulda, Vanessa Hua, Bryan Hurt, Phil Klay, Mister Loki, Casey Robb, Rion Amilcar Scott, Akhil Sharma, and Robert Anthony Siegel.
Junk to Think About
Lantern Slides: Stories
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
"Superb...[Lantern Slides] continues the quest for origin and explanation that has preoccupied O'Brien...Her stories unearth the primeval feelings buried just below the surface of nostalgia, using memories to illuminate both what is ridiculous and what is heroic about passion." --David Leavitt, The New York Times Book Review "Her stories are brilliantly realized and often very funny...O'Brien is quite simply one of the finest short story writers of our time." --Joyce Carol Oates A newly reissued collection of stories from the author of Girl, "one of the most celebrated writers in the English language" (NPR's Weekend Edition) In twelve stories peopled with deeply etched characters, whom we come to know instantly and intimately, Lantern Slides reveals the wit and passion of a master of the short fiction form. Rich and humorous, full of struggle and boldness, these stories are a singular reflection of Edna O'Brien's artistry.Learning to Talk: Stories
Learning to Talk is a dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall trilogy.
With a New Preface
Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.
Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.