Showing 1–16 of 69 resultsSorted by latest
In these pages we find Bertie Wooster and his faithful valet, Jeeves, embarking on any number of foolhardy quests and inspired rescue missions – alongside other treasured stories featuring Psmith, the Oldest Member, and the Empress of Blandings herself.
The oldest mystery specialty bookstore in the world, The Mysterious Bookshop, has for most of its forty-five-year history commissioned an original short story as a holiday gift for its customers. Written exclusively for the store and never published elsewhere, the stories were given as a holiday gift to its customers as a thank you for their business, handed out or mailed between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. The prompt for the story requires three elements: that it be set at Christmastime, that it involve a crime of some kind, or the suspicion of one, and that it be set at least partially in the bookstore. And from these loose structural guidelines, diverse tales took flight. The dozen tales included in this volume are among the finest to be produced in this annual tradition, sure to charm any reader looking for a holiday-themed escape.
Selected from across Capote’s writing life, these sparkling tales convey both the wonder and the chill of Christmas time. They range from nostalgic portraits of childhood to more unsettling works that reveal the darkness beneath the festive glitter. In the Deep South of Capote’s youth, a young boy, Buddy, and his beloved maiden ‘aunt’ Sook forage for pecans and whiskey to bake into fruitcakes, make kites – too broke to buy gifts – and rise before dawn to prepare feasts for a ragged assembly of guests; it is Sook who teaches Buddy the true meaning of good will. In other stories, an unlikely festive miracle, of sorts, occurs at a local drugstore and a lonely woman has a troubling encounter in wintry New York.
Illicit queer crushes on a family picnic. A nightclub singer lecturing her Communist nephew. Drunken feuds at the seedy South Kensington Hotel’s staff dance. The eccentric spinsters tempting a little boy to grotesque acts. Welcome to the singular world of Angus Wilson. An overlooked legend of the post-war queer landscape, he casts a waspish, tragicomic yet oddly tender eye across mid-century England. Jitterbugging, espresso bars, spivs, Angry Young Men, teddy boys, satanic masses in village living rooms: all of life is here in these beloved stories. Savage in their deadly anatomy of social class yet compassionate in their portrayal of misfit outsiders, these are mini Austenesque novels-of-(bad)-manners, seething with high-octane dialogue, baroque humour and macabre secrets.
Baboons chatter in the zoo. Tadpoles writhe in a pond. A gecko is stuck to the window. And ants are crawling everywhere. Nature runs wild and mysterious in this collection of stories in which the everyday reality of the human world, with its social norms and familial ties, slides into something altogether more strange. As children begin to explore the landscape around them and adults are forced to navigate the bumpy terrain of marriage, parenthood and grief, the non-human world pulsates with a life of its own, and humans are revealed to be the most incomprehensible species of all.
This title explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own passions.
A man and a woman, who have only known each other for a few hours and must soon part, sit in an airport café and invent an entire shared life together. A girl born with two different eyes – one seeing only the past and the other only the future – strives for the unattainable now. Late at night a father conspiratorially hangs laundry between two cherry trees in a tiny Bulgarian town in the 1970s and sets off a series of events that will turn absurdly historic. A woman on a train passing through the poppy-filled Central European countryside waves at everyone she passes, unaware that a single gesture can ripple through another’s life like fate. A lonely drifter on a snowy New Year’s Eve sees himself mirrored in a shop window TV, every move presumably watched by unseen millions and a world that had forgotten him. Here is a collection of Gospodinov’s finest short stories.
Espionage. Blackmail. Revenge. Cunning. Secrets. From the troubled recruitment of a new MI5 informant to the buried secrets of the Cold War, Herron’s novellas capture the drama, humour, and high stakes of everyday life in the world of spycraft. A world rife with both legends and secrets, where thrill-seeking and loneliness are ubiquitous and deadly, and where the lines between friends, enemies, and lovers are perpetually blurred by circumstance and subterfuge.
Amid the reflections and twisting alleyways of Venice, a grieving couple are haunted by the past. On a sharp December day, the wind changes – and the birds begin to gather. A group of wartime scientists attempt to capture the power of death, an eye operation reveals a monstrous reality, and a woman returns home to find she doesn’t exist. From murderous desires to supernatural forces, du Maurier’s masterful short stories stare into the dark heart of our relationships: between men and women, humanity and nature, love and obsession, the future and the past.
This series curates the finest short stories published by British writers globally over the past year, inviting readers to explore the best of contemporary British short fiction.
Harper Lee remains a landmark figure in the American canon – thanks to Scout, Jem, Atticus, and the other indelible characters in her Pulitzer-winning debut, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, as well as for the darker, late-’50s version of small-town Alabama that emerged in ‘Go Set a Watchman’, her only other novel, published in 2015 after its rediscovery. ‘The Land of Sweet Forever’ combines Lee’s early short fiction and later nonfiction in a volume offering an unprecedented look at the development of her inimitable voice.
The act of walking inspires a dizzying variety of stories, from Bill Bryson’s comic ‘A Walk in the Woods’ to M.R. James’s tale of a ghost cursed to wander forever, and from the thrilling true account of a woman who escaped from an Auschwitz death march to a dreamy tale by Anais Nin about wandering in the labyrinth of memory. Here are comic stories and love stories, moments of adventure and of observation, of sleepwalking and of mental travelling, of strolling and of hiking, all set into glorious motion by a diverse array of great writers past and present.
An evocative collection of fourteen tales exploring Gaelic mythology, magic and wonder.
A collection of famous and lesser-known tales from classic Japanese folklore, including ‘The Bamboo Cutter and the Moon Child’, inspiration for Studio Ghibli’s Princess Kaguya.
A thrilling set of stories from Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. One of ten pocket-sized paperbacks from Macmillan Collector’s Library celebrating the art of the short story.
A collection of thirteen short stories from Ken Liu, master of short-form SFF.