Story books
Listings for short story collections
Author:
How to Breathe Underwater
by Julie Orringer
This debut collection dives into the private world of adolescence, immersing the reader in its fears and longings.
publisher Penguin
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
by ZZ Packer
The characters in this short-story collection from an acclaimed new voice in American fiction are all too human in their struggle to find a place in the world.
They include a group of vengeful Brownies; evangelical Sister Clarice; Spurgeon Bivens, who has just bailed his father out of jail; and Dina, a college student who undergoes an emotional awakening.
publisher Canongate
The Quantity Theory of Insanity
by Will Self
Among the curious and disturbing subjects Self’s début deals with are the Ur-Bororo, a superhumanly dull tribe of Amazonian bores; the terrible, seductive secret of Ward 9; and the revolutionary possibilities of waiting.
His other collections, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys and Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, are also published by Penguin.
publisher Penguin
The Stories of Eva Luna
by Isabel Allende
translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Allende's trademark magic realism imbues this evocative collection.
publisher Penguin
The Ends of our Tethers
by Alasdair Gray
Gray's tales of love and loss focus on the ageing process; the collection is illustrated throughout with the author's eccentric and idiosyncratic drawings.
publisher Canongate
Exemplary Stories
by Miguel De Cervantes
translated by Cyril albert Jones
Included in this collection are The Little Gypsy Girl, Rinconete and Cortadillo, The Glass Graduate, The Jealous Extremaduran, The Deceitful Marriage, and The Dog’s Colloquy.
publisher Penguin
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
by Yann Martel
The author of the Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi tackles themes of storytelling and illness, war and music, death and bureaucracy, science and sex in this collection, originally published in 1993.
publisher Canongate
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings
by Edgar Allan Poe
This selection of Poe’s short fiction (which includes 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and 'The Gold-bug') and poetry also includes his critical writings and demonstrates his intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind.
publisher Penguin
Field Study
by Rachel Seiffert
Seiffert's stories are set in locations as diverse as post-Communist eastern Germany and the Scottish seaside; they evoke the human need for connection, taking the reader on journeys that express both the fragility and adaptability of emotion.
publisher William Heinemann
The Garden Party and Other Stories
by Katherine Mansfield
These fifteen stories were written towards the end of the author's short life. Many are set in Mansfield's native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera.
All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience.
publisher Penguin
The Girl Who Married a Lion
by Alexander McCall Smith
From animal fables to mysterious forces in the landscape, McCall Smith's stories are adaptations of tales that have been handed down by generations of Ndebele people from Matabeleland, Zimbabwe.
publisher Canongate
Give Me (Songs for Lovers)
by Irina Denezhkina
Mining the themes of teenage sex, drugs, violence and music, Denezkhina tells it like it is for Russia's new generation, brought up in a complex post-Communist world where the ideological influences are more MTV than Marx.
publisher Chatto & Windus
Good Clean Fun
by Michael Arditti
These stories take an uncompromising look at love and desire in the twenty-first century.
publisher Maia Press
In the Stacks
by Michael Cart (ed.)
An anthology of short stories in defence of reading by some of the greatest practitioners of the genre: Babel, Calvino, Borges, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore and Saki.
publisher Duckworth
Hieroglyphics
by Anne Donovan
Often written in Glaswegian dialect, Donovan's stories are charming, witty and touching.
publisher Canongate
In the Land of Time, and Other Fantasy Tales
by Alfred Dunsany
A selection of tales spanning the author's career, including the entire Gods of Pegana, several about the traveller Joseph Jorkens and a murder story called The Two Bottles of Relish.
publisher Penguin
Jigs and Reels
by Joanne Harris
Suburban witches, defiant old ladies, ageing monsters, suicidal Lottery winners, wolf men, dolphin women and manufacturers of erotic leatherwear come to life in Harris's first collection of short stories.
publisher Black Swan
Complete Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
This volume, which includes all the stories from A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, also contains several stories never before published in book form.
O'Connor was a unique writer whose work encapsulates the tensions of the American South.
publisher Faber
The Lemon Table
by Julian Barnes
If Barnes's new collection has a theme it is 'rage in age': the settings of the stories range from eighteenth-century Sweden and nineteenth-century Russia to a barber's shop and the South Bank concert hall in London.
An earlier collection about the British in France, Cross Channel, is also published by Picador
publisher Picador
Like a Charm
by Karin Slaughter (ed.)
The stories in this anthology are linked by a charm bracelet that brings bad luck to its finder; they are set in locations ranging from nineteenth-century Georgia to wartime Leeds.
Contributors include Peter Robinson, Fidelis Morgan, Lynda La Plante, Val McDermid and Mark Billingham.
publisher Arrow
The Burning Mirror
by Suhayl Saadi
Saadi's collection covers everything from Glaswegian Asian gangsta stories to themes drawn from various trans-Mediterranean cultures, from the philosophising of a spirit trapped in a bottle to the everyday tribulations of a Catholic evangelist, from a searing portrayal of brick-making villages in Pakistan to a Pointillist love story set amidst the late twentieth-century Balkan wars.
publisher Polygon
Loot
by Nadine Gordimer
Ten startling stories from the Nobel Prize-winning Gordimer, culminating in Karma, in which a disembodied narrator returns to the earthly life five times, taking on different ages or genders and questioning the nature of existence.
publisher Bloomsbury
McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales
by Dave Eggers & Michael Chabon (eds.)
Contemporary authors dip their toes into the pool of pulp genre writing.
publisher Penguin
Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories
by Agatha Christie
The shorter adventures of the sleuthing spinster.
Also available: Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories and Collected Short Stories.
publisher HarperCollins
Thong Nation
by Henry Sutton
Zara wants to do it in the Med, Alicia wants a Brazillian to please Mikey, Sally prefers the garden hose to Brian, and Catherine can only find satisafaction on the tennis court.
Charlie and Dorothy's four over-sexed, grown-up daughters struggle to find fulfilment in Blair's skimpy Britain in these humorous linked, ultra-brief short stories.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Morning Child and Other Stories
by Gardner Dozois
A collection of classic science fiction stories by the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author and editor.
publisher Simon & Schuster
Most Of Us Are Here Against Our Will
by David Levinson
A debut collection about families, lovers, loss, sex and survival, set mostly in Austin, Texas, and featuring a cast of the unemployed, the unsuccessful, and the addicted.
publisher Penguin
Naked
by David Sedaris
Humorous stories: the author confronts his naked self in the mirrored sunglasses of a lunatic, takes to the road with a thieving quadriplegic, and sorts the fancy from the extra-fancy in a bleak fruit-picking factory.
publisher Phoenix
Natasha and Other Stories
by David Bezmozgis
Bezmozgis came to Canada from Latvia as a boy with his family; he writes with clarity, compassion and humour about the pains and joys of the immigrant life.
publisher Jonathan Cape
The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories
by David Leavitt & Mark Mitchell (eds.)
This classic collection of stories by writers male and female, gay and straight, has been revised: 21 stories from the original books have been joined by 15 new ones.
Contributors include D H Lawrence, E M Forster, John Updike, Edna O'Brien, Annie Proulx and many more.
publisher Penguin
Nocturnes
by John Connolly
12 chilling tales of the supernatural: lost lovers, missing children, subterranean creatures and predatory demons, a modern-day grim reaper, and a haunted house tale with a twist.
publisher Coronet
Oblivion: Stories
by David Foster Wallace
Hailed as 'the most significant writer of his generation' by the Times Literary Supplement', David Foster Wallace serves up a dazzling collection of short stories in Oblivion.
publisher Abacus
The Oblivion Seekers
by Isabelle Eberhardt
translated by Paul Bowles
publisher Peter Owen
Oranges from Spain
by David Park
A collection of stories set in Northern Ireland about the trials of growing up in communities where tension, confusion and violence hold sway.
publisher Bloomsbury
The Long Valley
by John Steinbeck
These stories are set in Steinbeck's birthplace, the rolling Salinas Valley in California. They explore the tensions between men and women, the individual and society, and humanity and the natural world.
The stories in The Pastures of Heaven are also set in a fertile California valley.
publisher Penguin
The Whole Story and Other Stories
by Ali Smith
In a celebration of connections and missed connections, an inquiry into everything from flies and trees and books to sex, art, drunkenness and love, Smith rewrites the year's cycle into a very modern calendar.
Smith's other collection, Other Stories and Other Stories is also published by Penguin.
publisher Penguin
Work Suspended and Other Stories
by Evelyn Waugh
A writer of detective fiction puts his incomplete novel in a drawer until such time as he can finish it; the hero of Black Mischief defeats the children of the Sixties.
This volume also includes the fragment Charles Ryder's Schooldays, which sketches the background to the narrator of Brideshead Revisited.
publisher Penguin
The Withered Arm and Other Stories 1874-1888
by Thomas Hardy
Beautiful in their own right, these stories are also testing-grounds for Hardy's novels in their controversial sexual politics, their refusal to employ the structures of the romantic genre, and their elegiac pursuit of past, lost loves.
publisher Penguin
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories 1892-1895
by Anton Chekhov
translated by Ronald Wilks
These stories from the middle period of Chekhov’s career show him exploring complex, ambiguous and often extreme emotions.
'Ward No. 6', set in a mental hospital, is a savage indictment of the medical profession; 'The Black Monk' explores ideas of genius and insanity; and in 'The Student', Chekhov’s favourite story, a young man undergoes a spiritual epiphany after recounting a tale from the gospels.
publisher Penguin
Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories
by R K Narayan
An enchanting collection from one of India's foremost storytellers, rich in wry, warmly observed characters from every walk of Indian life - merchants, beggars, herdsmen, rogues - all of whose lives are microcosms of the human experience.
Also available: Malgudi Days.
publisher Penguin
Typhoon and Other Stories
by Joseph Conrad
In the four stories in this collection, written between 1900 and 1902, Joseph Conrad bid gradual farewell to his adventurous life at sea and began to confront the more daunting complexities of life on land in the twentieth century.
publisher Penguin
The Steppe and Other Stories 1887-1891
by Anton Chekhov
translated by Ronald Wilks
Written during Chekhov's late twenties and early thirties, these stories are the work of a young writer in dialogue with his masters: Tolstoy, Gogol and Maupassant.
They deal with good and evil, depicting heroes, villains and monsters with a lightness of touch and a lack of ambiguity which is largely absent from the stories Chekhov wrote following traumatic and defining visit to the penal island of Sakhalin to investigate prison conditions in 1890.
publisher Penguin
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories
by Washington Irving
These witty, perceptive and captivating tales range from fantasy to romance: the enchantment of Rip Van Winkle in the Kaatskill Mountains; Ichabod Crane's gruesome end at the hands of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow; the Spectre Bridegroom who turns out to be happily substantial; the pride of an English village and the come-uppance of the over-zealous Mountjoy.
publisher Penguin
The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories
by Stephen Crane
This collection brings together Crane's famous American Civil War story and half a dozen others.
Penguin also publishes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Tales of New York.
publisher Penguin
A Parisian Affair and Other Stories
by Guy de Maupassant
translated by Sian Miles
Set in the nouveau riche Paris of society women, prostitutes and playboys, in the Normandy countryside and on the French Riviera where Maupassant had lived, the thirty-three contes in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in French literature.
publisher Penguin
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories
by D H Lawrence
These twelve stories - Lawrence's first published collection - were written between 1907 and 1914, during a crucial period of development for Lawrence from which he emerged a leading figure of the modernist movement.
publisher Penguin
Poor Folk and Other Stories
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
translated by David McDuff
Dostoyevsky’s first great literary triumph, the novella Poor Folk is here accompanied by The Landlady, Mr. Prokharchin and Polzunkov.
publisher Penguin
Master and Man and Other Stories
by Leo Tolstoy
translated by Ronald Wilks
The ten stories collected in this volume represent five decades of Tolstoy's artistic prowess, as he experimented with prose styles and drew on his own experiences with humour, realism and compassion.
publisher Penguin
The Marquise of O and Other Stories
by Heinrich von Kleist
Between 1799, when he left the Prussian Army, and his suicide in 1811, Kleist developed into a writer of unprecedented and tragically isolated genius.
This is a collection of works from the last period of his life.
publisher Penguin
Metamorphosis and Other Stories
by Franz Kafka
translated by Malcolm Pasley
These translations bring together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication, including his most famous story Metamorphosis.
Taken together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.
publisher Penguin
The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories
by Anton Chekhov
translated by Ronald Wilks
In the final years of his life, Chekhov wrote short stories that rank among his masterpieces.
A man and a woman indulge in an affair that could ruin both their marriages, but their feelings for each other compel them towards betrayal; peasants spend their meagre earnings on vodka and go home drunk to beat their wives; a gentleman becomes a labourer despite his father’s protestations.
publisher Penguin
Innocent Erendira and Other Stories
by Gabriel García Márquez
Short stories from the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Márquez's other short story collections are also available: Leaf Storm, Strange Pilgrims and Collected Stories.
publisher Penguin
For Esmé - With Love and Squalor and Other Stories
by J D Salinger
Beautiful and bleak short fiction by the reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye.
publisher Penguin
The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories
by Henry James
By the 1890s, Henry James was feeling depressed by his lack of a sizeable, responsive audience in what he called 'an age of trash triumphant'.
These stories, several of them elaborate Jamesian games, are all concerned with the art of fiction and the position of the artist in society.
publisher Penguin
The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories 1888-1900
by Thomas Hardy
The eleven stories collected here share the theme of love, but they are more than simple love stories.
Written with Hardy’s customary compassion for ordinary women and his sharp sense of irony, they tell of love’s disasters, betrayals, misunderstandings and cruelties.
And, as in Hardy’s novels, it is frequently the women who fall in love unwisely, in defiance of their class, their expectations or their family loyalties, and suffer for their impulsiveness.
publisher Penguin
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
by Nikolai Gogol
translated by Ronald Wilks
Gogol's world is less a world than an atmosphere, a question of sleight of hand and trapdoor humour, involving characters that are vivid in the way only ghosts or government clerks can be.
publisher Penguin
Don't Look Now and Other Stories
by Daphne du Maurier
Don't Look Now, Daphne du Maurier's terrifying tale set in Venice, was memorably filmed by Nicolas Roeg. It is joined in this collection by four other stories.
publisher Penguin
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
by Leo Tolstoy
translated by Rosemary Edmonds
Three of Tolstoy’s most powerful and moving shorter works are brought together in this volume.
A meditation on life and death recounts the physical decline and spiritual awakening of a successful man faced with his own mortality; a seventeen-year-old girl marries her guardian twice her age; and a disenchanted young nobleman seeks fulfilment amid the wild beauty of the Caucasus.
publisher Penguin
The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories
by Sarah Orne Jewett
Written in the nineteenth century, the title story is narrated by a young woman writer who leaves the city to work one summer in the Maine seaport of Dunnet Landing, and stays with the herbalist Mrs Almira Todd.
She writes a New England idyll rooted in friendship, particularly female friendship, weaving stories and conversations, imagery of sea, sky and earth, the tang of salt air and aromatic herbs into an organic 'fiction of community' in which themes and form are exquisitely matched.
publisher Penguin
Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories
by Giovanni Verga
translated by G H McWilliam
Born into a well-to-do Sicilian family in the 1870s, Verga was an active observer and habitué of Milanese salon society, but eventually he found in the everyday lives of Sicilian peasants the inspiration for his finest narratives.
Love, adultery and honour are recurring themes in stories grounded in the opportunism and hardship of peasant life, set against the scorched landscapes of the slopes of Mount Etna and the Plain of Catania.
publisher Penguin
The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Other Stories
by Jack London
Someone once said that they didn't need to read any other books, because they had read The Call of the Wild. Well, here it is, along with three other stories set in the northern wilderness.
publisher Penguin
Billy Budd and Other Stories
by Herman Melville
Melville's classic tale of an innocent young man unable to defend himself against wrongful accusations is joined in this collection by seven other stories.
publisher Penguin
Collected Stories
by Elizabeth Bowen
Love stories, ghost stories, stories of childhood, of English middle-class life in the twenties and thirties, of London during the Blitz - Elizabeth Bowen combines social comedy and reportage, perception and vision in this 79-strong collection.
publisher Vintage
Birthday Stories
by Haruki Murakami (ed.)
Stories revolving around the theme of birthdays collected by Murakami. Contributors include Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, Claire Keegan, Paul Theroux, David Foster Wallace, Andrea Lee and Murakami himself.
publisher Harvill
The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories About Childhood
by Lorrie Moore (ed.)
Wonderful collection of stories full of the joys and horrors of childhood from some of the best writers in contemporary fiction.
publisher Faber
After the Quake
by Haruki Murakami
translated by Jay Rubin
Short stories inspired by the Kobe earthquake. Murakami's earlier collection of stories, The Elephant Vanishes, is also available.
publisher Vintage
Bending Heaven
by Jessica Francis Kane
Debut collection from an American writer, which the New York Times described as 'Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro country'.
publisher Chatto & Windus
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
by Ursula K Le Guin
Challenging short stories (and a novella) that explore notions of gender and society. Some of the stories are set in worlds Le Guin has written about before, others not.
publisher Gollancz
The Body
by Hanif Kureishi
The title story of Kureishi's collection - in which an older academic trades his body in for a younger model - explores ideas of identity and physical ageing.
Also available, the collections Love in a Blue Time and Midnight All Day.
publisher Faber
The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read
by Susan Hill
Rural tales of love, desperation and evil by the author of I'm the King of the Castle.
publisher Vintage
Camouflage and Other Stories
by Murray Bail
Short fiction from an Australian writer whose full-length novels (e.g. Eucalyptus) are fairly short in themselves.
publisher Vintage
The Short Hello
by Susie Maguire
Ranging in subject matter from sleuths and film stars, from love stories to fables, and from poetic realism to satire, Maguire's humour is observant and sharp.
publisher Polygon
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
by Raymond Carver
One of the writers dubbed as 'dirty realists' by Granta magazine, Carver produced four collections of spare, beautiful short stories about so-called ordinary life before his death in 1988.
This is a collection of tales set in America's mid-West.
His other collections are Will You Please Be Quiet Please, Cathedral and Elephant.
publisher Vintage
Collected African Stories Volume 1: This Was the Old Chief's Country
by Doris Lessing
Lessing explores the tensions between the white and black communities living side by side in early twentieth-century Africa in these 13 stories.
Volume 2 - The Sun Between Their Feet - continues this theme in the context of the continent's vast and humbling landscape.
publisher Flamingo
The Collected Stories
by William Trevor
Five of Trevor's collections and several previously unpublished stories are brought together in this magnificent tome: over 1,200 pages of writing by one of the greatest masters of the short story genre.
publisher Penguin
The Collected Stories of Angela Huth
by Angela Huth
An anthology of three previous collections, plus two new stories, by the author of Land Girls.
publisher Abacus
The Collected Stories of Colette
by Colette
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, the music-hall artist who went on to become a successful writer, conjured up in her stories the vibrancy of Paris in the 1920s as well as the bucolic French countryside and the difficulties of being a woman.
This anthology brings together 100 of her stories.
publisher Minerva
Collected Short Stories
by Michael McLaverty
A collection of stories by one of Ireland's finest writers. A gift edition of the book, with woodcut illustrations and an introduction by Seamus Heaney, is also available.
publisher The Blackstaff Press
The Collected Shorter Fiction of Joseph Roth
by Joseph Roth
translated by Michael Hofmann
Austrian-Jewish by birth, Roth was a journalist who also wrote 13 novels, as well as short stories. He witnessed the destruction of Germany in 1918 and died in exile in Paris in 1939.
His novellas and short stories are considered by some to rank with Chekhov's and Kafka's as among the greatest of the 20th century.
publisher Granta
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
by Nikolai Gogol
translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
Gogol was a nineteenth-century Russian playwright, dramatist and novelist, whose best-known work is still produced (The Government Inspector) and read (Dead Souls) today.
This volume brings together his shorter fiction.
publisher Granta
The Comfort Zone
by Jeremy Sheldon
Sheldon's stories read deceptively easily, like comic books, like watching TV, and are often very funny.
They are also an acute look at what it is to be young, male and English. His characters are diffident, blocked, emotionally muted, caught between the momentum of their desires and the frustrating clutches of their anxieties.
publisher Vintage
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3W
by Gabriel Brownstein
This inventive collection plays on famous stories and myths, bringing alive the human tragedies that lurk beneath the bizarre and the Kafkaesque.
Five stories are set in one New York apartment building, where young Davey Birnbaum watches his neighbours’ lives unfold.
publisher Bloomsbury
Darling?
by Heidi Jon Schmidt
Lost causes and hopeless cases are made heroes in Heidi Jon Schmidt's American stories. These are a collection of misfits, certain that they are missing something from their lives, but unable to pinpoint quite what. What emerges are characters who are terribly flawed but deeply appealing.
publisher Flamingo
Dead Girls
by Nancy Lee
Loosely linked by a man’s conviction for the murder of a number of prostitutes, Lee’s stories have a dark undercurrent of despondency running through them: the fumblings of teenage sex; recreational drug use gone wrong; fractured relationships between parents and siblings; the slow pain of love affairs breaking down; and the chronic ache of the loss of a dead child.
publisher Faber
The Deep
by Mary Swan
Though the pieces in the collection range widely in setting and time, many of them are also haunted by memories of war and loss.
The title story, which won the O. Henry Award, describes the experiences of twin sisters who volunteer to work behind the front lines in France in the last year of the Great War.
publisher Granta
Down to a Soundless Sea
by Thomas Steinbeck
Steinbeck follows in his father's footsteps with this collection, which resonates with the rich history and culture of California, recalling vivid details of life in Monterey County from the turn of the century to the 1930s.
publisher Allison & Busby
Collected Stories
by Carol Shields
This posthumously published book brings together Shields's three short story collections (Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival.
publisher HarperPerennial
Everything's Eventual
by Stephen King
This collection contains King's stories that were first published in The New Yorker as well as 'Riding the Bullet', which was first published as an e-book.
For a man who writes very long books, he's no slouch at the shorter form.
publisher Sceptre
The Falling Woman
by Shaena Lambert
Stories of family and love, lovers and betrayal, the longing and fear of which we are made up: the stories of Shaena Lambert are about malevolent pubescent sexuality; tough women; and adolescent boys boasting about their knowledge of female anatomy.
publisher Virago
A Fanatic Heart
by Edna O'Brien
Stories of love and loss, the villages and countryside of western Ireland, sexual intimacy and social alienation. This volume comprises 29 stories, some selected by the author from her previous collections, some published in The New Yorker.
publisher Phoenix
Filthy English
by Jonathan Meades
A dog that stars in porn films gets addicted to aniseed; hallucinogenic mushrooms and incest in the New Forest; the criminal fraternity in suburban Surrey; and a homosexual crime of passion are some of Meades's queasy subjects in this collection.
publisher Fourth Estate
Learning to Talk: Short Stories
by Hilary Mantel
Stories set in an insular northern village 'scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.' For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out.
publisher Fourth Estate
Little Infamies
by Panos Karnezis
The residents of one unnamed and disintegrating Greek village feature in this collection of short stories about religion, love, death and life.
publisher Vintage
Wall of the Sky, Wall of the Eye
by Jonathan Lethem
These short stories blur the boundaries of science fiction, mystery, and thriller: a crack addict is dogged by an invulnerable alien; convicts are used as building blocks for new prisons; and a man is raised from the dead to support his family, only to suffer periodic out-of-body sojourns in Hell.
publisher Faber
The Turning
by Tim Winton
Here are stories of first love, friendship, disappointment and working-class life, some linked, others not.
An acknowledged master of the genre, Winton has published other collections: Minimum of Two (tales of ordinary people battling to maintain loyalty against the odds) and Scission (lives falling apart) are also available.
publisher Picador
Murderers I Have Known and Other Stories
by Marina Warner
Marina Warner's stories conjure up mysteries and wonders in a physical world, treading a delicate, magical line between the natural and the supernatural, between openness and fear.
publisher Vintage
Not the End of the World
by Kate Atkinson
From Charlene and Trudi, obsessively making lists while bombs explode softly in the streets outside, to gormless Eddie, maniacal cataloguer of fish, and Meredith Zane who may just have discovered the secret to eternal life, each of these stories shows that when the worlds of material existence and imagination collide, anything is possible.
publisher Black Swan
The Oxford Book of English Love Stories
by John Sutherland (ed.)
The twenty-eight stories chosen by John Sutherland reflect something of the infinite diversity of English love, with authors as varied as Sylvia Plath and Aphra Behn, Thomas Hardy and V. S. Pritchett, D. H. Lawrence and Adam Mars-Jones.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories
by A S Byatt (ed.)
The 37 stories featured here are selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy to J G Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan.
Many draw ingeniously from the richness of earlier English literary writing.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories
by T A Shippey (ed.)
This wide-ranging anthology begins with H G Wells and ends with David Brin. Other contributors include Arthur C Clarke, William Gibson, Ursula K Le Guin, Brian Aldiss and J G Ballard.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories
by Michael Cox (ed.)
The Victorians excelled at telling ghost stories. In an age of rapid scientific progress the idea of a vindictive past able to reach out and violate the present held a special potential for terror.
This anthology charts the development of the ghost story from 1850 to the early years of the twentieth century.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories
by Michael Cox (ed.)
This selection of 42 stories written between 1829 and 1968 presents the full range and vitality of the English tradition of literary ghost fiction.
Authors include J S Le Fanu, M R James, Walter de la Mare and Robert Aickman.
publisher Oxford University Press
Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence
by Amit Chaudhuri
Some of these stories explore the lives of the post-Independence upper classes, their relations to each other and to the concepts of celebrity, popular culture, art and tradition.
Others are vibrant and enticing retellings of episodes from Hindu mythologies. The reminiscence is a verse meditation on the writer's Bombay origins.
publisher Picador
A Multitude of Sins
by Richard Ford
America's most unflinching chronicler of modern life is drawn to amorous relationships inside, out and to the sides of marriage.
In these extraordinary stories all human relations, our entire sense of right and wrong, are put into vivid and unforgettable play.
Ford's other collections, Rock Springs and Women with Men are also available.
publisher Vintage
Running from Legs and Other Stories
by Ed McBain
Marriage problems, prohibition era New York, life in the circus and death in the movies are some of the subjects McBain writes about in these eleven short stories, three of which have never been published before.
publisher Allison & Busby
Scenes from the Life of a Bestselling Author
by Michael Krüger
The pottering heroes of these hilarious stories never throw in the towel, opting instead for lives of heroic, ridiculous abnegation.
Whether by abandoning fame to care for a gymnasium-sized beast, by endeavouring to prove that all history stems from typos, or by harnessing the moon to predict world events, Krüger's characters consistently opt for art over life, only to find life, in its most outlandish forms, biting relentlessly back.
publisher Vintage
Servants of the Map
by Andrea Barrett
A mapper of the highest mountain peaks realizes his true obsession; a young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with a romantic fantasy; brothers and sister, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion.
Ranging across two centuries, and from the Himalayas to an Adirondack village, these novellas and stories travel the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery.
publisher Flamingo
Seven Tales of Sex and Death
by Patricia Duncker
This collection of interwoven stories is a gripping, haunting read, with an edgy tone reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe at his most dazzling and thought-provoking.
publisher Picador
Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh
by Mo Yan
translated by Howard Goldblatt
Eight short stories, written over the past twenty years: surrealistic political fables, ghost stories, tales of failed and perverse love, and stories about the destructive effects of superstition and ignorance.
These stories capture the current concerns of the Chinese: lack of income, famine, and the devastating effects of the one-child policy.
publisher Methuen
Six Easy Pieces
by Walter Mosley
More murder and mayhem for Easy Rawlins as he wanders from schoolhouse to whorehouse haunted by the memory of his apparently dead sidekick, Raymond 'Mouse' Alexander.
In these mysteries Easy confronts the financial and moral corruption at the heart of the mean streets of Los Angeles' Watts district in the 1960s.
publisher Serpent's Tail
The Stealing Steps
by John Arden
From revolutionary murmurs in fourteenth century Yorkshire and the love and jealousies of the Regency theatre, to unfulfilled ambitions and doubtful affiliations in modern-day Ireland, these nine stories - which include the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize-winning Breach of Trust - display John Arden's remarkable range and depth.
publisher Methuen
Strictly Casual: Women on Love
by Amy Prior (ed.)
The course of true love for the single girl has never been rougher, but there are always good times to be had on the way.
With contributions from A M Homes and more than a dozen other women writers.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Absence Makes the Heart
by Lynne Tillman
This selection of New Yorker Lynne Tillman's short fiction, written over a ten-year period is understated and ironic, her work as funny as it is disturbing as she coolly takes aim at art, sex, memory and death.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Beneath Black Stars: Contemporary Austrian Short Stories
by Martin Chalmers
Although in the second half of the 20th century, a large number of exceptional writers emerged from the Austrian Republic, their relationship to the cultural mainstream was stormy. This collection is an excellent opportunity to sample a rich literature that remains central to European culture.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Blind Love
by Mary Woronov
From the euphoric moments of first love to the last desperate acts of jaded sex, Woronov captures the essence of love in the twenty-first century.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Demonized
by Christopher Fowler
A journalist spends a nerve-wracking weekend in the company of Nazis; a tropical holiday takes a nasty turn thanks to a troupe of monkeys; and a waitress challenges a sinister customer in a night restaurant. Fowler's latest collection of stories of urban dread is designed to fill your waking dreams with dark fears and even darker laughter.
publisher Serpent's Tail
The Devil in Me
by Christopher Fowler
A teacher loses one of her pupils somewhere in the London Underground; a catwalk model reveals the grisly secret of looking good; and sex toys become instruments of fate in this collection of immoral tales.
publisher Serpent's Tail
The Eagle and the Crow
by Teresa Halikowska
The stories in this anthology reflect how Polish writers have refracted through their work the political and social events that have determined their country's culture, a culture constantly renegotiating its boundaries and its sense of identity.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Had I A Hundred Mouths: Short Stories 1947-1983
by William Goyen
Like his contemporaries Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, Goyen's writing is deeply rooted in the myths and spells of his birth place: the wetlands of Texas. In Goyen's writing, magical, intense experiences are expressed in a prose whose rhythm refracts the brutal isolation of his characters.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Darker Days Than Usual
by Suzannah Dunn
Stories of the suburbs which are as brittle as they are funny. Dunn's observations snip away at home life until, little by little, we discover the secret truths women find so difficult to tell.
publisher Serpent's Tail
I Believe in Angels
by Fiona Cooper
Wronged lovers and passionate dreamers; dole-queue heroes and French Resistance heroines; children taking faltering steps in a chaotic world; and waltzing grannies, religious fanatics, true believers, painters and penguins. Cooper's tales touch on the joyously whimsical but also our deepest hopes and our darkest fears.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Intoxication: An Anthology of Stimulant-based Writing
by Toni Davidson (ed.)
With contributions from Irvine Welsh, Lynne Tillman, Jeff Noon, Gary Indiana and others, this anthology explores themes closely related to the preoccupations of the 'chemical generation.'
publisher Serpent's Tail
It's Dark in London: Graphic Short Stories
by Oscar Zarate
This collection includes the work of graphic artists (Neil Gaiman, David McKean, Alan Moore, Carol Swain, Dix) in tandem with the stories of London writers like Iain Sinclair, Graeme Gordon, Christoper Petit and Stella Duffy.
This fusion produces a portrait of London that captures the city's mixture of lofty towers and gutter sleaze, of suburban gentility and urban depravity, of private vices and public philanthropy.
publisher Serpent's Tail
The Language of Sharks
by Pat MacEnulty
Set in Florida's land of bare feet, rain puddles, sandspurs, palmettos, giant multicolored grasshoppers and alarmingly pink azaleas, these stories take place where garish developments rise temporarily out of the primordial swamps.
The characters' sorrows, deceptions and hopes are intertwined with a landscape that is part strip mall, part paradise.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Retro-Retro
by Amy Prior (ed.)
Marilyn Monroe goes browsing in a used bookstore in '50s New York; a Chinese fan of Hollywood musicals gets a Grace Kelly make-over; an exotic romance flourishes in a thrift store in '80s bohemian Baltimore.
Looking at the present through a rear-view mirror, this anthology offers readers a ticket to a new kind of time travel, through haunted houses and museums of strange hair, featuring ethnic slumming and dodgy '70s rock bands.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Sex, Drugs, Rock'n'Roll: Stories to End the Century
by Sarah LeFanu
These stories about sex, death and dancing are rich with references both literary and musical: from an updated version of The Story of 'O', or Alexander Trocchi in a female ward in the asylum, to Elvis reincarnated in a South Africa of multinational fast food outlets.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Stripping and Other Stories
by Pagan Kennedy
A collection of stories about female misfits - punk teenagers, voodoo queens, maths nerds, sickly little girls - each coping with the limits of her life by making up an elaborate and flattering lie about herself, a fantastic tale in which she escapes her helpless situation.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Suspect Device: Hard-Edged Fiction
by Stewart Home (ed.)
Home has gathered together a collection of fiction from a new generation of British writers who are blurring the boundaries between high-brow literature and pulp fiction: hard-edged writers who are not afraid to cross the line to violate every middle-brow notion of good taste.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Symmetries
by Luisa Valenzuela
A collection of stories that captures the absurdity of life.
Valenzuela's view of life captures the imagination because it is far removed from reality: cops in Buenos Aires are not afraid of dogs, latin lovers in cafés do make moves in the game of courtship, and the hotels in Venice overlook canals.
publisher Serpent's Tail
This Side of Reality: Modern Czech Writing
by Alexandra Buchler
To deal with political oppression, Czech writers developed a rich tradition of humour, the absurd and the surreal. Society valued the written word and made a privileged place for it in the culture.
Now Communism has been succeeded by the 'free' market, and the writer's place is more dependent upon the whims of the cultural consumer.
This anthology spans the last four decades of Czech history and brings together a rich variety of writers who together capture this turbulent period.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Vivaldi and the Number 3
by Ron Butlin
In these vignettes, the lives of great composers and philosophers are considered from unusual fictional angles: Vivaldi's creative block is cured by God's gift of the number 3; Mozart becomes Salzburg's first private eye; Haydn benefits from an appearance on Jerry Springer; and Seneca takes up residence in twenty-first century Edinburgh.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Vox'n'Roll: Fiction for the 21st Century
by Richard Thomas
Specially commissioned fiction from a selection of writers who have performed at Vox 'n' Roll literary event: Nicholas Blincoe, Jimmy Boyle, Lana Citron, Jim Dodge, Stella Duffy, Christopher Fowler, Tania Glyde, Sparkle Hayter, Vicki Hendricks, Magnus Mills, Patrick McCabe, Ben Richards, Kevin Sampson, Will Self, Matt Thorne, Lynne Tillman, Irvine Welsh and John Williams.
publisher Serpent's Tail
The Walk
by Robert Walser
Through his protagonists - young men of modest means, famous artists, society women, animals endowed with the gift of speech - Walser captures the dislocated unease of life in early twentieth-century Europe.
publisher Serpent's Tail
The Wave and Other Stories
by Caren Gussoff
The characters in Gussoff's stories live on the edge of society; they are fragile, easily bruised and lash out when threatened.
A compulsive purse-snatcher searches for the uniqueness of her self, and what makes her lovable; a recluse, dying of a mysterious illness, examines the triangle formed by her mother, her desires and the pursuit of pain; a younger sister unleashes brutal revenge when her virginity is traded for drugs.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Tree
by Patricia Duncker
A novella and short stories united by the themes of pleasure, passion, jealousy and revenge.
Duncker creates worlds where the apparently innocent are not harmless and no one ever turns out to be exactly what they seem.
publisher Picador
Appearances
by Gianni Celati
Celati never loses sight of the fact that a good story is one that entertains.
Whether describing the ups and downs of the rugby-mad Barratto, the conditions of light on the Via Emilia, the disappearance of a respectable man or the students in Milan bent on discovering the true meaning of books, the four novellas in this book are a dazzling blend of storytelling and philosophical speculation.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Break it Down
by Lydia David
This debut collection of 34 stories seems to assure us that reality is ordered and reasonable.
However, as the characters in the stories prove, misunderstanding and confusion are inherent in everyday life.
publisher Serpent's Tail
The Catch: Prize-winning Stories by Women
by Carole Buchan (ed.)
In 1996, the Asham Literary Trust organized a competition of short stories by women in honour of Asham House, the house in Sussex where Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived.
The competiton attracted over six hundred entries of which the judges selected thirteen which are published here together with commissioned stories by Kate Atkinson, Rachel Cusk, Louise Doughty, Candia McWilliam and Deborah Moggach.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Croatian Nights: A Festival of Alternative Literature
by Tony White, Matt Thorne & Borivoj Radakovic
Since 1999 the playwright and novelist Borivoj Radakovic has invited leading British writers to come to Croatia, and more recently Serbia, to perform alongside authors from the countries that make up the former Yugoslavia.
Containing 18 new short stories set in Croatia, this anthology features nine UK authors and nine writers from the former Yugoslavia, most of whom appear in English translation for the first time.
publisher Serpent's Tail
The Medicine Burns
by Adam Klein
These stories brim with boys and men who do not fit in, shedding new light on the outsider in our society
A mother and son are inexorably bound by their inherited club feet; a gay adolescent traumatised by acne turns vengeful after failing in his struggle to be loved; a young man with AIDS, unable to connect with everyday life, takes an exotic adventure.
publisher Serpent's Tail
The Quality of Light: Modern Italian Short Stories
by Ann Caesar & Michael Caesar
translated by Edward Emery
A taste of the range and richness of Italian writing today: alongside established names such as Celati, Del Guidice and Tabucchi, there are many writers whose works have not previously been translated into English.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Harlot Red: Prize-winning Short Stories by Women
by Carole Buchan & Kate Pullinger (eds.)
An anthology of the best stories submitted for the third Asham Award, organised in honour of Asham House, the house in Sussex where Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived.
The winning 12 are published here together with commissioned stories by Louise Doughty, Patricia Duncker, A L Kennedy, Elena Lappin, Kate Pullinger and Carol Shields.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Reshape Whilst Damp: The 2000 Asham Award Stories
by Carole Buchan (ed.)
Specially commissioned stories by Elspeth Barker, Helen Dunmore, Michele Roberts and Barbara Trapido rub shoulders in this anthology with the winners of the second Asham Award.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Home from the Vinyl Cafe
by Stuart McLean
Introducing Dave, owner of a downtown Toronto record store, and his wife, Morley, and their valiant attempts to rise to the challenges of modern life. These tales of everyday struggles and triumphs are rich in compassion and good-natured humour.
A second collection, The Vinyl Cafe Unplugged will be published in May 2006.
publisher Granta
Things You Should Know
by A M Homes
A woman pursues an unconventional strategy for getting pregnant; a teacher's list of 'things you already should know but maybe are a little dumb, so you don't' becomes an obsession for someone who wasn't at school the day it was given out.
The stories are full of magic and strangeness and humour, but also demonstrate an uncanny emotional accuracy and compassion.
publisher Granta
The Safety of Objects
by A M Homes
In Homes's first collection of short stories, a girl's blonde Barbie doll seduces her teenage brother in an intense episode of erotic obsession; a couple goes off the rails and smokes crack while their children are staying with their grandmother; and a lawyer seeks revenge on his boss by urinating into his potted plant every evening.
publisher Granta
The Coast of Good Intentions
by Michael Byers
The stories in Byers' collection evoke the landscape of the Pacific Northwest: crab factories, cranberry bogs, the fog-shrouded shore, the Seattle skyline.
Here are ordinary lives in all their messy, unresolved glory: ferry workers, carpenters, park rangers, adolescents leaving home, parents worrying about their children, and homecoming retirees.
publisher Granta
Stillness
by Courtney Angela Brkic
In her harrowing debut, Courtney Angela Brkic puts a human face on the lost, the missing, the exiled, and the invisible, from all sides of the Balkan conflict of the 1990s.
The stories are full of the possessions of the dead, showing how the mundane objects of everyday life can be invested with intense love and hope and grief.
publisher Granta
House of Day, House of Night
by Olga Tokarczuk
translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones
The town of Nowa Rud is a place of shifting identities. Here, at the heart of Europe, ordinary lives are not as simple as they appear.
When the narrator settles in the area with her husband, she discovers that the locals have their secrets. With the help of her enigmatic old neighbour, she gathers their stories, moving back and forth in time and between truth and myth.
publisher Granta
Reasons for Living
by Dmitry Bakin
translated by Andrew Bromfield
Known only for a handful of stories published in literary journals, Bakin suddenly found himself hailed as one of the most striking and original young writers to emerge since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
His tales are gripping, elemental dramas of restlessness and anguish; nothing is stable in his fictional universe, least of all reality, and everyone is searching, whether for safety, certainty, freedom or revenge.
publisher Granta
The Ugliest House in the World
by Peter Ho Davies
Ranging from the Welsh valleys to the Malaysian jungle, from Coventry to Natal, the eight stories in this original and elegant collection are filled with unlikely characters and striking juxtapositions.
publisher Granta
Equal Love
by Peter Ho Davies
Ho Davies takes as his starting point the essential imbalance in the relationship between parent and child.
Drawing on the author's own cross-cultural inheritance, these stories range across a series of settings and backgrounds. From a Chinese son gambling with professional mourners to a mixed-race couple who experience a close encounter with an alien being, Ho Davies' characters share an instantly recognizable sense of displacement.
publisher Granta
Lovers for a Day
by Ivan Klíma
translated by Gerald Turner
These previously untranslated stories span Ivan Klíma's career, from exiled dissident to celebrated author, and form a personal history of Prague that is an acute and moving examination of our attempts to find freedom in love.
publisher Granta
The Collected Stories of T C Boyle
by T C Boyle
A giant collection of short stories by one of America's most celebrated and versatile contemporary writers.
publisher Granta
Without a Hero
by T C Boyle
Meet Bernard Puff, proprietor of an all-American safari ranch just outside Bakersfield, California, where you can pop big game without the inconvenience of travelling to Africa.
And Susan Certaine, a Professional Organizer and acquisitive-disorders therapist, who is happy to strip you of everything including your sanity.
And beautiful Alena Jorgensen, ice maiden, seductress and liberator of the Hedda Gabler Range-Fed Turkey Ranch.
publisher Granta
Strange Words
by Patrick Chamoiseau
translated by Linda Coverdale
Chamoiseau explores and re-tells the scary, vibrant Creole folktales he heard as a child. These are fairy stories with attitude, drawn from a harsh world of slavery, sugar plantations and hunger.
They cast a strange light on our own folk tradition: the slave-ship captain is just as much a monster as the wicked old hag.
publisher Granta
Gravity
by Erica Wagner
Wagner examines the fragile architecture of human relationships, illuminating moments of redemption, despair and rare exhilaration.
publisher Granta
Monkfish Moon
by Romesh Gunesekera
The nine haunting stories in this collection are written with startling grace; they create a compelling picture of Sri Lanka, a country of teeming natural beauty and a society in turmoil.
publisher Granta
My Life in Heavy Metal
by Steve Almond
This debut collection of short stories explores the lives of young men in their twenties and thirties, their confusions, their obsessions, and their emotional complexities.
It is a clear-eyed view of relationships between young men and women coming of age in an era of lost innocence.
publisher Vintage
Einstein's Monsters
by Martin Amis
An ex-circus strongman meets his own personal holocaust and 'Einsteinian' destiny; maximum boredom and minimum love-making are advised in a 2020 epidemic; a virulent new strain of schizophrenia overwhelms the young son of a 'father of the nuclear age'; and the history of the earth is frankly discussed by one who has witnessed it all in Amis's nuclear-age collection.
publisher Vintage
Heavy Water and Other Stories
by Martin Amis
In Amis's stories whole worlds are created or inverted: everyone is gay, apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community; screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; a sardonic robot gives strange news about life in the solar system; and a man has an affair with himself.
publisher Vintage
Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories
by Margaret Atwood
A man finds himself surrounded by women who are becoming paler, more silent and literally smaller; a woman's intimate life is strangely dominated by the fear of nuclear warfare; a melancholy teenage love is swept away by a hurricane, while a tired, middle-aged affection is rekindled by the spectacle of rare Jamaican birds.
publisher Vintage
Dancing Girls
by Margaret Atwood
Pregnant women, students and journalists, farmers and birdwatchers, ex-wives, adolescent lovers and dancing girls: all ordinary people - or are they?
Atwood's other short story collections include Wilderness Tips and Good Bones.
publisher Vintage
The Complete Short Stories
by J G Ballard
96 of Ballard's short stories written throughout his 40-year career are brought together in this 1,200-page volume.
Also available: Myths of the Near Future (Vintage) - ten short stories originally written for magazines such as Time Out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The settings include an American wasteland of drained swimming pools, lushest Knightsbridge, a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and a suburb of Cape Kennedy.
publisher Flamingo
My Uncle Silas
by H E Bates
Over the course of 95 years Uncle Silas found the time to do most things: he boasted of the villains he had knocked to kingdom come, and of the women whose hearts he had captured.
Crotchety, vainglorious, occasionally wicked, he maintained a devilish spark of audacity which made him so attractive to everyone he met.
In this collection the stories are presented in full, accompanied by Edward Ardizzone's original drawings.
publisher Vintage
Red Dog
by Louis de Bernieres
Inspired by the bronze statue of the Red Dog in Karratha, a mining town in Western Australia, de Bernieres spent two weeks collecting stories about him.
publisher Vintage
Driving the Heart and Other Stories
by Jason Brown
Brown's thirteen stories focus on the battle against self-destruction, the struggle to transform loss into meaning, and the difficulty of connecting with others.
publisher Vintage
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
by A S Byatt
Byatt's fairy tales and fables are among the best-loved features of her fiction. This volume brings together the two fairy tales from Possession ('The Glass Coffin' and 'Gode's Tale' of the Breton Naie des Trepasses) with three other stories with medieval and oriental settings.
Her other collections include Angels and Insects and The Little Black Book of Stories.publisher Vintage
Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
by A S Byatt
The stories in this collection are concerned with betrayal and loyalty, loneliness and passion, and the mysterious absences at the heart of the fullest lives.
The settings range from the heart of Provence in summer to the cold forests of Scandinavia.
A S Byatt's other collections include Sugar and Other Stories and The Matisse Stories.
publisher Vintage
Coloured Lights
by Leila Aboulela
The eleven stories in this collection illuminate the subtleties of the Muslim immigrant experience in Britain, from comic culture clashes to deep spiritual struggles.
The title story tells of the tragic death of the narrator’s brother; another explores tentative romance in a Scottish kebab shop.
publisher Polygon
Adam, One Afternoon
by Italo Calvino
Nature in these stories has a magical quality in the flight of a crow, the iridescent track of a snail, and the sideways leap of a stray cat, but the magic can encompass both enchantment and terror.
Also available: Marcovaldo; Difficult Loves; Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories and Under the Jaguar Sun.
publisher Vintage
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
by Angela Carter
In tales that glitter and haunt - strange nuggets from a writer whose wayward pen spills forth stylish, erotic, nightmarish jewels of prose - the old fairy stories (Red Riding Hood, Puss-in-Boots) live and breathe again, subtly altered.
Also available: Burning Your Boats and Black Venus.
publisher Vintage
Collected Stories
by John Cheever
Cheever, like Richard Yates, was a masterful chronicler of the quiet desperation lurking beneath the manicured neatness of suburbia.
These stories of love and squalor are set in a world in which momentary glimpses of brightness - sea, clouds, light, the East River, a wife in a torn slip at the dressing table - contend with time, social change and the chaos of history.
publisher Vintage
Cannibals
by Dan Collins
The characters in this collection go about their lives in a welter of heartfelt lies and stony betrayals, wallowing in bad jokes and bad sex.
Cannibals is a novel of eighty-eight compelling bulletins that reveal the fractured essence of our age.
publisher Vintage
Furthermore
by Susie Maguire
Two Irishmen in Purgatory discuss their own suicides; a book-snob on holiday reflects on the nature of addiction; and a pair of thoroughly modern dog-lovers find breast issues impede perfect coupling in Maguire's second short story collection.
publisher Polygon
The Bride from Odessa
by Edgardo Cozarinsky
Set in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest and Odessa, both before and after the Second World War, Cozarinsky's stories belong to the spirit of Borges and to a great Argentine cosmopolitan tradition: that of the uprooted exile, the plaything of History, who, set down in a strange but proud land, looks back nostalgically to the Europe of his ancestral memory.
publisher Vintage
Diamond Dust and Other Stories
by Anita Desai
Desai's protagonists set out on journeys and find themselves suddenly beyond the pale, or surprisingly back where they started from. Caught up in cycles of hope and disappointment, their lives are ruled by the seasons, or straitjacketed by the conventions of hospitality, friendship and family. (Also available: Games at Twilight and Other Stories.)
publisher Vintage
Doghouse Roses
by Steve Earle
Musician Steve Earle also writes short stories. In this collection, he writes about a nearly-famous singer whose life and soul have been all but devoured by drugs; a hitchhiker stranded for years in a small Texas town; and the husband of a murder victim witnessing an execution.
publisher Vintage
Don't Read This Book if You're Stupid
by Tibor Fischer
Fischer takes the lid off the comedy scene in London, investigates where jokes come from and how you can make people laugh with only one toothpick and a foreskin.
Other stories are set in Brixton prison and German bookshops, contemplate the tanning of Russian bottoms on the Côte d'Azur, offer advice on driving during Romanian revolutions, give tips on successful and painless serial killing and demonstrate conclusively that no-one should live in south London.
publisher Vintage
The Worm and the Star
by John Fuller
The tales collected here are complete miniature narratives. None longer than three pages, they rove, with changes of perspective, over myth, sex, science fiction, the Middle East, boredom, beauty, grossness, global history, childhood, music and death.
Yet a strange unity of purpose binds them into a coherent universe where lives are brief but great mysteries are glimpsed.
publisher Vintage
Twenty-One Stories
by Graham Greene
The stories in this book, all written between 1929 and 1954, share the themes that feature so strongly in Graham Greene's novels: humour and violence, pity and hatred, betrayal and pursuit.
Comic, sad, shocking and tragic, they recount the tales of Mr Maling's loud stomach, destructive gangs of children, indiscretions revealed and secrets uncovered.
publisher Vintage
People for Lunch; and Spoilt
by Georgina Hammick
Funny, serious, scalpel-sharp and compassionate, Hammick's stories capture moments of truth in their subjects' lives.
Covering a wide spectrum of ages and types - from the nine-year-old son of a diplomat to an out-of-work car salesman - they expose the compromises and deceptions which we practice in our attempts to order our existence.
publisher Vintage
The Virago Book of Love and Loss
by Georgina Hammick (ed.)
This collection features work by some of the foremost women writers of this century: Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Townsend Warner.
publisher Virago
You Are Not a Stranger Here?
by Adam Haslett
The nine stories in this collection are set in Los Angeles, the Midwest, New England and England. What unites them is the emotional power that carries the reader past the surface of the subject and into the core of the characters' lives.
There is grief, passion, loneliness, humour and longing in these stories.
publisher Vintage
Death in the Afternoon
by Ernest Hemingway
First published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon remains a classic for its historical account of the Corrida, for the stories of the great matadors, their banderilleros and picadors, and for the stories of the bulls whose bravery is the primal root of the bullfight.
The book also contains some of the finest short stories Hemingway wrote, inspired by the intense life as well as the inevitable death of those hot, violent afternoons.
publisher Vintage
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
by Ernest Hemingway
In these early, partly autobiographical, stories, men and women of passion live, fight, love and die in scenes of dramatic intensity.
They range from haunting tragedy on the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro, to brutal America with its deceptive calm, and war-ravaged Europe.
publisher Vintage
The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife
by Philip Hensher
In this collection of 13 stories, discrete and contained lives brush up against each other.
A young couple are destroyed by the simple temptations of the ideal home; a shy Italian ends up in a stranger's hospital room when he rings a telephone number left in his back pocket after a late-night excursion to Hampstead Heath; the daughter of Stalin changes the life of a Cambridge painter with the gift of a fridge.
publisher HarperPerennial
The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka
by Franz Kafka
This volume contains all of Kafka's shorter fiction, from fragments, parables and sketches to longer tales.
Together they reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.
Some are well-known, others are mere jottings, observations of daily life, given artistic form through Kafka's unique perception of the world.
publisher Vintage
The Good Times
by James Kelman
The narrators of these twenty first-person narratives are men and boys who come face to face with uncomfortable truths whether musing on mortality, encountering betrayals both devastating and trivial, or struggling to understand women and work.
Also available: Burn and No, Not While the Giro and Other Stories.
publisher Vintage
The World's Smallest Unicorn and Other Stories
by Shena Mackay
An elderly woman, once an intrepid journalist, is paralysed with apprehension at the thought of meeting the daughter of her dearest friend; a budding writer is taken on as an amanuensis by a famous woman novelist, with disastrous results; a would-be biographer visits a home for retired clowns.
publisher Vintage
The Great Profundo and Other Stories
by Bernard Mac Laverty
On the fringes of society, Mac Laverty’s characters are forced to seek consolation as best they can.
Ranging from the deserted windswept coast of a troubled Ireland to the sun-drenched landscapes of Portugal, these stories portray the insecurity and flickering hope of the afflicted and estranged with deep compassion and gentle irony.
publisher Vintage
Island: Collected Stories
by Alistair MacLeod
Set against the unforgiving landscape of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, these stories are concerned with the complexities and mysteries of the human heart, the unbreakable bonds and unbridgeable chasms between man and woman, parent and child.
publisher Vintage
The Magic Barrel
by Bernard Malamud
Many of Malamud's characters are Jewish (the title story, for example, is about a rabbinical student trying to find a wife through a very peculiar marriage broker) but through his gentle and haunting exploration of their predicaments he illuminates a region that is common to every man's world.
publisher Vintage
Antipodes
by David Malouf
Stories which pinpoint the contrast between the old world and the new, between youth and age, love and hatred and even life and death itself.
publisher Vintage
Death in Venice and Other Stories
by Thomas Mann
Originally published in 1912, Death in Venice is an ironic look at the process of artistic creation and was influenced by the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (Oxford Companion to English Literature).
publisher Vintage
Ashenden
by W Somerset Maugham
One of the greatest - and most prolific - proponents of the short short form, Maugham's output is today collected in four volumes.
The stories in Ashenden are rooted in Maugham's own experiences as an agent in Switzerland during the First World War, reflecting the ruthlessness and brutality of espionage, its intrigue and treachery, as well as its absurdity.
publisher Vintage
Far Eastern Tales
by W Somerset Maugham
The stories in this collection are born of Maugham's experiences in Malaya, Singapore and other outposts of the former British Empire.
Whether portraying a ship-borne flight from a lover's curse, murder in the jungle or the remembered East of a repatriate's suburban home, they all reveal Maugham at his best - sometimes caustic, sometimes gently comic, but always the shrewd and human judge of character and soul. A second volume, More Far Eastern Tales, is also available.
publisher Vintage
Collected Short Stories (4 volumes)
by W Somerset Maugham
Although he regarded himself as a second-rate author, Maugham was certainly a prolific short-story writer and novelist.
The fact that it has taken these four volumes (and others) to collect his shorter fiction is testament to the volume and quality of his output.
publisher Vintage
First Love, Last Rites
by Ian McEwan
The book that started it all for McEwan: taut, brooding and densely atmospheric stories that show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness.
publisher Vintage
In Between the Sheets
by Ian McEwan
The seven stories in this collection engage and implicate us in the most fearful ways imaginable.
A two-timing pornographer becomes an unwilling object in the fantasies of one of his victims; a jaded millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress and plunges into a hell of jealousy and despair; and in the course of a weekend with his teenage daughter, a guilt-ridden father discovers the depths of his own blundering innocence.
publisher Vintage
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
by Alice Munro
There is in this collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in the characters for what might have been, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping.
But at the same time there is hope and second chances for people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, and move on.
publisher Vintage
The Beggar Maid
by Alice Munro
Born in a small Canadian town, Rose battled incessantly with her shrewd stepmother, Flo, who cowed her with tales of her own past and warnings of the dangerous world outside.
But Rose was ambitious; she won a scholarship and left for Toronto where she married.
This collection of stories reads like a novel following Rose's life as she moves away from her impoverished roots and forges her own path in the world.
publisher Vintage
Runaway
by Alice Munro
Runaway is about the power, betrayals and twists of love, about lost children, and lost chances.
At the heart of the book are three stories about one person, connected into one marvellously rich, long narrative.
There is pain and desolation beneath the surface of these stories, which makes them more powerful and compelling than anything she has written.
publisher Chatto & Windus
Selected Stories
by Alice Munro
A collection of Munro's short stories, selected from her earliest published work in 1968 to her latest in 1994.
Munro's other collections include Runaway; The Moons of Jupiter; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Dance of the Happy Shades; The Love of a Good Woman; and Friend of My Youth.
publisher Vintage
A Lazy Eye: Stories
by Mary Morrissy
A woman confesses her guilty secret to an obscene caller; a daughter trades with God for her father's life; a family re-enacts an unholy nativity.
Morrisy's characters act out of a flawed vision of the world; aggrieved, guilty, betrayed, they seek redemption with disturbing and savage consequences.
publisher Vintage
Me, My Mother and I
by Joyce Carol Oates & Janet Berliner
The stories in this volume are literary snapshots from the minds of some of the best living women writers.
In each story, the relationship of mothers to their daughters and daughters to their mothers plays a crucial role.
publisher Vintage
Slow Learner
by Thomas Pynchon
Collected early stories by one of America's most important and influential writers, including a revelatory essay on his early influences and writing.
publisher Vintage
East, West
by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie looks at what happens when external forces pull his characters first in one direction, then the other: a rickshaw driver writes letters describing his film star career in Bombay; a mispronunciation leads to romance and an unusual courtship in 1960s London; and Christopher Columbus dreams of consummating his relationship with Queen Isabella.
publisher Vintage
The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997
by Salman Rushdie & Elizabeth West
The best writing from the Subcontinent, selected to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence.
publisher Vintage
Civilwarland in Bad Decline
by George Saunders
Six short stories and a novella by the fiercely satirical and brilliant Saunders.
Set in a dystopian near-future in which America has become little more than a theme park in terminal disrepair, they constitute a searching and bitterly humorous commentary on the current state of the American Dream.
His other collection of stories, Pastoralia, is published by Bloomsbury.
publisher Vintage
Great Dream of Heaven
by Sam Shepard
In these seventeen stories, Sam Shepard taps the same wellspring that has made him one of America's most acclaimed playwrights: sex and regret; the yearning for a frontier that has been subdivided out of existence; the anxious gulf that separates men and women; the even deeper gulf that separates men from their true selves.
publisher Vintage
Darien Dogs
by Henry Shukman
Shukman's debut comprises the novella of the title and four short stories. Darien Dogs is about a man who once had everything, but has lost it all.
Now holed up in a seedy hotel in Panama, he realises the prostitute he's just been with has stolen his wallet. Shukman has developed one of the stories in this collection for his novel Sandstorm.
publisher Vintage
Hey Yeah Right Get a Life
by Helen Simpson
Helen Simpson's third collection is a loosely linked set of stories about women at work, at home and on holiday.
Her first two collections were Dear George and Other Stories and Four Bare Legs in a Bed. A new title, Constitutional (December 2005), tackles themes of time and change: tantrums, funerals, pregnancy, war and love affairs.
publisher Vintage
A Tidewater Morning
by William Styron
In this brilliant collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice returns to the coastal Virginia setting of his first novels.
Through the eyes of a man recollecting three episodes from his youth, Styron explores with new eloquence death, loss, war and racism.
publisher Vintage
After Bathing at Baxter's
by D J Taylor
Dorfman likes watching the planes take off towards a wider world than his; Fuchs dreams of going to England to escape from pornography, but never does; a boy is introduced to the world of art and repulsed by the bohemian life. When Elvis dies, his stand-in not only loses his job but also his raison d'etre.
publisher Vintage
Ovid Metamorphosed
by Philip Terry
For this collection, Terry asked leading writers to take Ovid as a starting point and set their imaginations free.
The results are startling, from Apollo and Phaeton transposed to a Dutch classroom, to Diana and Actaeon in the rain of Nova Scotia.
Also included: white-coated scientists, sports-cars, swans and shells, and even Ovid himself, high-spirited and unrepentant, speaking to us from beyond the grave.
publisher Vintage
Shifts
by Adam Thorpe
Thorpe explores the lives of his characters through the work they do: the jobs that empower or enslave, define or destroy them.
Work is seen as a means of social classification, an engine of prejudice or compassion, or as an arena in which bullying and subservience have legitimacy. Do we choose the job or does the job choose us?
publisher Vintage
In Every Sense Like Love
by Simona Vinci
For her second, prize winning, collection, Vinci moves away from disturbing explorations of child sexuality, but is still preoccupied by physical extremism.
She takes as her theme the definition of love in the twenty-first century: in an age when the individual is becoming increasingly absorbed by the corporate, are our own bodies the only things over which we have power?
publisher Vintage
Bagombo Snuff Box
by Kurt Vonnegut
For this unusual collection, Vonnegut has selected twenty-four of his favourite stories never published before in book form and has written a preface to accompany them.
publisher Vintage
The Acid House
by Irvine Welsh
Two professors of philosophy turn pugilists; Leith removal men become the objects of desire for Hollywood goddesses; God turns Boab Coyle into a house-fly; and a drug-addled young hero spins off on a collision course with his past.
publisher Vintage
A Haunted House and Other Stories
by Virginia Woolf
This complete collection of Virginia Woolf's shorter fiction dates from 1906 until the month before she died in 1941. It offers us an invaluable insight into her development as a writer, vividly demonstrating her evolving characterisations, narrative methods and themes.
publisher Vintage
Now That You're Back
by A L Kennedy
Exposing and exploring the sinuous undercurrents of violence, anguish and love, Kennedy examines the nature of the individual, both in isolation and society, as characters define and deny their chosen identities.
Her other collections, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, Indelible Acts, and Original Bliss, are also available.
publisher Vintage
True Tales of American Life
by Paul Auster
Chosen by Auster from four thousand stories submitted to his radio programme on National Public Radio, these 180 stories provide a wonderful portrait of America in the 20th century.
Strictly speaking, this not a collection of short fiction (one of the entry requirements was that each of the stories should be true), but in spite of this they have a fictional quality to them.
publisher Faber
The Selected Works of Djuna Barnes
by Djuna Barnes
The best writings of one of the great twentieth-century American stylists, whose extraordinary novel Nightwood, about rootless and sexually ambiguous expatriates in Paris between the wars, is a modern classic.
As well as Nightwood, this volume contains early stories and a verse play.
publisher Faber
A View from the Mangrove
by Antonio Benitez-Rojo
This collection of stories draws on and reflects the historical complexity and ethnic and linguistic diversity of the Caribbean by moving through time and geography and a variety of narrative styles.
The subject matter includes the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, the colonization of St Kitts, the landscape of the Cordillera and the Spanish-American War among other themes.
publisher Faber
The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy
by Tim Burton
Twenty-three illustrated gothic tales from the dark imagination of film director Tim Burton.
The gruesomely sympathetic children in this collection are misunderstood outcasts who struggle to find love and belonging in their cruel worlds.
Burton's lovingly lurid illustrations evoke both the sweetness and tragedy of these hopeful, yet hapless beings.
publisher Faber
Collected Stories
by Peter Carey
Peter Carey is renowned for his novels, but he is also a writer of short stories.
This volume brings together all the stories from The Fat Man in History and War Crimes as well as three other stories not previously published in book form.
They reveal Carey to be a moralist with a sense of humour, a surrealist interested in naturalism and an urban poet delighting in paradox.
publisher Faber
Love and Longing in Bombay
by Vikram Chandra
In five haunting tales Chandra paints a remarkable picture of contemporary Bombay - its ghosts, its passions, its feuds, its mysteries - while exploring timeless questions of the human spirit.
publisher Faber
Boyfriends and Girlfriends
by Douglas Dunn
The stories in poet Douglas Dunn's collection are set mainly in Scotland and show an unprejudiced eye for characters and their foibles at all levels of society.
publisher Faber
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
by Nathan Englander
Ten irreverent stories rooted in the complexity of Jewish history and the customs of orthodox life: a group of Jews fated for Auschwitz improvises an escape by blending into a troop of acrobats; a married Hasidic man, incensed by his wife's interminable menstrual cycle, gets a dispensation from a rabbi to see a prostitute.
publisher Faber
Black Faces, White Faces
by Jane Gardam
A loosely-linked sequence of stories, offering vignettes of human foibles on the island of Jamaica. Mrs Filling sees something nasty in the midday sun; an English lawyer dallies while his wife goes mad in England; sexuality flares and everywhere farce and racial tension lurk.
Gardam's other collections, The Pangs of Love, Going Into a Dark House, Missing the Midnight, and The Sidmouth Letters are also available.
publisher Abacus
My Century
by Günter Grass
translated by Michael Henry Heim
A collection of one hundred interlinked stories celebrating the twentieth century, by one of Germany's most eminent contemporary writers.
As the sequence of stories unfolds, a lively and rich picture emerges, an historical portrait of our century in all its grandeur and in all its horror.
publisher Faber
Skin
by Tobias Hill
The title story explores the Japanese underworld of tattoos, acid and murder.
In other tales, a young father finds it impossible to eradicate the ghostly memories of his dead twins; two Japanese newlyweds experience an early souring of their relationship; and a group of young children dare each other in a game of depravity while their parents sip drinks under parasols.
publisher Faber
Days Like Today
by Rachel Ingalls
In these five stories prototypes from the ancient world cast a shadow over our age: Cupid and Psyche, Penelope, Oedipus, Icarus and Odysseus inhabit the consciousness of characters who wrestle with betrayal, sacrifice, family conflict and war.
publisher Faber
Cold Snap
by Thom Jones
Jones's second collection (his first was The Pugilist at Rest) is about an overadrenalized world of desire, mania and rage.
He takes us from down-and-out America to death and disease in Rwanda, introducing us to hard-luck fighters steeling themselves for battles they've already lost, doctors who fall in love with their illnesses, and a strung-out advertising writer who uses the hand of the devil to do the work of God.
publisher
Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine
by Thom Jones
A Vietnam Vet swims alone across the English Channel to maintain the 'edge' that kept him alive in wartime; a young amateur fighter stoically endures repetitive beatings because he knows boxing shields him from the even crueller world beyond the ring; an unemployed man performs gruesome experiments on mice.
publisher Faber
We Are Still Married
by Garrison Keillor
Here are tales of love lost and found, letters on marriage and fatherhood, together with reflections on cigarette-smoking, baseball and the perils of nearsightedness.
publisher Faber
Homeland
by Barbara Kingsolver
Over landscapes ranging from northern California and the urban Southwest to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St Lucia, Kingsolver tells stories of hope, momentary joy and powerful endurance.
publisher Faber
Laughable Loves
by Milan Kundera
This collection first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but was then banned.
The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and stratagems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs and impulses that can start a terrifying train of events.
publisher Faber
The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories
by David Marcus
Marcus has brought together some of Ireland's best-loved writers with both the new, emerging generation and some previously unpublished authors.
From Ireland itself to the United States, from rural Peru to the mountains of the Himalayas, these stories collectively and individually demonstrate the complexity of emotion and memory that characterise the very finest short stories.
publisher Faber
The Collected Stories of John McGahern
by John McGahern
This remarkable volume brings together all of John McGahern's short fiction, fully revised, in a definitive text.
publisher Faber
Demonology
by Rick Moody
In this collection, Moody travels across the surface of America and lays bare the troubling loss of connection that lurks beneath.
The stories are cast in many varied forms - domestic comedy, pseudo-fairytale, philosophical argument - but whatever the genre, the underlying elements linking them all together concern loss, pleasure, and the difficulty of really expressing love.
publisher Faber
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
Moore's collection of stories is remarkable for its range, emotional force and dark humour, and for the sheer beauty and power of its language.
It unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the young, the hip, the lost, the unsettled and the unhinged of modern-day America.
publisher Faber
Curfew and Other Stories
by Sean O'Reilly
O'Reilly's characters inhabit a world that can seem dangerously indifferent to human feeling but alive to the thrills of living on the edge. Unnecessary risks are taken which are punished, not obscured, by family.
publisher Faber
The Blue Lantern
by Victor Pelevin
translated by Andrew Bromfield
Russian novelist Pelevin's reality-warping and inventive short stories bring together sex-change prostitutes, melancholy animals and a cabinful of young boys obsessed by death.
publisher Faber
The Reasons I Won't Be Coming
by Elliot Perlman
An office worker discovers his lover's betrayal via e-mail; a woman hires a private detective and trawls through the underworld for her brother; a man finds himself waking up, once again, beside the wrong person.
publisher Faber
Standard Time
by Keith Ridgway
The stories in this collection bring to life a strange, changing Dublin, full of pathos and wry humour; a city haunted by its future as much as by its past.
publisher Faber
Woman Hollering Creek
by Sandra Cisneros
This collection brings to life the sounds and smells of both sides of the Mexican border.
publisher Bloomsbury
The Smiling School for Calvinists
by Bill Duncan
Duncan's stories alternate in setting between the fishing community of Broughton Ferry and Dundee: a father soothes his son to sleep with a story of a boy floating to Scandinavia; Big Sheila tries to conceal a frozen chicken under her Russian hat; a man is reminded of his departed wife and dead son by a strand of hair on a suit.
publisher Bloomsbury
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant
by Mavis Gallant
The 52 stories in this collection, written between 1953 and 1995, confirm Gallant as one of the greatest short story writers of the twentieth century.
publisher Bloomsbury
Explaining Death to the Dog
by Susan Perabo
A Beverly Hills actor has to protect his neighbours from his own father who has taken up jewel theft in his old age; a bored wife spends all her inheritance at an auction; two straight-A students murder the school bully.
publisher Bloomsbury
Unsung Heroes of American Industry
by Mark Poirier
In his second collection of short stories Poirier writes about the misfits and visionaries who embody the aspirations of the American entrepreneur: pornographers, beauty pageant entrants, chicken processors and pearl-button manufacturers.
Poirier's debut collection, Naked Pueblo, is also published by Bloomsbury.
publisher Bloomsbury
Shoe Fly Baby: The Asham Award Short Stories
by Kate Pullinger (ed.)
The twelve winning stories plus original fiction by Liz Jensen, Maggie O'Farrell, Kamila Shamsie, Francine Stock, Erica Wagner, and Lesley Glaister.
publisher Bloomsbury
The Lion in the Room Next Door
by Merilyn Simonds
This collection of stories explores the intimate workings of a woman's heart and mind.
Inspired by moments and thoughts from a life, the tales distil memory into compelling narratives that veer from the personal to the universal.
publisher Bloomsbury
Telling Tales
by Nadine Gordimer (ed.)
Proceeds from the sale of this anthology, which features writing by Gabriel García Marquez, Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Susan Sontag, Hanif Kureishi and José Saramago among others, go to AIDS charities.
publisher Bloomsbury
Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub
by John Williams
Gangsters, pimps, dealers, bookies and the nation of Islam - welcome to Cardiff! This is a collection of twelve fast-paced and gritty stories.
publisher Bloomsbury
The Collected Stories
by Tobias Wolff
This collection brings together stories from Hunters In the Snow and Back In the World, and features the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning short story, 'The Barrack Thief'.
publisher Bloomsbury
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson
by Rose Tremain
The title story of this collection takes us into the dark heart of the dying Wallis Simpson as she lies in her Parisian bedroom, a virtual prisoner of her domineering lawyer.
Tremain is also the author of the collections The Colonel's Daughter and Other Stories, Evangelista's Fan and Other Stories and The Garden of the Villa Mollini.
publisher Chatto & Windus
Stick Out Your Tongue
by Ma Jian
Though a work of fiction, Jian's book draws on his experiences to create an extraordinary portrait of Tibet, both enchanting and horrifying, violent and beautiful, perverse and seductive.
When first published in China in 1987 it was condemned and banned.
publisher Chatto & Windus
The Nimrod Flip-Out
by Etgar Keret
translated by Mirian Schlesinger and Sondra Silverston
Set mostly in the author’s native Israel, these tales capture the ennui of life for the younger generation and poke gentle fun at Jewish stereotypes.
However, there are surprisingly moving vignettes and several surreal stories here as well.
publisher Vintage
Cannon Fodder
by David L Hayles
Hayles' debut collection, The Suicide Kit, was an alarming excursion into the world of the suffering, the delusional and the criminally insane.
The new book is populated by demented misfits, sleazy sex tourists, killer inmates, has-beens and never-weres.
publisher Secker & Warburg
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates
by Richard Yates
Yates was one of the most compassionate and technically accomplished writers of America's post-war generation.
His work inspired Richard Ford, Andre Dubus, Robert Stone, and Kurt Vonnegut, and his 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road, is a classic of American literature.
This volume contains all of Yates's short fiction.
publisher Methuen
A Calendar of Love and Other Stories
by George Mackay Brown
Fourteen stories about ancient and modern life on the island of Orkney. Mackay Brown's other collections include The Island of the Women and Other Stories.
publisher John Murray
Out of India: Selected Stories
by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
A selection of stories about the experience of living in India, brought together from this prolific writer's other collections.
publisher John Murray
My Nine Lives
by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Each chapter of this semi-autobiographical novel imagines a different life the author might have lived; as such it reads like a collection of linked short stories.
publisher John Murray
Half in Love
by Maile Meloy
From the author of the bestselling Liars and Saints, a collection of stories about a soldier's kiss in wartime London; a best friend's funeral; and a young girl torn between two worlds.
publisher John Murray
Ten Sorry Tales
by Mick Jackson
Bones and stones, vengeful hermits, wayward hearses, and junior Rip Van Winkles: Jackson's weird and eccentric stories read like cautionary tales and modern-day fables, as the world of adult experience meets that of the child’s imagination.
publisher Faber
Either Side of Winter
by Benjamin Markovits
This book is set in Manhattan over the course of one year, moving through a series of linked events and characters, season by season: together they form a moving picture of people whose lives are inextricably linked by circumstance, community and a need to be loved.
publisher Faber
Nothing But Ghosts
by Judith Hermann
Hermann's first book The Summer House, was about young women and their relationships. In this second collection, the women have moved on, but their relationships are all on the turn in some way.
publisher Fourth Estate
Men and Cartoons
by Jonathan Lethem
Superheroes take tenured positions at colleges; innermost secrets are blurted out in baroque dinner-party games; sheep bred for suicide defy the imperatives of their creators, and the smallest moments of life become unexpectedly revelatory, uncanny and hilarious in Lethem's stories.
publisher Faber
Songs on Bronze: The Greek Myths Retold
by Nigel Spivey
A bold and sensuous retelling by a Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge.
publisher Faber
Whoever You Choose to Love
by Colette Paul
Hailed on publication, this debut collection by a young Scottish writer twists the mundane to make it seem extraordinary.
A young woman goes to see her estranged father but ends up having to see him in his coffin; a little girl watches from the top bunk as her older sister gets ready to go out; and a father teaches his child to look at the stars.
publisher Orion
Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now
by Patrick McGrath
A fictional contribution to Bloomsbury's The Writer and the City series: three New York short stories, each set in a different century, evoking the changing nature of the city and its inhabitants.
publisher Bloomsbury
Lord of Illusions and Other Stories
by Dilys Rose
This collection is chiefly concerned with exploring the human spirit, through acute observation of human behaviour and detailed imagery.
Luath Press also publishes Rose's Selected Stories.
publisher Luath Press
The Lives of Strangers
by Chitra Divakaruni
Divakaruni embroiders a colourful tapestry of life in India and America, weaving tales of two continents with perception and sensitivity.
publisher Abacus
68: New Stories from Children of the Revolution
by Nicholas Royle (ed.)
Revolution, utopia, dystopia and change all feature in this collection, which was published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the student uprisings in Paris of May 1968, and other protest movements worldwide that were inspired by them. The ten writers gathered here were all born in that momentous year.
publisher Salt
Antipodes
by Ignacio Padilla
translated by Alistair Reid
Short stories by the Mexican author of Shadow Without a Name about demented explorers, impossible missions and strange plagues.
publisher Scribner
A Renegade in Springtime: Selected Short Stories
by Edward Upward
This new selection of Upward's short stories spans a literary career of almost eight decades, and celebrates his centenary.
Beginning in 1928 with the fantastical world of Mortmere in 'The Railway Accident', the stories continue through the era of political engagement in the Thirties to the reflective and poignant studies of old age that have underpinned his revival in the past decade.
publisher Enitharmon Press
The Last Book You Read and Other Stories
by Ewan Morrison
These stories tell of people caught between places and lovers, between the USA and Scotland, between desire, addiction and regret. From this collection emerges a singular picture of modern-day relationships, their conflicts and passions.
publisher Black and White
Diaspora City: The London New Writing Anthology
by Nick McDowell (ed.)
This collection of the best stories from the fifth annual London New Writing Competition includes both new and established writers (John Berger, Maggie Gee, Toby Litt, Ben Okri, Iain Sinclair, A Sivanandan and others).
publisher Arcadia
Present Fears
by Elizabeth Russell Taylor
A collection of short stories about middle-class treachery. Will Dolores Come to Tea?, Taylor's second collection, dissects our closest relationships to expose the violence that lies at the heart of intimacy.
publisher Arcadia
Nova Scotia: An Anthology of Scottish Speculative Fiction
by Andrew J Wilson & Neil Williamson
The stories in this volume re-imagine Scotland in the past, present and future. Contributors include Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, Ron Butlin, Jane Yolen, Matthew Fitt and Edwin Morgan.
publisher Mercat Press
About Love and Other Stories
by Anton Chekhov
Elusive and subtle, spare and unadorned, the stories in this selection are among Chekhov's most poignant and lyrical. They include well-known pieces as well as less familiar work.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
These short stories made the fortunes of the Strand magazine, in which they were first published, and won immense popularity for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. The detective is at the height of his powers and the volume is full of famous cases.
publisher Oxford University Press
At the Court of Pelesu and Other Malayan Stories
by Sir Hugh Clifford
Hugh Clifford was a colonial administrator in Malaya and a gifted writer. Both his early sympathies with the Malays and his aristocratic background are reflected in this collection of stories.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Attack on the Mill and Other Stories
by Émile Zola
translated by Douglas Parmée
publisher Oxford University Press
Carmen and Other Stories
by Prosper Mérimée
Mérimée's classic tale of passion and power, provided the inspiration for one of the world's most enduringly popular operas; the other stories in this book also explore the clash of primitive and civilized values.
publisher Oxford University Press
Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories
by M R James
21 stories from one of the best writers of ghost stories.
publisher Oxford University Press
Classic American Short Stories
by Douglas Grant (ed.)
This selection from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries illustrates some of the American short story's finest achievements.
Tales of the frontier, friendship, and life's experiences abound with lively characters, humorous incidents, and vivid descriptions.
Authors include Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, James, and Hemingway.
publisher Oxford University Press
Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance
by William L Andrews
During the 1920s and 1930s, an extraordinary confluence of black talent expressed itself in the literary and cultural phenomenon that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.
In a radical assertion of racial self-consciousness and a celebration of ethnic identity which was echoed across the nation, black writers and intellectuals came together with the intent of redefining the vision of America through artistic endeavour.
publisher Oxford University Press
Discoveries: Fifty Stories of the Quest
by Harold Schechter and Joanna Gormely Semeiks
This collection includes new stories by writers from diverse cultural backgrounds (Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, B K Narayan), and from a new generation of writers (Stephen Milhauser, Ellen Gilchrist, Patrick McGrath). The anthology is organized around the quest pattern delineated by Joseph Campbell.
publisher Oxford University Press
First Love and Other Stories
by Ivan Turgenev
This collection brings together six of Turgenev's best-known `long' short stories, in which he turns his skills of psychological observation and black comedy to subjects as diverse as the tyranny of serfdom, love, and revenge on the Russian steppes.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Golden Pot and Other Stories
by E T A Hoffmann
translated by Ritchie Robertson
Hoffmann is among the most popular of the German Romantics.
This selection, while stressing the variety of his work, puts in the foreground those tales in which the real and the supernatural are brought into contact and conflict.
publisher Oxford University Press
Heart of Darkness and Other Tales
by Joseph Conrad
The four tales in this volume depict corruption and obsession, and question racial assumptions.
Set in the exotic surroundings of Africa, Malaysia and the east, they variously appraise the glamour, folly, and rapacity of imperial adventure.
publisher Oxford University Press
Late Victorian Gothic Tales
by Roger Luckhurst (ed.)
This anthology collects together some of the most famous examples of the Gothic tale in the 1890s, with stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Vernon Lee, Henry James and Arthur Machen, as well as some lesser known yet superbly chilling tales from the era.
publisher Oxford University Press
Mad Monkton and Other Stories
by Wilkie Collins
Adapting the tradition of the Gothic tale of terror, Collins wrote ghost stories with a distinctively contemporary flavour and also made a major contribution to the newly emerging form of the detective story.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories
by Stewart Brown & John Wickham
This collection includes stories from the four main languages of the region: English, Spanish, French, and Dutch.
English language writers such as V S Naipaul, Sam Sevlon, and Jean Rhys are set alongside their Spanish- and French-speaking contemporaries Alejo Carpentier, Jan Bosh, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Also included is the new generation of Caribbean writers, among them Edwidge Danticat, Robert Antoni, Astrid Roemer, and Jamaica Kincaid.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories
by William Trevor (ed.)
This anthology traces the development of the Irish short story from the early folk-tales of the oral tradition through Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, James Joyce, and Liam O'Flaherty, and on to the rising stars of the modern generation, such as Bernard Mac Laverty and Desmond Hogan.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories
by Theodore Goossen (ed.)
This collection of short stories, including many new translations, is the first to span the whole of Japan's modern era from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.
publisher Oxford University Press
Paris Tales
by Helen Constantine (ed.)
Twenty-two stories by well-known French and Francophile writers including Nerval, Maupassant, Colette, and Echenoz, each providing a captivating glimpse into Parisian life from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.
publisher Oxford University Press
Plain Tales from the Hills
by Rudyard Kipling
Kipling was, of course, one of the greatest writers of short stories (many of which first appeared in newspapers). His early tales of the Raj were collected in this volume, his first published book, in 1888.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Queen of Spades and Other Stories
by Alexander Pushkin
translated by Alan Myers
Pushkin's classic representation of gambling is joined in this collection by three of his other major works, moving from the witty parodies of sentimentalism and high melodrama to an early experiment with recreating the past, and a narrative of rebellion and romance.
publisher Oxford University Press
Scenes of Clerical Life
by George Eliot
The three stories in Eliot's first book of fiction foreshadow her later work with her compassionate portrayal of ordinary lives.
publisher Oxford University Press
South Sea Tales
by Robert Louis Stevenson
This collection - the first to bring together all his shorter Pacific fiction in one volume - shows Stevenson using the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Oxford Book of French Short Stories
by Elizabeth Fallaize (ed.)
Spanning the centuries from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth, this collection includes writing by, among others, the Marquis de Sade, Stendhal, Balzac, Maupassant, Beauvoir, Colette, Djebar, Baroche, Saumont and Vivien.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories
by Douglas Dunn (ed.)
Dunn's selection displays the range of Scottish storytelling, beginning with early traditional tales, and including writers from the last three centuries: Scott, Stevenson, Barrie, Violet Jacob, Neil Gunn, Linklater, Alasdair Gray, Kelman, Ronald Frame, Janice Galloway, and A L Kennedy.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Oxford Book of Short Stories
by V S Pritchett (ed.)
41 stories from 11 countries have been collected for this wide-ranging anthology, edited by one of the acknowledged masters of the genre.
publisher Oxford University Press
Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
Anderson's masterpiece is a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small Ohio town at the end of the nineteenth century.
At its centre is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's 'grotesques'.
George is their conduit for expression and solace from loneliness, but he has his own longings which eventually draw him away from home to seek a career in the city.
publisher Oxford University Press
Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A collection of twenty of Hawthorne's tales drawn from his prolific output.
publisher Oxford University Press
The Crimes of Love: Heroic and Tragic Tales
by Marquis de Sade
translated by David Coward
Coward has selected seven tales from Sade's compendious four-volume collection of short stories for this publication.
Sade writes about murder, seduction, and incest; tragedy, despair, and death. His villains will stop at nothing to satisfy their depraved passions, and they in turn suffer under the thrall of love.
publisher Oxford University Press
Lucky Girls
by Nell Freudenberger
Shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Award for New Writers, Freudenberger's debut is a collection of five stories set in India and South-East Asia which explore romance, loss, betrayal and dysfunctional families against the backdrop of the cultural alienation that one can experience when living abroad.
publisher Picador
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
by Amy Bloom
Second collection (her first was Come to Me) from American writer Bloom: a woman recovers from cancer while her best friend and husband face their loneliness and a new friendship; a mother comes to know that her wonderful little girl is a boy; a man and his stepmother do a complicated dance of memory, anger and forgiveness.
publisher Picador
Who Do You Think You Are?
by Malcolm Bradbury
In seven short stories, Bradbury takes a subtly ironic look at a variety of targets: American academics, provincial Britain, the aspirations of social workers, psychologists and the well-intentioned.
publisher Picador
The Picador Book of Contemporary Chinese Fiction
by Carolyn Choa & David Su Li-Qun
An anthology of Chinese stories written since the demise of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.
Offering an insight into a changing culture, this collection concentrates on the literature arising from China in the 1980s.
publisher Picador
The Picador Book of Crime Writing
by Michael Dibdin (ed.)
Dibdin has gathered a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction for this collection to shed real insight into the laws, whys and wherefores of crime.
Contributors include Chekhov, P D James, Chandler, Poe, Sartre and Barbara Vine.
publisher Picador
Dancing After Hours
by Andre Dubus
The lives in this collection of 14 stories unfold with an inevitability that is moving, sometimes redemptive and always surprising, whether they are played out at a roadside bar or family camp, or among the rigors and violence of the domestic world.
publisher Picador
The Picador Book of Latin American Stories
by Carlos Fuentes & Julio Ortega
39 Latin American stories that emphasize urban and cosmopolitan experiences. Established authors such as Borges and Marquez are represented along with lesser-known authors.
publisher Picador
Because They Wanted To
by Mary Gaitskill
Featuring sex between friends, between enemies and between strangers, this is a collection of stories about people who want badly, without quite knowing what it is that they want or how to get it.
publisher Picador
Pilgrims and Other Stories
by Elizabeth Gilbert
A collection of short stories in which the characters misjudge things, find themselves in the wrong place, and doggedly follow the wrong path (such as the vegetable market stallholder who decides to stand for election against the local Mafia boss).
publisher Picador
Why Don't You Stop Talking: Stories
by Jackie Kay
The stories in this collection cover a great deal of emotional and narrative terrain, from an immaculate observation of the female physiognomy to the bewilderment of the elderly; from silent hidden love to a lifetime reminiscence of an immigrant's England.
publisher Picador
Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance
by Matthew Kneale
A respectable lawyer chances upon a stash of cocaine and realizes it offers the wealth and status he hungers for; a well-intentioned family on holiday in China become complicit in the country's violence; a salesman in Africa is caught up in a riot that turns his life upside down.
These stories journey from England to Ethiopia, from Colombia to the Middle East.
publisher Picador
Mondo Desperado
by Patrick McCabe
McCabe writes under the guise of Irish writer Phildy Hackball, who has compiled a collection of stories about small-town life in Barntrosna, from a farmer's romance to his skin condition to one man's culinary relationship with Bruce Lee.
publisher Picador
Wait Till I Tell You
by Candia McWilliam
Travelling between Scotland and England, each story in this collection is separate from, but bonded to, its fellow by similiar themes, such as love and nationality.
publisher Picador
Not Her Real Name
by Emily Perkins
A guide to romance, to the vagaries of city life, and to a self-absorbed generation whose love affairs are never as good as the last movies they've seen.
publisher Picador
33 Moments of Happiness
by Ingo Schulze
These stories focus on the city of St Petersburg: a mafia shoot-out in a disco; three devils who appear for an evening in a steam bath; and St. Nicholas coming back as a rich American.
publisher Picador
The Lady with the Laptop
by Clive Sinclair
The stories in this collection are concerned with unreliable narrators and equally unreliable contraceptives.
Sinclair's other short story title For Good or Evil is also published by Picador.
publisher Picador
Bear and his Daughter
by Robert Stone
Junkies, addicts and obsessives populate Stone's short stories.
publisher Picador
All Stories Are True: The Stories of John Edgar Wideman
by John Edgar Wideman
A collection of stories about African Americans from all walks of life who reside in Homewood, a black section of Pittsburgh, about ancestors, family and lovers caught up in American history and haunted by their particular demons.
publisher Picador
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories
by John Barth
Through his exploration of the nature of storytelling, and the uncanny power that language has in our lives, Barth offers a blend of playfulness and illuminating insight.
Here are tales of ageing, time, possibility, and relationships, framed - in postmodern fashion - by the narration of a veteran writer.
publisher Atlantic Books
The Magic of Blood
by Dagoberto Gilb
This, Gilb's first collection, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. The stories are set in the southwestern USA and introduce the reader to a world of bills and debt repayment; old trucks; paychecks that bounce; greedy landladies; fights; cheap girls; drugs; and a hunger for work.
publisher Atlantic Books
Sightseeing
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Lapcharoensap writes about the real Thailand beneath the tourist veneer: a place that is dynamic and corrupt, full of pride and passion and fear.
In these intergenerational stories of luck and loss, mother and son, Thai and tourist, healthy and sick are bound together.
publisher Atlantic Books
Broken Promises
by Igal Sarna
Sarna's (true) stories describe how Israeli men and women struggle to hold on to their identity, their sanity and their hope in the face of brutal and desperate conditions.
These modern-day parables of flesh, blood and soil expose the profound human toll exacted in the process of creating a nation.
publisher Atlantic Books
Going to Meet the Man
by James Baldwin
Theses stories explore the roots of love, murder and radical conflict: a child who can never be forgiven by his God-fearing father for his illegitimacy; a black girl in love with a white man who, she knows, will leave her; a racist's memories of the mutilation and murder of a black man.
Baldwin unlocks doors marked ‘history’ and ‘prejudice’ and probes beneath the skin to the soul.
publisher Penguin
Selected Short Stories
by Honore de Balzac
translated by Sylvia Raphael
13 short stories by the author of Old Goriot.
A distinguished atheist surgeon attends religious services; a decaying country mansion harbours an horrific secret; a murder is committed in the Red Inn.
publisher Penguin
Collected Stories
by Saul Bellow
Bellow died in 2005; this collection of his shorter fiction is a worthy testament to his writing.
publisher Penguin
The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
by Jorge Luis Borges
translated by Andrew Hurley
This was the last of Borges' major collections to be published and includes stories written right at the end of his life. The stories have fantastical plots but are written very plainly.
Penguin also publishes the collections Labyrinths and The Aleph.
publisher Penguin
Stories
by Paul Bowles
Isolation is a major theme of Bowles's dark and often unsettling stories. He creates a world in which the extreme situations the characters find themselves in move relentlessly towards their logical yet disturbing conclusion.
publisher Penguin
On the Yankee Station
by William Boyd
This early collection features adolescent sex in a Scottish boys' public school, oddballs on the seedy side of America, and murder in a quiet Devon cottage.
It also includes two early adventures from the career of Morgan Leafy, anti-hero of A Good Man in Africa.
publisher Penguin
The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories
by Malcolm Bradbury (ed.)
A veritable roll-call of established and respected British writers: Ishiguro, Greene, Lowry, Beckett, Bowen, Pritchett, Rhys, Golding, Amis, Lessing, Spark, Fowles, Ballard, and Weldon, McEwan, Trevor, Pritchett and more.
publisher Penguin
Italian Folktales
by Italo Calvino
translated by George Martin
Calvino's collection of folktales from his homeland transports the reader into a world of adventurers, tricksters, kings, peasants and saints.
publisher Penguin
Exile and the Kingdom
by Albert Camus
translated by Justin O'Brien
Set mostly on the desert fringes of Camus’s native Algeria, these stories are concerned with exile – spiritual, mental or physical. They depict men and women at revelatory moments of their lives, yet often escape leads to imprisonment of another kind instead.
publisher Penguin
Music for Chameleons
by Truman Capote
One non-fiction novel - an insight into the mind of a killer and the obsession of the man bringing him to justice - six short stories and seven ‘conversational portraits’ make up this collection of Capote's writing.
publisher Penguin
The Penguin Book of American Short Stories
by James Cochrane (ed.)
21 stories by some of the greatest names in American literature: Poe, James, Hemingway et al.
publisher Penguin
The Devil's Larder
by Jim Crace
In sixty-four dark, unsettling and tender tales, Crace explores our human foibles through our relationship with food: dishes both exotic and mysterious, manners less suited to the table than to the bedroom, chefs with much more than food on their minds, diners with curious appetites and ingredients that can alter lives.
publisher Penguin
The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl
by Roald Dahl
This omnibus contains all the stories from the collections Over to You, Someone Like You, Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch, plus eight further tales of the unexpected.
publisher Penguin
Seven Gothic Tales
by Isak Dinesen
Romantics, adventurers, sensualists, melancholics and dreamers inhabit the bizarre and exotic world conjured up in these seven intricately interwoven tales, whose settings range from Tuscany and Elsinore to Zanzibar. Dinesen's other collections (Winter's Tales; Anecdotes of Destiny and Shadows on the Grass) are also available.
publisher Penguin
Love of Fat Men
by Helen Dunmore
Tense, moving and mysterious, this book explores the pain woven into human relationships, the ambivalence of filial love and the dangerous lure of sensuality. Dunmore's other short story collection, Ice Cream, is also available.
publisher Penguin
The Collected Short Stories
by F Scott Fitzgerald
From the glittering glamorous social whirl of the jazz age and the grim realities of the 30s, with their lost hopes and shattered dreams, to the last sad years of his life, Fitzgerald wrote unforgettable stories that defined a generation.
publisher Penguin
Three Tales
by Gustave Flaubert
First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness and religious experience, and together form a triumphant conclusion to Flaubert's literary career.
publisher Penguin
Collected Short Stories
by E M Forster
Written at various dates before the First World War, these twelve stories contain themes that were to re-emerge in Forster's later work, in particular the attempt to escape from the 'respectable claim of reality'.
Forster demonstrates his belief in freedom, self-realization and a spiritual honesty that may be used to defeat the lies of repression.
publisher Penguin
Gothic Tales
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect, and form a stark contrast to the social realism of Gaskell's novels, revealing a darker and more unsettling style of writing.
An account of the Salem witch hunts shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors; and an evil doppelganger is formed by a woman's bitter curse.
publisher Penguin
Romantic Fairy Tales
by Carol Tully (ed.)
Deeply affected by the turmoil of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, many of the great German Romantics adopted the Kunstmärchen or 'literary fairytale' to express their fascination with mystery, mediaevalism and the darker side of human nature.
This volume features work by Goethe, Tieck, Fouqué, and Brentano.
publisher Penguin
Selected Stories
by O Henry
These 80 stories displays O Henry's comic eye and ironic approach to life's realities. They are about con men, tricksters and 'innocent' deceivers, as well as fate, luck and coincidence.
publisher Penguin
Dubliners
by James Joyce
Joyce's stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism.
He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.
publisher Penguin
When the Women Come Out to Dance
by Elmore Leonard
In this new collection of shorter works – two novellas and a number of short stories – Leonard is at his characteristic best: dead-on dialogue, vivid atmosphere, superb characterization and driving plots.
publisher Penguin
Moments of Reprieve
by Primo Levi
translated by Ruth Feldman
These stories are an elegy to the human figures who stood out against the tragic background of Auschwitz.
publisher Penguin
The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories
by Wyndham Lewis
This collection recounts the adventures of Kerr-Orr, a self-termed ‘soldier of humour’, and his travels in the Breton countryside shortly before the First World War.
Through his experiences, along with other tales that range from mocking depictions of fellow travellers to vivid portrayals of circus clowns, Wyndham Lewis depicts a weary, run down pre-war culture.
publisher Penguin
Exhibitionism
by Toby Litt
Second collection of short stories by Litt (his first was Adventures in Capitalism.
publisher Penguin
Beyond the Blue Mountains
by Penelope Lively
These fourteen stories range from the fantasy of Scheherazade to a dazzling example of chaos theory. For the most part, however, they depict the subtle but significant events that go to create everyday experience.
publisher Penguin
The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories
by H P Lovecraft
Lovecraft expanded the vast boundaries of the horror genre with his vividly imagined stories of exotic and fantastical otherworlds, nightmarish dreamscapes or the supernatural terrors lurking beneath the surface of small-town America.
Also available from Penguin: The Thing on the Doorstep and The Call of Cthulhu.
publisher Penguin
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
by Carson McCullers
McCullers' tale of unrequited love, violence, hatred and betrayal is joined in this collection by six other short stories.
publisher Penguin
Collected Stories
by Vladimir Nabokov
65 stories spanning Nabokov's extraordinary life and career.
Arranged chronologically to illuminate his development as a writer, the collection displays Nabokov's astonishing range of technical and formal inventiveness: the dazzling sleight of hand, fanciful fairy tales, ingenious puzzles, enchanting vignettes and haunting melancholic narratives full of disturbing ambiguities.
publisher Penguin
The Blazing World and Other Writings
by Margaret Cavendish
Flamboyant, theatrical, exuding ambiguous sexuality, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was one of the seventeeth century's most striking figures. The title story is an inventive and extravagant portrayal of the rise of a woman to absolute power.
publisher Penguin
My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories
by Frank O'Connor
O'Connor (the pseudonym of Irishman Michael O'Donovan) published many volumes of short stories.
In the title story of this collection a boy grows resentful and jealous of losing his mother's undivided attention when his father returns from the war.
publisher Penguin
The Collected Dorothy Parker
by Dorothy Parker
Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of her age in her writing.
The decadent 1920s and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll.
With a biting wit and perceptive insight, Dorothy Parker examines the social mores of her day and exposes the darkness beneath the dazzle.
publisher Penguin
The Complete Short Stories
by Saki (H H Munro)
In these macabre, acid and very funny short stories, Saki drives a knife into the upper crust of English Edwardian life. There is tea on the lawn, the smell of gunshot, the tinkle of the caviar fork and beneath it all the half-seen, half-felt menace lying beneath the polished surface of society.
publisher Penguin
Selected Short Stories
by Rabindranath Tagore
Poet, novelist, painter and musician, Rabindranath Tagore is the grand master of Bengali culture.
Written during the 1890s, the stories in this selection brilliantly recreate vivid images of Bengali life and landscapes in their depiction of peasantry and gentry, casteism, corrupt officialdom and dehumanizing poverty.
publisher Penguin
The Heart of India
by Mark Tully
Imbued with his love for India, and informed by his experience of India (where he worked for the BBC for over 20 years), Mark Tully has woven together a series of stories set in Uttar Pradesh.
publisher Penguin
The Early Stories 1953-1975
by John Updike
This collection opens with Updike's autobiographical stories about a young boy growing up during the Depression in a small Pennsylvania town.
Also included: tales of life away from home, student days, early marriage and young families, and finally Updike's experimental stories.
Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, 'Rabbit Remembered' is also available.
publisher Penguin
Micromégas and Other Short Fictions
by Voltaire
translated by Theo Cuffe
From ribald tales of adultery to conversations between cosmic travellers, the stories in this collection pose moral, philosophical and social questions. Reader and protagonist alike find their assumptions challenged as Voltaire mingles rationality and fantasy.
publisher Penguin
Complete Short Fiction
by Oscar Wilde
Fairy tales, ghost stories, detective fiction and comedies of manners; the stories collected in this volume made Oscar Wilde’s name as a writer of fiction, showing breathtaking dexterity in a wide range of literary styles.
publisher Penguin
The Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women
by A Susan Williams & Richard Glyn Jones (eds.)
These tales are presented in chronological order, capturing the sexual values and mores of each writer's time. Together they illustrate the uniquely feminine experience of sex.
Among the 31 contributors are Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, and writers from countries as disparate as Germany, Botswana, Lebanon, and Japan.
publisher Penguin
Consider Her Ways and Others
by John Wyndham
Wyndham writes about the future as an amazonian ants' nest, a single-sex totalitarian nightmare; the search for a love that is not just lost, but has never even been; a Satanic salesman's struggles with a quick-witted mortal. (More of his short stories appear in The Seeds of Time.)
publisher Penguin
Fantastic Night & Other Stories
by Sfefan Zweig
The title story of this collection is about a transforming evening in the life of a rich, bored man. Other tales explore unrequited passions. Zweig's other work is also published by Pushkin Press.
publisher Pushkin Press
For a Night of Love
by Emile Zola
These stories explore themes of deception and dissatisfaction, as well as depicting the sexual mores of Zola's age.
publisher Hesperus Press
In a German Pension
by Katherine Mansfield
Written shortly after Mansfield visited Germany as a young woman, these short stories form a series of satirical sketches of German characters, from a young wife’s preoccupation with her husband’s stomach, to a society lady’s inability to see beyond the latest fashion.
publisher Hesperus Press
Life in the Country
by Giovanni Verga
Rich in colour and poignant in style, this collection is Verga's heartfelt attempt to record the very essence of Sicilian life.
publisher Hesperus Press
Loveless Love
by Luigi Pirandello
translated by J G Nichols
The three stories in this collection were Pirandello's debut collection. In his bitter theme, he offers no sweet notes to take the edge off abuse in the name of love.
publisher Hesperus Press
Mugby Junction
by Charles Dickens
Arriving at Mugby Junction in an attempt to escape his unhappy past, Barbox Brothers befriends a workman and his invalid daughter. They help him to discover which of the seven lines will best suit his journey of escape; each line provides the basis for a story.
publisher Hesperus Press
The Popular Girl
by F Scott Fitzgerald
A society girl meets a very rich and very eligible young man; yet no sooner have they met than her drunken father dies unexpectedly, leaving her impoverished.
Too ashamed to admit this, she creates a fanciful world of parties and suitors to convince him she is still the popular girl he first met.
Also available: The Rich Boy and The Collected Short Stories.
publisher Hesperus Press
Talking About It
by Tim Parks
Whether describing the simmering warfare in an Italian condominium, the problems and pleasures of adultery, or the trappings of the generation game, these stories reveal Parks's deeply-felt preoccupations with the inner workings of the human psyche.
publisher Hesperus Press
Transformation
by Mary Shelley
Three Gothic tales from the author of Frankenstein.
publisher Hesperus Press
The Wall
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre charts the mental descent into madness of three political prisoners on the eve of their execution in exquisite, often harrowing detail. This snapshot of life in anguish is the perfect introduction to a collection of stories in which the neuroses of the modern world are mirrored in the lives of the people who inhabit it.
publisher Hesperus Press
Who Killed Zebedee?
by Wilkie Collins
Chilling stories about Victorian London by the author of The Moonstone.
publisher Hesperus Press
Underwords: The Hidden City
by Maggie Hamand (ed.)
This collection features the winning entries to the Booktrust London Short Story Competition as well as new stories about the capital by established writers Diran Adebayo, Nicola Barker, Sarah Hall and others.
publisher Maia Press
The Complete Short Stories
by Ian Rankin
This volume brings together Rankin's previous short story titles Beggar's Banquet and A Good Hanging; it also includes a new Inspector Rebus mystery entitled 'Atonement'.
publisher Orion
The Collected Mystery Stories
by Lawrence Block
This omnibus edition contains 58 stories previously uncollected in the UK, plus 12 additional stories. The collection features many of Block's best-loved characters, including Matt Scudder, Ehrengraf, Chip Harrison and Bernie Rhodenbarr.
publisher Orion
The Continental Op
by Dashiell Hammett
These seven stories, which first appeared in the magazine Black Mask, are the best examples of Hammett's early writing, in which his formidable literary and moral imagination is already operating at full strength.
publisher Orion
Dark Visions
by Stephen King, George R R Martin, Dan Simmons
A collection of horror stories by three of the most respected writers of the genre.
publisher Orion
Reach for Tomorrow
by Arthur C Clarke
The twelve tales in this collection, which includes Clarke's first published short story, display the unique blend of scientific realism and soaring visionary imagination that have made him the world's best-loved writer of science fiction.
publisher Gollancz
The Wonders of the Invisible World
by David Gates
A gay man leaves the big city for life in his hometown, only to find himself cast as a father figure to his detoxing sister's young son; a woman chafes at life after the departure of the husband she never imagined would leave her; an embittered dean loses his wife, child, and student lover.
publisher Orion
Last Night: Stories
by James Salter
In some ways the ten disturbing, compelling stories in Last Night are old-fashioned; men are manly, women are beautiful, and each one comes with a killer twist. Yet the stories’ central themes – betrayal and the way it almost carelessly destroys the golden lives of the seemingly contented – are universal and timeless.
publisher Picador
Close Range: Wyoming Stories
by Annie Proulx
Brutal, beautiful and funny stories set in the heartland of the United States. The lives of Proulx's characters are inextricably linked to the land and the fight for survival in extreme conditions.
Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 explores these themes further.
publisher Fourth Estate
The Collected Short Stories
by Jeffrey Archer
This volume brings together three of Archer's previous collections A Quiver Full of Arrows, A Twist in the Tale, and Twelve Red Herrings. Another collection, To Cut A Long Story Short is also available.
publisher HarperCollins
The Complete Stories of Isaac Asimov
by Isaac Asimov
25 science fiction stories, many of them classics of the genre, by a Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the author of the Robot books.
A second volume brings together another 23 stories.
publisher HarperCollins
The Stories of Richard Bausch
by Richard Bausch
In a collection of forty-two short stories by an award-winning writer, the author explores his fascination with the everyday details of human relationships and considers the dramatic roots of common interactions.
publisher HarperCollins
Nice Big American Baby
by Judy Budnitz
A fantastically surreal collection from the Orange Prize shortlisted author of If I Told You Once.
publisher HarperPerennial
Sands of Time
by Barbara Erskine
Ghost stories, mysteries and love stories make up this collection, which also includes two longer pieces that follow the fortunes of characters from Erskine's novel Whispers in the Sand. She has written two other collections of short stories as well.
publisher HarperCollins
Bread and Chocolate
by Philippa Gregory
A TV chef who specialises in outrageous cakes tempts a monk who bakes bread for his brothers; a surprise visitor invites mayhem into the perfect minimalist flat in the season of good will; a woman explains her unique view of straying husbands.
publisher HarperCollins
What You Make It
by Michael Marshall Smith
Surreal and disturbing stories: God is discovered working in a drab old electrical store on Kentish Town Road, with few customers; the lengths some people will go to in order to fit into their old jeans; the end of an idyllic summer childhood day.
publisher HarperCollins
Tales from the Perilous Realm
by JRR Tolkien
A collection of Tolkien's four 'fairie' tales: 'Farmer Giles of Ham'; 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil'; 'Leaf by Niggle'; and 'Smith of Wootton Major'.
publisher HarperCollins
The Age of Grief
by Jane Smiley
A collection of often humorous short stories by a prize-winning American writer, each of which is an account of contemporary domestic life in crisis.
publisher Flamingo
To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories 1
by Doris Lessing
For more than four decades, Lessing's work has observed the passion and confusion of human relations, holding a mirror up to our selves in her unflinching dissection of the everyday.
The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories 2 is also available.
publisher Flamingo
Dangerous Pleasures: A Decade of Stories
by Patrick Gale
Gale writes about curious childhood loyalties, long-hidden memories, newly discovered joys, startling secrets, dislocated relationships, and overwhelming, thrilling passions, exploring the subtle boundaries between the fantastic and shockingly real.
publisher Flamingo
In This Block There Lives a Slag
by Bill Broady
Who is the mysterious Slag that has the whole street gossiping, and who has she hurt? Why has a ten-foot-high message been painted on a council block?
From the backstreets of Bradford to dingy moorland pubs with ten-year-old jukeboxes, Broady's bright stories give Yorkshire a lick of new paint.
publisher Flamingo
The Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri, a Bengali Bostonian, won the Pulitzer Prize for this collection, in which (among other things) a couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment; and a student arrives in a mystifying new land to await the arrival of his arranged-marriage wife from Bengal.
publisher Flamingo
The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner
by Alan Sillitoe
Sillitoe's classic tale is joined by other stories in this edition.
publisher Flamingo
The Means of Escape
by Penelope Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's last book comprises eight stories, among them a tale of office life, redundancy and "a visitant which should not be walking but buried in the earth"; and one about a young seventeenth-century boy's discovery of a lost keepsake in the hand of a cold-handed boy.
publisher Flamingo
Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide
by Fay Weldon
A spiky, feisty, hilarious collection of stories that expose women's clumsy, often doomed, attempts to negotiate a smooth path through life.
Bold, glamorous, sexy and unrepentant, Fay Weldon's heroines offer a quite unique view of the world as they face their trials without fear or trepidation.
Other Fay Weldon short story collections: Watching Me, Watching You, Polaris, Moon Over Minneapolis and A Hard Time to be a Father.
publisher Flamingo
Poachers
by Tom Franklin
In these ten muscular stories, Franklin evokes a world of forests and swamps, hunting and fishing, and fills it with poachers, drunks and poor white trash.
He creates haunting tales about people who react, often violently, against a dying world whose gravity they can't escape.
publisher HarperPerennial
The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
A sequence of stories about the Vietnam War, this book also has the unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme. It aims to summarize America's involvement in Vietnam, and her coming to terms with that experience in the years that followed.
publisher Flamingo
The Three Button Trick: Selected Stories
by Nicola Barker
A woman's talking foetus makes plans of its own; a nose-job reveals strangeness in a teenage girl: these are just two of the odd characters that inhabit Nicola Barker's unsettling fictional world.
publisher Flamingo
The Brutal Language of Love
by Alicia Erian
Erian's debut may not be a book for nice girls, but it has a lot to teach us about the unruly nature of desire.
A college-bound student plots to lose her virginity to a pizza waiter; a spelling champion spends her afternoons in the bath with the classroom bully; and a newlywed finds herself strangely drawn to her husband's father.
publisher Review
Jenny and the Jaws of Life
by Jincy Willett
A uniquely insightful short story collection with huge appeal to women of all ages.
publisher Review
Kissing in Manhattan
by David Schickler
A series of intertwining New York fairytales set in an old-fashioned apartment building with some extraordinary characters, among them a charismatic millionaire with a penchant for nude restraint; a couple whose secret nightly bath is suddenly headline news; and a nymphomaniac perfume heiress.
publisher Review
Of Cats and Men
by Nina de Gramont
Haughty Bengals, Himalayan high points and feral strays: these are the haunting familiars of this collection of themed tales. Prowling through every story, these enigmatic creatures expose the hidden fears and passions of the female heart, and illuminate the deep truths about men and love.
publisher Review
The Red Carpet
by Lavanya Sankaran
Friction between the generations is nowhere stronger than in Banglore, India's Silicone Valley, where software billionaires, beggars and the legacy of the Raj combine and collide. Sankaran writes about this clash between East and West in her stories.
publisher Review
Fancies and Goodnights
by John Collier
First published in 1951, Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are a part of the tradition of weird writing that includes E T A Hoffmann, Borges and Dahl. His characters include man-eating flora, disgruntled devils and suburban salarymen.
publisher New York Review Books
The Fierce and Beautiful World
by Andrei Platonov
Platonov's work was suppressed in his lifetime (1899-1951). For a new generation of experimental Russian writers he figures as a remarkable linguistic innovator, the master of what has been called 'alternative realism'.
publisher New York Review Books
The Stories of J F Powers
by J F Powers
Powers wrote about many things: baseball and jazz, race riots and lynchings, the Great Depression, and the flight to the suburbs. His greatest subject, however — and one that he made his own — was the lives of priests in Chicago and the Midwest.
publisher New York Review Books
Destinations
by Sheila O'Flanagan
This collection is set around the DART (the Dublin Area Rapid Transport system) and includes the tale of two eavesdropping passengers who learn more than they bargained for about their own love lives and an office worker who imagines herself to be an undercover agent.
publisher Headline
Girl in Hyacinth Blue
by Susan Vreeland
This series of tales revolves around an imaginary painting by Vermeer. Each tale reflects the impact the painting has on the the people around it whose lives it either illuminates or darkens.
publisher Headline
Smoke and Mirrors
by Neil Gaiman
Among the stories in Gaiman's collection: an elderly widow finds the Holy Grail beneath an old fur coat; a stray cat fights and refights a terrible nightly battle to protect his adoptive family from evil.
publisher Headline
Crime from the Mind of a Woman
by Elizabeth George (ed.)
These stories are set in locations as diverse as Africa and the Caribbean, London and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Switzerland.
Some are modern; some period. Some feature well-known sleuths - Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, Jemina Shore - or notorious villains - Jack the Ripper; others are tales of 'ordinary' people caught up in unusual events.
publisher Hodder & Stoughton
The Dog Catcher
by Alexei Sayle
This sequel to Sayle's first short story collection Barcelona Plates is similarly dark, satirical, humorous and disturbing.
publisher Sceptre
Hotel of the Saints
by Ursula Hegi
publisher Scribner
The Laws of Evening
by Mary Yukari Waters
Waters brings to life a generation of Japanese women who survived the war their husbands did not - the last representatives of a delicate, ancient culture.
In their past lies the brutality and defeat of World War Two, which fills them with shame. In the future looms the American Century, which their children want to embrace.
publisher Scribner
Life After God
by Douglas Coupland
What happens if we are raised without religion or beliefs? As we grow older, the beauty and disenchantments of the world temper our souls. We all have spiritual impulses, yet where do these impulses flow in a world of commodities and consumerism?
publisher Scribner
London Bone
by Michael Moorcock
Stories of London's past, present and future, of brave old ladies, beatific unfrocked vicars, Irish-Americans, and the seedy side of the London tourist trade.
publisher Scribner
Perfect Recall
by Ann Beattie
The eleven stories in this collection are peopled by characters coming to terms with the legacies of long-held family myths or confronting altered circumstances, new frailty or sudden, unlikely success. Beattie has been writing short stories for more than 30 years.
publisher Simon & Schuster
The Barnum Museum
by Steven Milhauser
The title story in this collection of short stories tells of the Barnum Museum, a monstrous landmark so compelling that an entire town finds its citizens gradually and inexorably disappearing into it. Three of Milhauser's other collections are also available.
publisher Phoenix
Big Mouth
by Blanaid McKinney
Language and communication, or the lack of it, is the underlying theme of many of these Irish stories: a middle-aged woman discovers a kind of freedom from the tragedy of her mute husband; a former tube-train driver is silenced by the horror of a 'leaper' under his train; an IRA informer - incapable of keeping his mouth shut - suffers the ultimate penalty.
publisher Phoenix
Collected Stories
by Dylan Thomas
This collection brings together all of Thomas's short stories, from his urgent hallucinatory visions of the dark forces beneath the surface of Welsh life to the inimitable comedy of his later autobiographical writings and evocations of childhood magic and the follies of adult life.
publisher Phoenix
The Complete Stories
by Alice Walker
Comprising two volumes - In Love and Trouble and You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down - this collection represents three decades of the author's work.
publisher Phoenix
England Calling: 24 Stories for the 21st Century
by Julia Bell & Jackie Gay (eds.)
A series of fictional snapshots of the different areas of England today, its landscapes, cityscapes, dialects and atmospheres. Authors include Lesley Glaister, Kevin Sampson, Julia Darling, Andrea Ashworth, Harland Miller, Alexei Sayle, Julie Burchill, Jane Rogers, Joolz Denby, and David Almond.
publisher Phoenix
Everything in this Country Must
by Colum McCann
McCann's collection focuses on the recent, troubled, history of Ireland. Fishing the Sloe-black River is also available.
publisher Phoenix
The Meat Eaters
by Michael Collins
Collins's stories are about Ireland, about the Irish as they are and as they would like to be imagined; a struggling widow, a careless father, the schoolboy and the philosopher, the good and the corrupt.
Collins' other collection The Feminists Go Swimming is also published by Phoenix.
publisher Phoenix
Flights of Love
by Bernhard Schlink
Seven stories, all of them weaving around the idea of love: why people are drawn to it and why some run away.
Schlink shows us love as desire, love as confusion, love as a quick affair, love as a drastic life-changing rebellion, love as a force of habit, and love as self-betrayal.
publisher Phoenix
Hunger
by Lan Samantha Chang
Chang was born and brought up in America, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her stories represent her search for the truth of her identity, and the struggle between two cultures. Here the Chinese principles of fate, the spirit world and the importance of family contrast with the American way of life.
publisher Phoenix
Inventing the Abbotts and Other Stories
by Sue Miller
In this collection's title story, a young man starved of affection becomes obsessed with the three pretty daughters of the wealthy Abbott family, but for them, he will always be nothing more than the boy from the wrong side of the tracks.
publisher Phoenix
Nights in a Foreign Country
by Jean McNeil
Lives intertwine briefly and uncoil suddenly in these human encounters: two girls in a burning landscape, a journalist caught in a Central American coup, a father and a daughter watching eels thrashing in a weir on a moonlit night.
publisher Phoenix
Opening Nights
by Katy Hayes
Katy Hayes' short stories chart the terrain of human relationships, from the unhappy young housewife who takes to midnight rollerskating in the park, to the politically correct young student embroiled in a very dubious affair.
publisher Phoenix
The Rose City
by David Ebershoff
Set in contemporary California and Boston, these stories recount a moment in their protagonist's life when the world begins to shift beneath him: the boy who breaks into a gay man's house to see how he lives; the tennis tutor who learns too much about the family for whom he works.
publisher Phoenix
Axiomatic
by Greg Egan
Egan's first short story collection includes 'The Hundred Light Year Diary', 'Learning to be Me', and 'Closer'.
publisher Gollancz
We Can Remember It For You Wholesale
by Philip K Dick
The fifth and final part of the complete collected stories shows Dick at the height of his powers. These 25 tales were written between 1963 and 1981 and include two stories which were adapted for the cinema as 'Total Recall' and 'Blade Runner'.
publisher Gollancz
The Wind's Twelve Quarters
by Ursula Le Guin
This was Le Guin's first collection of short stories; it brings together almost all of her early short fiction and includes such enduring masterpieces as the Hugo winning 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', and the Nebula winning 'The Day before the Revolution'.
publisher Gollancz
The Best British Mysteries 2005
by Maxim Jakubowski (ed.)
The latest volume in this ongoing celebration of British crime writing, featuring new stories by Colin Dexter, John Mortimer, Reginald Hill, Ian Rankin, Amy Myers, Val McDermid, Lindsey Davis, Bill James, H R F Keating, Christopher Fowler and others.
publisher Allison & Busby
A Hand at the Shutter
by Francis King
From the author of the collection One is a Wanderer, this collection of short stories span a wide geographical and social range.
publisher Allison & Busby
The Sedgemoor Strangler and Other Stories of Crime
by Peter Lovesey
Sixteen bite-sized tales around the theme of the perfect crime. Lovesey explores the methods criminals use to manipulate and deceive and investigates how some people can get away with murder.
publisher Allison & Busby
As in Eden
by R M Lamming
Using stories from the Bible as her starting point, Lamming breathes life into its female characters who have been condemned to live in the shadows of their male counterparts until now.
She skilfully rewrites the ancient stories, laying bare the predicaments of Eve, Claudia Procula and Martha, amongst others, with great compassion and insight.
publisher Faber
Good Evening Mrs Craven
by Mollie Panter-Downes
Panter-Downes' wartime stories were first published in The New Yorker from 1938 to 1944.
Exploring most aspects of English domestic life during the war, they are about separation, sewing parties, fear, evacuation to the country, obsession with food, and the social revolutions of wartime.
Minnie's Room, a companion volume of Panter-Downes' peacetime stories describing aspects of British life after the war, is also available.
publisher Persephone Books
Tell It to a Stranger
by Elizabeth Berridge
Originally published in 1947, this collection of short stories is funny, observant, bleak and reminiscent of Mollie Panter-Downes' Good Evening Mrs Craven.
publisher Persephone Books
Tea with Mr Rochester
by Frances Towers
Frances Towers died, aged 63, before this selection of short stories she had been writing over the previous twenty years appeared.
But when these captivating, unusual, and at times bizarre stories were published in 1949 reviewers were unanimous in their praise.
(Five of the stories from this collection were read on BBC Radio 4 in 2003.)
publisher Persephone Books
The Casino
by Margaret Bonham
These witty and perceptive 1940s short stories have a unique voice and a dark sense of humour. The heart of each story is usually the relationship between one parent and a child.
They were read on BBC Radio 4 in 2004 and 2005.
publisher Persephone Books
Outlandish Affairs: An Anthology of Amorous Encounters
by Evan Rosenthal & Amanda Robinson
Each tale in this volume explores the different aspects of cross-cultural relationships, often highlighting the awkward and humorous situations born from simple misunderstanding.
There are also tales of lost love, haunting love and indefinable love, all trying to break down the barriers of culture.
publisher Luath Press
Too Weird for Ziggy
by Sylvie Simmons
Simmons' fiction debut is a darkly comic collection of linked stories all set in the world of crass A & R men, fans mired in hero worship, and music stars perpetually on the verge of ego tantrums or outright crackups.
publisher Atlantic
The Light Fantastic: Skye Folk Tales and Fantasies
by Rhona Rauszer
This collection is permeated with a compassion for the people of Skye. The stories were written during the 1960s and 1970s when she was regularly engaged by the BBC.
The 30 stories fall into three distinct sections: the first section’s stories are set in South Skye, the home of the ancestral clans; the middle section covers experiences and encounters away from the island; the final section deals with life in the northern peninsula of Trotternish on Skye.
Further Skye stories are collected in Rauszer's Consider an Island.
publisher Polygon
Damage Land: New Scottish Gothic Fiction
by Alan Bissett (ed.)
Be afraid of Ali Smith's neo-Nazi, Alison Armstrong's transvestite serial-killer, Brian McCabe's abominable neck-boil, James Robertson's mutant mouse, Toni Davidson's confused sado-masochist.
Be frozen by Maggie O'Farrell's quiet touch or appalled at Andrew Murray Scott's putrescent landscape. Experience fork and knife disorder with Jackie Kay or receive sinister letters from Helen Lamb.
publisher Polygon
Hawkfall
by George Mackay Brown
These fables deal with Mackay Brown's perennial themes of love, violence, death and rebirth, and are set in an Orcadian world that spans myth and reality, past and present.
publisher Polygon
In Between Talking About the Football
by Gordon Legge (ed.)
This collection captures the lives of council estate dopeheads, single parents, awkward young men and lonely old women.
By and large the characters in these 33 stories are crying out for help; some of them even find it.
publisher Polygon
The Hope That Kills Us: An Anthology of Scottish Football Fiction
by Adrian Searle (ed.)
Scottish football is simultaneously compelling and repulsive in equal measure. Each story in this collection examines, from its own unique viewpoint, the participants, observers, experience and emotion that feed our nation's obsession.
Featured writers include Alan Spence, Des Dillon, Denise Mina, Gordon Legge, Laura Hird, Linda Cracknell, Alan Bissett, Suhayl Saadi, Andrew C. Ferguson, Jim Carruthers, Billy Cornwall and Colin Clark.
publisher Polygon
Lunderston Tales
by Robin Jenkins
Behind the douce facade of pipe band recitals and the little baker's shops of Lunderston lies the whole of human life: from Doreen and the Virgin Plumber to the Merry Widow and the Elder, here are characters who have, in the end, to assume responsibility for their thoughts and actions.
publisher Polygon
Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
First published in the early 1930s, these stories reveal an author whose interests lay far beyond the Scottish and rural.
In a far Persian dawn a sorcerer searches for life's lost constituent; a strange drama is played out in the garden of Eden, and a Bishop inverts a famous text to save his own soul.
publisher Polygon
Something Wicked, Something New: New Scottish Crime Fiction
by Susie Maguire & Amanda Hargreaves
21 stories by well-established and new contemporary writers, including Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Christopher Brookmyre, Manda Scott and Denise Mina.
publisher Polygon
Superior Bedsits
by Helen Lamb
The stories in this collection cover a broad terrain: childhood kissing techniques; the paper-thin world of bedsits; daughter-father relationships; and the pain of a disintegrating relationship.
publisher Polygon
Time in Carnbeg
by Ronald Frame
A small Perthshire spa town is the setting for this collection of stories linked by people and place.
From the widow facing her own death on the river to the failed gift shop owner and the seamstress slowly going blind, Frame exposes a raw and complex emotional world that lies behind a seemingly calm and staid facade.
publisher Polygon
Visiting the Bard and Other Stories
by Alasdair Campbell
Short stories set on the Isle of Lewis.
publisher Polygon
Transgressions
by Ed McBain (ed.)
10 new novellas by some of the best names in contemporary American fiction: Stephen King, Sharyn McCrumb, John Farris, Lawrence Block, Walter Mosley, Jeffrey Deaver, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Perry, Donald E Westlake and McBain himself.
publisher Orion
The Detection Club Anthology
by Simon Brett (ed.)
A collection of new and previously unpublished crime stories to celebrate 75 years of The Detection Club, whose first president was G K Chesterton.
This anthology includes new stories by Lindsey Davis, Robert Barnard, Colin Dexter, Robert Goddard, John Harvey, Reginald Hill, P.D. James, H R F Keating, Peter Lovesey, Michael Ridpath, Margaret Yorke and Simon Brett.
publisher Orion
Stranded
by Val McDermid
As well as McDermid's popular series character, private eye Kate Brannigan, this collection contains narrative voices, both female and male, from different continents and an eclectic range of backgrounds.
McDermid has chosen the short-story form to probe not only the motivations of the criminal underworld but also the nature of crime itself.
publisher Flambard Press
Under the Dam and Other Stories
by David Constantine
This is the first full collection of short stories by poet, translator and modern languages fellow, David Constantine.
From an Americanized Moscow to the shores of the Hebrides, these stories have a haunting sense of place and a knack for freeze-framing each character’s life just at the moment when the past breaks the surface, or when the present - like the dam of the title - collapses under its own weight.
publisher Comma Press
Ellipsis 1: Comma Modern Shorts
by Sean O'Brien, Jean Sprackland, Tim Cooke
Ellipsis is a new series celebrating the 'short story sequence' - that interlocking daisy-chain of narrative produced when stories knit together to form a continuum of character or theme.
Sprackland's stories, set in the hotels and suburbs of a down-at-heel coastal town are about a cast of rootless characters; Cooke invites us into the derelict rooms and vandalised stairwells of an inner city tower-block; and O'Brien writes about an ornate, vaulted lending library
publisher Comma Press
Comma: An Anthology
by Ra Page (ed.)
The city is at once strange and strangely familiar in these stories. Friendships break up or never quite begin in decaying bars; lives are relived on home video, deaths pawed over in a crime photographer's fixing fluid.
One woman's paranoia about being mugged or burgled leads to her questioning her own sanity; another, driving home late one night, wonders how the events in her life have led inexorably to this moment.
Contributors: Michael Bracewell, Shelagh Delaney, Paul Morley, Gwendoline Riley, Anthony Wilson, Gerard Woodward, Tariq Mehmood, David Constantine, Clare Pollard, Amanda Dalton, Michael Symmons Roberts, Emma Unsworth, Tony Sides, Wayne Clews and Jeanie O'Hare.
publisher Comma Press
Bracket: A New Generation in Fiction
by Ra Page (ed.)
This anthology brings together 20 of the country’s most promising, previously unpublished writers.
From the cliffs of Flamborough Head to high rise, inner city madness; from lost loves to the last days of civilisation - the settings and scenarios in these stories captivate and unsettle in equal measure, all the time striving for that most unlikely modern thing, intimacy.
publisher Comma Press
Hyphen: An Anthology of Short Stories by Poets
by Ra Page (ed.)
A one-off experiment to show how much the short story has in common with a very different literary form, the poem.
The poets included here bring with them a new perspective as well as an intuitive feel for the snapshot's hidden narratives.
Contributors include Anne Stevenson, Gerard Woodward, Ruth Padel, Ian McMillan, Sophie Hannah and 15 others.
publisher Comma Press
Liverpool Stories 1
by Tane Vayu (ed.)
Comma's City Shorts are magazine-style mini-anthologies designed to take short fiction to a wider readership in cities across the North of England, with editions in Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle, and Manchester.
The stories in this issue examine the pace of Liverpool life and show the city as an altered landscape - a place changed forever by the extremes of a child’s imagination or an adult’s fear.
publisher Comma Press
Newcastle Stories 1
by Angela Readman (ed.)
Comma's City Shorts are magazine-style mini-anthologies designed to take short fiction to a wider readership in cities across the North of England, with editions in Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle, and Manchester.
Poets, playwrights and novelists capture the character, and characters, of Newcastle in stories that range from recognisable quayside drinking dens to the commanding ramparts of the Lit and Phil library, from an anonymous call centre on the edge of town, to a family backyard full of feathers.
publisher Comma Press
Leeds Stories
by Isaac Shaffer (ed.)
Comma's City Shorts are magazine-style mini-anthologies designed to take short fiction to a wider readership in cities across the North of England, with editions in Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle, and Manchester.
Contributors to this celebration of Leeds are Tony Harrison, Martyn Bedford, David Peace, Peter Sansom, James Nash and Tom Palmer.
Leeds Stories 2 will be available in September 2005.
publisher Comma Press
Gothic Tales: Manchester Tales 7
by Emma Unsworth (ed.)
Comma's City Shorts are magazine-style mini-anthologies designed to take short fiction to a wider readership in cities across the North of England, with editions in Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle, and Manchester.
The theme for this special edition is the range of urban responses to the meaning of 'gothic' in modern Britain: from supernatural prophecies and revenge beyond the grave to more psychological horrors, and social and economic underworlds.
publisher Comma Press
The Celestial Omnibus
by E M Forster
Collection of minimalist short stories by the author of Howard's End.
publisher Snowbooks
This Other Salt
by Aamer Hussein
The linked stories in this collection explore themes of betrayal, bereavement, exile and belonging.
A writer torn between two loves searches for lost words; a poet revenges herself on her faithless lover; and a teenage boy's life begins to mirror the role he plays in a school operetta.
Also by Aamer Hussein and published by Saqi: Turquoise.
publisher Saqi Books
Kahani: Short Stories by Pakistani Women
by Aamer Hussein (ed.)
Jamila Hashmi, Mumtaz Shirin, Fahmida Riaz and others use intricate narrative patterns, polemicism and lyricism in their stories about Pakistan's convoluted history.
Their work explores topics such as the creation of Bangladesh, war with India, nationalism, independence and the ethnic conflicts in Karachi.
publisher Saqi Books
Altrive Tales: Featuring a Memoir of the Author's Life
by James Hogg
Hogg's reminiscences of how he, a ragged servant lad, became a respected professional writer, are joined in this volume by a selection of his short fiction.
'The Adventures of John Lochy' is about a social outcast adrift in Scotland, Russia, the Netherlands and Spain; 'The Pongos' looks at Scottish involvement in Empire-building; and 'Marion's Jock' describes nineteenth-century peasant life in the Borders.
Also available by James Hogg from Edinburgh University Press: Shepherd's Calendar.
publisher Edinburgh University Press
Short Cuts from the Fringe: 8 Stories Recorded at the Edinburgh Festival
by Various
These stories, each of 15 minutes' duration, were read at the 2000 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and broadcast live on BBC Radio 4. The stories are by established writers, some of whom read their own work, while other entries are performed by actors.
publisher BBC Audio
Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain
by Rehana Ahmed
A collection of short stories for teenage readers by some of Britain's best Asian writers.
Contributors include Jamila Gavin, Aamer Hussein, Romesh Gunesekera, Bali Rai, Shyama Perera, Rukhsana Ahmed, Farrukh Dhondy, Preethi Nair.
publisher Macmillan
Counting Stars
by David Almond
This collection gives a clear insight into the experiences which lie behind David Almond's novels: the memories of a Tyneside childhood, the tragedies and happiness of his loving family and the ordinary and extraordinary people who shared his home village.
He also explores his Catholic upbringing, and the way he alternately embraces and rejects his religion as he grows up. The darker side of life, in the shape of his mother's arthritis, and the deaths of his little sister Barbara and his father, are also movingly related.
publisher Hodder & Stoughton
Learning to Swim and Other Stories
by Graham Swift
Swift's collection explores the enclosed worlds of illusion and deception, obsession and erroneous authority.
publisher Picador
Not for Glory
by Janet Paisley
A collection of interlinked stories, delivered in a Scottish prose style unique to this writer. The author sets her book in a central Scots village, laying bare the dramas of the lives of the villagers in a world where there's little escape and less privacy.
publisher Canongate
The State of the Art
by Iain M Banks
The novella of the book's title is published here with a selection of Banks's short stories.
They span the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror.
publisher Orbit
Queen of the Sheep: New Writing Scotland 23
by Valerie Thornton & Hamish Whyte (eds.)
translated by Maoilios Caimbeul, Gaelic Adviser
New Writing Scotland - an annual anthology of short fiction and poetry in English, Scots and Gaelic - has been going for 23 years now and is a mainstay of the Scottish literary scene.
The 2005 issue features stories about country and city; weather (rain, of course) and seasons; Frank O’Hara in Gaelic and Jock Steinbeck in Canada; a few birds (eider, chicken, wren and Brent Millar’s lovebirds); food; sheep; and much more.
publisher Association for Scottish Literary Studies
Tart Noir: An Anthology
by Stella Duffy & Lauren Henderson (eds.)
This anthology of feisty female crime writing features heroines who think it is entirely possible to save the world while wearing stiletto heels. Their morals are questionable and their actions are guaranteed to shock and delight.
From classic crime to magical anti-realism, hot sex to cold calculation, these stories cover all the bases.
publisher Pan
The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories
by Michel Faber
Faber's collection flows effortlessly from the biblical innocence and savagery of the title story to the unexpected ferocity of a betrayed wife, by way of an international conference on coconuts.
Faber won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award in 1999 for his first story collection Some Rain Must Fall.
publisher Canongate
All Fires the Fire and Other Stories
by Julio Cortázar
Cortázar’s stories are like small time pieces, where each polished part moves relentlessly on its own particular path, exercising a crucial and perpetual influence on the mechanism as a whole.
Moments jerk forward and retract, reflect and refract: an island at noon from an aeroplane – an aeroplane at noon from an island; the living deceiving the dying and also themselves, about death; fatality by fire in an ancient Roman arena and in a modern city apartment.
It is a world that is constantly shifting, upsetting our balance and our peace of mind.
publisher Marion Boyars
Brilliant Careers: The Virago Book of 20th Century Fiction
by Ali Smith (ed.)
100 short stories and extracts from novels by women - one for each century - form this anthology. It includes work by - among others - Katherine Mansfield, Nell Dunn and Grace Paley.
publisher Virago
The Weekenders
by Andrew O'Hagan (ed.)
This collection of short fiction and non-fiction was compiled to help raise money for those affected by the civil war in Sudan.
Contributors include Irvine Welsh, Andrew O'Hagan, Alex Garland, Victoria Glendinning and WF Deedes.
publisher Ebury Press
Where You Find It
by Janice Galloway
A collection of stories with an emphasis on relationships: the struggle to love against the odds; a yearning to communicate; and the extraordinary epiphanies in which the world falls away leaving only the lovers.
publisher Vintage
Nail and Other Stories
by Laura Hird
In Hird's powerful and hard-hitting Scottish fiction a ten-year-old boy uses Edinburgh buses to escape from his dysfunctional mother and her boyfriend; a mentally-challenged boy tries to join a female gang; a dead lesbian lover can't let go; and a British soldier loses the plot.
Hird's second collection, Hope and Other Stories, will be published in 2006.
publisher Rebel Inc
Children of Albion Rovers
by Kevin Williamson (ed.)
This collection of novellas from Scotland's emerging writers of the 90s contains the first science fiction story by Irvine Welsh, and a bizarre tread through Scottish surrealism in the form of spaced-out crematorium attendants and vengeful traffic-wardens.
Other contributors are Alan Warner, Gordon Legge, James Meek, Laura Hird and Paul Reekie.
publisher Rebel Inc
Taking the Drawing Room Through Customs
by E A Markham
The stories in this collection have as their core the motion of travel, primarily from Montserrat to Britain, but also to continental Europe.
For Markham the drawing room is both the repository of memories, of family network, and the riposte of a West Indian from a society that had its own social graces but finds itself in a Britain that harbours the stereotype that nothing of value has been brought.
publisher Peepal Tree Press
Monopolies of Loss
by Adam Mars-Jones
A collection of stories written in response to the AIDS crisis.
Mars-Jones' other collection of short stories is Lantern Lecture.
publisher Faber
The Migration of Ghosts
by Pauline Melville
A 65-year-old matriarch wins the heart of a postman; a widow commemorates the death of her husband by winning a taverna's dance competition; a South American president takes a sentimental astral journey around the scenes of his ruthless rise to power before being buried by an ungrateful nation; and a discerning parrot tours world cultures and learns about Christianity.
Melville's first collection of stories, Shape-shifter, won the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and the Guardian Fiction Prize.
publisher Bloomsbury
Tales from Firozsha Baag
by Rohinton Mistry
A series of stories which feature the residents of apartment complex in Bombay, and the daily routine and rhythm of their lives, such as the visits of the egg man, biscuitman and fishwalla, and the rag man's song.
publisher Faber
Out of Bounds
by Beverley Naidoo
Naidoo's stories are linked by the theme of young people experiencing personal dilemmas. All are set in South Africa, first under apartheid and then after the first democratic elections.
They cover the period from 1950 to 2000 and reflect the lives of a range of young people, black and white, living in what was for many years seen as the world's most openly racist society.
publisher Puffin
Society Within
by Courttia Newland
Interlinked stories about the residents of Greenside Estate, west London.
Newcomer Elisha - sweet, bright, sassy and eighteen - negotiates new territory with more than its fair share of dark corners, coming into contact with other Greensiders: cool, ambitious Valerie, with some bad secrets to deal with; Little Stacey, looking for his first girl; and Orin, dealing, stealing and trying to stay away from anything too lethal.
publisher Abacus
Tell Tales: The Anthology of Short Stories 1
by Courttia Newland & Nii Ayikwe Parkes (eds.)
This anthology stemmed from a community project undertaken in 2001. The stories were written to a format devised to produce stories that took ten minutes or fewer to read, without sacrificing the depth of emotion and intrigue expected of a well-developed short.
The collection is diverse culturally and stylistically, embracing well known writers such as Niall Griffiths and Matt Thorne as well as a host of relatively unknown new authors.
Tell Tales 2 is also available, published by Flipped Eye.
publisher Tell Tales
Piranha to Scurfy and Other Stories
by Ruth Rendell
The prolific Rendell is best known for her Wexford mysteries, but she has also written a number of short story collections.
Piranha to Scurfy is a intriguing mix of psychological crime, vengeance, mystery and horror.
Also available: Blood Lines, The Copper Peacock, The Fallen Curtain, The New Girl Friend.
publisher Arrow
The Complete Short Stories
by Muriel Spark
All of Spark's published short stories are brought together with some new writing in this volume, which displays her cool, biting humour and unique vision of human nature.
Ghosts and judges, priests, murder and French chateaux: all the Spark obsessions are here, and much more besides.
publisher Penguin
Aisha
by Ahdaf Soueif
Soueif's collection is united by the central character, an Egyptian girl growing up in both Egypt and Britain. The stories are populated by the characters she meets, each moving in their own world as Aisha grows up and travels in Cairo and London.
Sandpiper also explores Egyptian and Western life and the links between them, looking at relationships within and across continents, feuds and key events in the lives of certain characters.
publisher Bloomsbury
Playing Sardines
by Michèle Roberts
A collection of stories about food, eating and the erotic allure of recipes: a cook's obsessive love turns hungry and dangerous; a fanatical dieter and maker of lists works out how to deal with a husband who snores; and a faddy eater is thrown off-course by a miracle.
Roberts has also written another short story collection, During Mother's Absence.
publisher Virago
Leopard VI: The Norwegian Feeling for Real
by Harald Bache-Wiig, Birgit Bjerck & Jan Kjærstad (eds.)
2005 is the centenary of Norway's secession from Sweden; to mark the occasion, Harvill is publishing this selection of some of the most exciting and the most interesting Norwegian short fiction from the past four decades.
There are 28 stories in the anthology, including work by Jostein Gaarder, Karin Fossum, Lars Saabye Christensen, Per Petterson and Jan Kjærstad.
publisher Harvill
Dreams Never End: New Noir Short Stories
by Nicholas Royle (ed.)
10 short stories by three writers - Andrew Newsham, Mick Scully and H P Tinker - ranging from the violent to the surreal, and painting a picture of the seedy side of Birmingham.
Dreams Never End is part of Tindal Street Press's 'Showcases' series.
publisher Tindal Street Press
Are You She?
by Lesley Glaister (ed.)
Four authors have each contributed two stories to this collection. Subject matter includes a childhood in Africa; the bitterness of unrealised teenage dreams; love in a prairie giftshop; and the significance of love and loss in the wake of the 9/11 disaster.
Are You She? is part of Tindal Street Press's 'Showcases' series.
publisher Tindal Street Press
Scottish War Stories
by Trevor Royle (ed.)
War stories have made a significant contribution to Scotland's literature. The stories gathered here provide insights into ordinary people's experiences of unimaginable horrors, of coming to terms with the barbaric loss of loved ones and of forming steadfast new friendships in adversity.
Contributors include Walter Scott, John Buchan, Muriel Spark and George Mackay Brown.
publisher Polygon
Looking for Jake and Other Stories
by China Miéville
Ghosts, impossible diseases, visionary cityscapes and urban paranoia are the themes of Miéville's short stories. Also included in this collection is the award-winning novella The Tain, set in the world of New Crobuzon, and a story illustrated in comic-book form.
publisher Macmillan
Heaven Lies About Us
by Eugene McCabe
These short stories delve deep into the soul of the Irish border counties, where confusion, divided loyalties and heightened emotions are part of everyday life.
Whether McCabe is describing the aftermath of the Great Hunger or sectarian violence, his playwright's ear for dialogue remains true.
publisher Jonathan Cape
Lark's Eggs: New and Selected Stories
by Desmond Hogan
Hogan's subject is exile and self-image, explored through the lives of loners and eccentrics, trapped by poverty, personal histories and restless identities. His stories give a voice to those on the margins.
This collection draws together 22 stories taken from earlier collections and twelve fresh narratives.publisher The Lilliput Press
Thirteen
by John McLay (ed.)
Thirteen stories by thirteen different authors about being thirteen years old.
Contributors to this volume for younger readers include Marcus Sedgwick, Kevin Brooks, Mary Hooper, Margaret Mahy, Eleanor Updale and Eoin Colfer.
publisher Orchard Books
The Shell Collector
by Anthony Doerr
Doerr's debut takes readers from the African coast to the suburbs of Ohio, from sideshow pageantry to harsh wilderness survival, conjuring nature in both its beautiful abundance and its crushing power.
A blind man roams the beaches of Kenya, his fingers ploughing through sandy granules of grace and intrigue, his German shepherd at his side. Whale-watchers and fishermen, hunters and mystics, live uncompleted or undone lives.
Doerr explores the human dilemma in all its manifestations: longing, grief, indecision, heartbreak and slow recuperation.
publisher Flamingo
The Remarkable Everyday
by Various
A host of writers took on the challenge of portraying a single day in the life of a character. From the heartbreak of a parent whose child will never grow up, to family conflict on a farm, and snapshots of the lives of three commuters on Midlands train, these stories show that the everyday is indeed remarkable.
publisher Legend Press
To the World of Men, Welcome
by Nuala Ní Chonchúir
At the heart of this collection is an exploration of the pain and pleasure of love: sexual love, romantic love, the love between parents and their children. Set against a backdrop of contemporary Ireland, as well as Europe of the past and present, these stories are brimming with sensuality, art, secrets and loss.
The author's first collection is called The Wind Across the Grass.
publisher Arlen House
Wonderwall
by Anthony Cropper & Ian Daley (eds.)
The latest in the highly acclaimed Route series of contemporary stories, the anthology features stories from Crista Ermiya, Michael Nath, Tania Hershman, James Bones, Jennifer Moore, Sarah Butler, Philip Hancock, Carolyn Lewis, Penny Aldred, Alexandra Fox, James Nash, Malcolm Aslett and James K Walker.
publisher Route
Discoverers
by Chrissie Glazebrook (ed.)
An anthology of short stories by 15 writers from the Tees Valley.
Glazebrook acted as external selector for this selection of stories related to 'a sense of place'. The settings range from the Falkland Islands to Africa via Thailand as well as in and around the Tees Valley.
The work showcased in this book demonstrates imagination, originality, warmth and humanity, traits that are characteristic of the area's residents.
For more information, go to www.northernpublishers.co.uk
publisher Mudfog Press
Leaning, Leaning Over the Water
by Frances Itani
The author of the prizewinning Deafening returns with a poignant and compelling novel in ten stories.
Jock moves his young family to Quebec in the aftermath of the Second World War and tries to teach them about life. Underneath the calm domestic surface, however, bubble the anxieties of the women in the family.
publisher Sceptre
Beware of God
by Shalom Auslander
A pious man discovers that God is a chicken; a young boy mistakes Holocaust Remembrance Day as emergency preparedness training for the future.
Auslander's stories draw on his upbringing in an Orthodox Jewish community; they are filled with shame, sex, God and death.
publisher Picador
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
by Yiyun Li
Li's stories evoke a modern China facing up to a complex history of repression and guilt. In turn horrifying and breathtakingly lyrical, they confront the silence that has dominated the history of her country, and illuminates how mythology, politics, history and culture intersect with personality.
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the inaugural Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, worth €50,000.
publisher Fourth Estate
Diving Girls
by Jo Mazelis
The stories in Diving Girls contain undercurrents of sex, death and unhealthy obsession. They are stories about the surface of things, and what lies below the surface; whether that is a photograph, the skin of a peach or a flock of seemingly innocent birds.
publisher Parthian
Circle Games
by Jo Mazelis
Nineteen stories in Circle Games have themes of darkness and deception, escape and pursuit. The meanings of freedom, love, possession and identity become disputed territories in the protagonists' lives and demonstrate how winning the game is sometimes as tragic as losing.
publisher Parthian
Little Black Dress
by Susie Maguire (ed.)
Women feature prominently in this anthology of stories by women writers, many of whom are Scottish. Themes include sexuality and an addiction to wearing black, both in and out of relationships and work; the approaches are a combination of the humorous and the sinister.
publisher Polygon
Little Sacrifices and Other Stories
by Meg Kingston
Kingston has brought together a number of her previously unpublished but prize-winning stories for this collection.
The title story is about the inevitability of oil shortages; science-fiction writer Stephen Baxter chose it as the winner of a competition organised by campaigning group Powerswitch.
publisher Jay Walker Writing
A Life Elsewhere
by Segun Afolabi
Afolabi's debut collection explores what it means to be 'elsewhere'. A man takes his American wife to his homeland for the first time; a refugee boy struggles to understand his place in a new land (in 'Monday Morning', which won the 2005 Caine Prize for African Writing); a troubled teenager is sent abroad to live with his step-brother for a while.
These are tales of displacement, set in a world where the boundaries of geography, culture and language are more fluid.
publisher Jonathan Cape
Kafka in Bronteland and Other Stories
by Tamar Yellin
These are stories of love, yearning and displacement, set in the bleak but beautiful landscape of the author's native Yorkshire.
As Stevie Davies noted in the Guardian, 'the beauty of this remarkable first collection is its extension of Jewish diaspora literature, in recognising the ubiquity of diasporas: look back, and exile is universal.'
publisher Toby Press
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories
by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
translated by Jay Rubin
The stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) paint a picture of a medieval Japan peopled by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants. In later works he drew on the experiences of his own life, revealing his intense melancholy and his terror of madness.
This edition features a preamble by Haruki Murakami.
publisher Penguin
Don't Know a Good Thing
by Kate Pullinger (ed.)
Set in places as diverse as Alaska and Australia, this collection include tales of murder, loss of innocence, revenge, heroism and hope.
New stories by Helen Dunmore, Trezza Azzopardi, Helen Simpson, Louise Doughty, Marina Warner and Lynne Truss are interspersed with 12 stories from the unpublished writers who were shortlisted for the Asham Short-Story Prize 2005.
publisher Bloomsbury
Scéalta: Short Stories by Irish Women
by Rebecca O'Connor (ed.)
Poet Rebecca O'Connor has drawn together for this collection stories of dysfunctional marriages, urban alienation, domestic violence, child abuse and abortion.
These are tales of ordinary lives told in an extraordinary way. The authors write movingly about the darkness of childhood, the abusiveness - and vulnerability - of men, and the anxiety and absurdity of life.
Contributors include Anne Haverty, Julia O' Faolain, Claire Keegan and Judy Kravis.
publisher Telegram Books
Povídky: Short Stories by Czech Women
by Nancy Hawker (ed.)
Since 2000, women's literature in the Czech Republic has broken free of the limitations of 'Romance and Relationships'. This collection brings together authors of different generations (some of which were proscribed by the government), styles and backgrounds.
The stories are about young women who drift through Prague; a child who resolves to sin 'just a little bit'; drunken men bantering over card games; and pickled buttocks.
publisher Telegram Books
The National Short Story Prize 2006
by Various
This short, pocket-sized volume brings together the stories shortlisted for the inaugural 2006 National Short Story Prize, the largest award in the world for a single short story.
The panel of judges (authors William Boyd and Lavinia Greenlaw, Prospect magazine deputy editor Alex Linklater, BBC Radio 4 executive producer Di Speirs, and broadcaster and writer Francine Stock) chose stories by Rana Dasgupta, William Trevor, James Lasdun, Rose Tremain and Michel Faber.
publisher Atlantic Books
The Hill Road
by Patrick O'Keeffe
Bitter sadness, violence and regret bubble to the surface of rural Ireland in this prize-winning volume of novellas set in the fictional townland of Kilroan.
O'Keeffe has a poetic sensiblilty and a way of describing the dustiness of long summer days akin to Laurie Lee's writing; like Lee, he can also twist the knife, populating his tales of bucolic idyll with drinkers, gamblers and the unhappily married.
publisher Bloomsbury
I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Train
by Peter Hobbs
Hobbs's writing is bleak, funny, surreal and just plain brilliant.
publisher Faber
People I Wanted To Be
by Gina Ochsner
Ochsner’s stories of love, loss, death and redemption were inspired by her travels around Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic.
Despair pervades the lives of her struggling protagonists, but she is generous enough to allow some of them an almost mythical spirituality, suggesting that beneath or alongside our sorrows lies a strata of potential redemption.
publisher Portobello Books
Pieces for the Left Hand
by J Robert Lennon
One hundred very short, beautifully crafted vignettes that aptly capture the oddness of everyday life.
Prosaically put, Lennon’s point – if indeed he is trying to make a point – seems to be that life is full of strange conflicts, misunderstandings and coincidences, and that these experiences, common to us all, can and do enrich the seeming mundanity of our existence.
publisher Granta
Rust and Bone
by Craig Davidson
Davidson conjures a savage world populated by fighting dogs, prizefighters, sex addicts, gamblers, a repo man and a disappearing magician.
The hostility of his fictional universe is tempered by the humanity he invests in his characters and by his subtle observations of their motivation. These stories explore violence, masculinity and life on the margins.
publisher Picador
The Granta Book of the American Short Story
by Richard Ford (ed.)
First published in 1992, this is still one of the best anthologies of American short-story writing, representing many of the best writers from the second half of the twentieth century. The editor's no slouch either.
publisher Granta
War by Candlelight
by Daniel Alarcon
From Third World urban centres to the fault lines that divide nations and people, these nine stories examine the lives of various characters in transition.
Alarcon writes about unrepentant terrorists and immigrants wrestling with the idea of never returning home. His characters are never entirely free of the conditions that define their lives. Wars are waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, and in New York apartments.
publisher Harper Perennial
The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories
by Valerie Martin
Martin turns an unflinching eye upon artists struggling beneath the tyranny of art to reconcile their audience with their muse.
A painter who owes his small success to a man he despises, discovers that his passivity has cost him the love that might have set him free; an actress struggles with the guilt she still feels 20 years after an affair with a young actor; a writer of modest talents encounters the old love who once betrayed him, yet the unfinished novel she leaves in his hands may surpass anything he could ever produce himself.
publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Escalator
by Michael Gardiner
Gardiner's debut collection is set in densely packed, colourful 21st-century Japan.
A young man is bewildered to find himself on the career conveyer-belt totally unaware of his destination; a Japanese student blithely lives her life under 24-hour surveillance, in order to pay her way through one of Japan's 'prestigious' universities.
These stories give a compelling glimpse under the skin of a country that many find enigmatic.
publisher Polygon
Black Juice
by Margo Lanagan
Lanagan's spare sentences and arresting metaphors conjure up tales of worlds similar but subtly different to our own, often set in unspecified pasts and futures.
A boy yells into the wind to usher in the spring; a girl is sung to her death in a tar pit; elephants go in search of their kidnapped keeper.
This extraordinary and hard-to-pigeonhole book of short stories is breathtaking and beautiful by turn.
publisher Gollancz
Constitutional
by Helen Simpson
A woman's grief is assuaged by carpentry; a smoker's health scare momentarily puts his failing marriage back on track; and a mother's forgetfulness has unfortunate consequences for her long-suffering son, with unfortunate results.
Much praised by readers and authors alike, Simpson's spare writing is poised, moving and funny. The stories in this new collection are peopled by recognisable characters in recognisable situations.
publisher Jonathan Cape
Ghosts and Their Uses
by Katherine May
The stories in May's first collection of short stories are about human relationships going wrong - guilt, unhappiness and adultery - but they also contain a strong element of the supernatural and ghostly.
publisher Urban Fox Press
The Tent
by Margaret Atwood
a collection of fictional essays, in the mold of Good Bones and Murder in the Dark, decorated with illustrations by the author.
Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, these essays reflect the times in which we live with accuracy and precision.
publisher Bloomsbury
NW14: The Anthology of New Writing Volume 14
by Lavinia Greenlaw and Helon habila (eds.)
The 14th edition of the British Council's annual anthology showcases the best new fiction, non-fiction and poetry by previously published and unpublished writers from the UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth.
Short-story contributors include James Lasdun, winner of the inaugural National Short Story Prize, Romesh Gunesekera, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kirsty Gunn and Desmond Hogan.
publisher Granta
Tooth and Claw
by T C Boyle
These are stories of the dropouts, deadbeats and kooks of small-time America: a man shares his apartment with a wildcat won in a drunken bet; nature buffs get caught in a vicious blizzard; a suburban woman who joins a pack of dogs, eating rabbits and baying at the moon.
Nature proves to be a sinister and unpredictable force, but here too are moments of reprieve, where the meteor hurtling through space maybe isn't heading straight for you.
publisher Bloomsbury
Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse
by Philip Ó Ceallaigh
A performance artist opens his chest to display his beating heart; a smuggler pays off an old debt to his sister and resigns himself to a life of honest toil in the mine-shafts of his home town; a mysterious rodent named Brigitte enters the lives of two old men; and the inhabitants of a crumbling tower-block go about their business.
publisher Penguin Ireland
Revenge of the Lawn: stories 1962-1970
by Richard Brautigan
First published in 1971, the 62 ultra-short stories in this collection are set mainly in Tacoma, Washington (where the author grew up) and in the flower-powered San Francisco of the late 50s and early 60s.
What Brautigan has rejected in terms of length, he compensates for with his offbeat perceptiveness, bitter-sweet ironies and dry, self-deprecating wit.
publisher Canongate
Hester Lilly and Other Stories
by Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor was well regarded for her stories of twentieth century middle-class life; she exposed deceit but had sympathy for the vulnerable members of society.
This collection of short stories is about the downside of civilization: long marriages, the polite English countryside, missed opportunities and a child's view of the adult world.
publisher Virago
The Collected Stories of Grace Paley
by Grace Paley
Paley's "tragi-comic stories resound with the cadences of the city where she was raised [New York] and are carried by the spoken word. All embrace the 'open destiny of life' and the politics of dailiness." (The Oxford Companion to English Literature.)
publisher Virago
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
by George Saunders
Inner Horner is so small it can only accommodate one of its citizens at a time. The other six citizens wait their turn in the Short-Term Residency Zone of the surrounding country of Outer Horner. But, when Inner Horner suddenly shrinks, the Outer Hornerites declare an Invasion in Progress.
Saunders' witty, satirical and hilarious fable of power and impotence, justice and injustice is joined by In Persuasion Nation, a collection of stories set in a warped yet very recognisable American landscape.
publisher Bloomsbury
Is This The Way You Said?
by Adam Thorpe
An expectant first-time novelist meets a publisher for lunch, only to find himself drawn into a terrible personal tragedy; an orchestral tympanist's life crumbles over the half-time coffee and sandwiches; a business executive copes badly with the news that his wife has given birth prematurely.
publisher Jonathan Cape
Gallatin Canyon
by Thomas McGuane
Place exerts the power of destiny in these stories: a boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gathers at the bedside of their dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores.
Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country, McGuane's signature landscape: a father tries to buy his adult son out of virginity; a convict turned cowhand finds refuge at a ranch in ruination; a couple makes a fateful drive through the perilous gorge of the title story before parting ways.
publisher Harvill Secker
The Secret Goldfish
by David Means
These are stories of the American psyche, of love and loss and of the landscape and its people.
A goldfish circles in its bowl, refusing to die, becoming the silent focus of a difficult family life; a pianist loses his talents as he is forced to question the meaning of love and commitment; a man is repeatedly struck by lightning.
publisher Harper Perennial
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
by Haruki Murakami
translated by Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin
Murakami sidesteps the real and sprints for the surreal: a young man accompanies his cousin to the hospital to check an unusual hearing complaint and recalls a story of a woman put to sleep by tiny flies crawling inside her ear; a mirror appears out of nowhere and a nightwatchman is unnerved as his reflection tries to take control of him; a man follows instructions on the back of a postcard to apply for a job, but an unknown password stands between him and his mysterious employer.
publisher Harvill Secker
Collected Stories
by Cynthia Ozick
Ozick writes about bitterness, cruelty and compulsion with brutal acuity and tenderness. In this collection, Greek mythology, superstition and the religious and cultural experience of the Jewish diaspora in America collide.
publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Matters of Life and Death
by Bernard MacLaverty
This collection begins with the story of a family caught up in an explosion of sectarian violence and ends with the white-out of an Iowa blizzard and a different kind of fear: the fear of displacement, erasure, of losing your way – and yourself – very far from home.
This is a book about bonds and connections made and broken, secret and known.
publisher Jonathan Cape
Twilight of the Superheroes
by Deborah Eisenberg
A group of friends' good fortune turns to disaster when their luxurious Manhattan sublet becomes a front-row seat to the 9/11 catastrophe; a schoolteacher holidays in Rome, fleeing the news that her ex-husband has a life-threatening illness; a schizophrenic's tragic life puts her brother off the idea of family.
These are brutal and poetic tales of modern connection and displacement.
publisher Picador
Dial M for Monkey
by Adam Maxwell
Violence and humour are the trademarks of Maxwell's collection:
A bricklayer is almost killed by a stray nail from a carpernter's nail gun; a man microwaves a pistol to check whether happiness is indeed a warm gun; two old men inflict harm on a teenage assailant.
publisher Tonto Press
You Are Not The One
by Vestal McIntyre
A debut collection of eight stories about today's brand of social outcasts.
Lynn, the protagonist of 'Binge', is a forty-something Manhattan pastry chef dabbling with drugs and desperate to feel connected; in 'Sahara', a young man is kidnapped while wearing a kangaroo suit advertising a fast-food restaurant; and in 'ONJ.com' a young woman decides that what is missing from her life is a gay man.
publisher Canongate
The Museum of Doubt
by James Meek
A collection of surreal and unnerving short stories by the author of The People's Act of Love.
The array of characters who populate Meek's vague and elusive worlds are driven by paranoia and doubts, as well as hopes and fears of things only half-glimpsed.
publisher Canongate
Sawn-off Tales
by David Gaffney
David Gaffney's very compact, surreal tales are filled with poignancy and wit. Each story goes off like a tiny depth charge in the mind, leaving you with the trace memory of some new urban myth - comic, absurd and disturbingly true.
publisher Salt Publishing
Mothers and Sons
by Colm Toibin
These stories paint rich and textured portraits of individuals at different pivotal moments in their lives. In each case, Toibin shows how their relationship with either a mother or a son, or their relationship to their own role as mother or son, reveals something unique and important about them.
publisher Picador
Moral Disorder
by Margaret Atwood
A collection of eleven stories that is almost a novel ... or a novel boroken up into eleven stories - you decide.
Atwood's book resembles a photograph album - a series of moments that trace the course of a life, and the lives with which it is intertwined.
publisher Bloomsbury
The Dead Fish Museum
by Charles D'Ambrosio
It is a bizarre and frankly baffling fact that Charles D'Ambrosio’s mind-blowing new collection of stories has not found a publisher in the UK. This is writing to set racing the pulse of anyone remotely interested in reading.
Here are multi-layered tales of masculinity, botched relationships, psychological breakdown, sexual desire and family tensions.
publisher Knopf, U.S.
Incidences
by Daniil Kharms
translated by Neil Cornwell
Kharms wrote as one of a group called the Society for Real Art in the Soviet Union after the First World War. His work - absurdist miniatures that tend to feature chance violence and sudden death - was banned; he spent years in the gulag until dying of starvation in 1941.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Mortality
by Nicholas Royle
A collection of twisted short stories featuring lovesick morticians, mad women, male neurotics, frustrated pizza waiters and psychotic serial killers.
publisher Serpent's Tail
The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B and Other Stories
by Jeremy Akerman and Eileen Daly (eds.)
A bizarre collection of short stories (some of them very short and many of them about death) by 17 contemporary British artists.
Contributors include Jake Chapman, Edward Allington, Mikey Cuddihy, Polly Gould and Chris Hammond.
publisher Serpent's Tail
Ploughing Songs
by Damian Croft
Croft's Fenland tales were inspired by a summer he spent working with local thatcher Stephen Morley, cutting osiers in the beds around Godmanchester and criss-crossing Huntingdonshire meeting eccentric local people.
publisher Elm Tree Press
Hope and Other Urban Tales
by Laura Hird
Set in the low-rent areas of Edinburgh, Hird's slices of reality are gritty, bleak and often darkly funny. Yet the possibility of hope, always just out of reach, unifies this collection, conveying that just as circumstances can reveal the morally obscure darkness in 'good' people, so can seemingly irredeemable characters harbour well-hidden pockets of humanity.
publisher Canongate
The Blue: Short Stories
by Maggie Gee
The people in this collection try and often fail to understand the world, freeing themselves by small acts of courage, love or folly. These are lives jolted by tragedy, numbed by disaster and cowed by circumstance.
publisher Telegram Books
War and Peace: Contemporary Russian Prose
by Natasha Perova (ed.)
Stories of war - life as a soldier in the Chechnya war; fierce fighting and a miraculous salvation from sure death; an ex-serviceman's inability to reintegrate into peaceful life after his army stint in Chechnya; one day in the bleak existence as a border guard - and of peace: a vivid portrait of a small provincial town where a very average, modern, young woman still yearns for love and tries various ways of getting it; a modern woman rebels against the traditional dependency implicit in male-female relationships.
publisher Glas
A Winter Book
by Tove Jansson
translated by Silvester Mazzarella, David McDuff and Kingsley Hart
Drawn from Jansson's youth and older age, and spanning most of the twentieth century, this newly translated selection (chosen by Ali Smith) is full of stories that 'celebrate the endless, unstoppable, good-natured force of the imagination.'
'The stories face age, youth, and each of the dark and light seasons with the same determination to make something light of it all.' (From Ali Smith's introduction.)
publisher Sort Of Books
Music for the Off-Key
by Courttia Newland
Drawing inspiration from everything from traditional horror movies to the contemporary sophistication of Japanese works in this genre, Newland brings together the literary and the popular in a uniquely Black British mix.
publisher Peepal Tree Press
Light Transports: Commutes
by Steve Dearden (ed.)
The stories in this book are long enough to be read on the daily commute.
Alecia McKenzie's African heroine surfaces as an illegal domestic in Belgium; Jack Mapanje lives in York where he is reclaiming the time he lost in the political prisons of Hastings Banda by writing his prison diary; and the characters in the stories by MY Alam and Sumeia Ali operate in the cities of northern England, caught between the exaggerated world of gangster bling and the mundane necessities of going straight.
Read more about the Light Transports project.
publisher route
Light Transports: Intercity
by Steve Dearden (ed.)
The stories in this book are long enough to be read on a train journey from one city to another.
They are: a Guyanese love story by Mark McWatt; a tale of a young German soldier's experience in occupied Czechoslovakia by Storm Jameson; a romp of international criminality and magical spells in rural France by Patricia Duncker; and Aritha van Herk's story about a woman who wants to disappear.
Read more about the Light Transports project.
publisher route
Light Transports: A Couple of Stops
by Steve Dearden (ed.)
The seven stories in this book are short enough to be read on the shortest of train journeys.
Steven Hall takes you into the inner lives of the other passengers in your carriage; Mandy Sutter gets right inside one of those moments when certainties shift; Kath McKay and Ellen Osborne explore how we move on after the death of someone close; Tom Spanbauer takes us back to his house in Portland, Oregon, and Chenjerai Hove meditates on the fear Bible stories created in his Zimbabwean childhood.
Read more about the Light Transports project.
publisher route
Tales of the DeCongested 1
by Paul Blaney and Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone (eds.)
This anthology contains the best stories from the first two years of this short story reading event, which takes place on the last Friday of each month at Foyles Bookshop on London's Charing Cross Road.
Among the 32 tales in this volume are stories by Ali Smith, Nicholas Royle, Ray Robinson and Frank Goodman.
publisher Apis Books
Seven Days: The Short Story Reinvented
by Various
Seven authors delve into the mind of a character for a single day, providing a number of different perspectives on the many ways in which humans experience the world on a weekly basis.
Like its predecessor, The Remarkable Everyday, this collection strives to bridge the gap between the novel and the short story.
publisher Legend Press
Every Move You Make
by David Malouf
David Malouf has a keen sensibility for the troubled ways in which boys and men try to make sense of the world, often hindered by an inability to communicate.
A boy is finally allowed to join the town's men on their annual expedition to the Valley of Lagoons; a young man readies himself for a tour of duty in Vietnam; a woman struggles to cope with the fact that her partner won't talk about his past.
publisher Chatto & Windus
Salmonella Men on Planet Porno
by Yasutaka Tsutsui
translated by Andrew Driver
Tsutsui's stories centre on the folly of human desire. Most of his characters suffer awful fates as a result of their own foolishness, which usually takes the form of greed, lust or vanity.
publisher Alma Books
Cairo Stories
by Ann-Marie Drosso
Egypt is the setting for this collection, but the stories are universal: a girl's mother no longer recognises her daughter; a young man uses the changing political climate to humiliate the family patriarch; a woman is consumed by guilt for abandoning her children.
publisher Telegram Books
Sunstroke
by Tessa Hadley
These stories of family life have a sharp undercurrent of treacherous love running through them. Hadley's characters have affairs, or think about having affairs; their loves are complicated and on occasion illicit.
A boy becomes aware that one of his parents' friends is flirting with him; a son confesses to his mother that he is thinking of being unfaithful to his girlfriend; pent-up young mothers dream of more exciting lives.
publisher Jonathan Cape
Family Connections
by Chrissie Gittins
These stories trace the fragile and enduring connections between those related by blood, and those not.
A gay couple care for a cantankerous neighbour, a daughter hangs on to the threads of her father’s mind, an anthropologist finds it difficult to leave behind the refugees she has studied, and the fate of a nonagenarian former channel swimmer is sealed alongside a virginal teenager and a baroque beautician.
publisher Salt Publishing
Faded Pictures
by Mark Ellis
Lost Russian warplanes, sunken treasure, a dying distiller, a stuffed toy dog, an imaginary cat and a kidnapped penguin. All the characters in these stories are trying to escape something.
These are grey people, dreaming about colour from the background of old photographs.
publisher Collective Unconscious
Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 1
by Stephen Moran (ed.)
The best of the international Willesden short story prize with writing from Britain, India, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand and the US. A feast of new short stories from Willie Davis, Steve Finbow, James Lawless, Lee Joans, Nicholas Hogg, Wes Lee, Vanessa Gebbie, Jonathan Attrill, Laura Solomon, Shakti Bhatt, Laura Heggie, Olesya Mishechkina and Arthur Allan.
publisher PretendGenius Press
So Far, So Near
by Mat Coward
Journey through these sixteen stories and unravel the mystery of killer cats and dead ghosts, discover why fresh air is so clean, and understand why the Joke Squad is one of the busiest in the police force.
Coward’s characters deal with infestations of horses, witches running call centres, and ponder the eternal question: if time travel is possible then where are all the time travellers?
publisher Elastic Press
Pumping Up Napoleon
by Maria Donovan
A lively collection with an offbeat take on human relationships. 'Offbeat' includes growing your own four-foot son for organ transplants; dog massage; and a university lecturer’s touching relationship with a resurrected Napoleon Bonaparte.
publisher Seren
The Gradual Gathering of Lust
by Toni Davidson
From the confessions of an ex-Miss World to the last stand of an elderly nymphomaniac, the power struggles of brother and sister castaways to the quandaries of a fly-on-the-wall documentary-maker on a tantric sex weekend, Davidson's enigmatic narrators tell all.
publisher Canongate
7 Stories
by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
translated by Joanne Turnbull
Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was prominent in Moscow literary circles in the 1920s and 30s but his work was all but unpublished. Since then he has slipped into oblivion, best known for being forgotten.
This translated collection of his philosophical, satirical, lyrical phantasmagorias should restore his reputation.
publisher Glas
Last Evenings on Earth
by Roberto Bolano
translated by Chris Andrews
This posthumous collection by the acclaimed Chilean author is imbued with 'the melancholy folklore of exile', as Roberto Bolano once put it, and set largely in the world of the Chilean diaspora in Central America and Europe.
Grappling with private quests, the characters live in the margins, in constant flight from nightmarish threats.
publisher Harvill Secker
The Female of the Species
by Joyce Carol Oates
Brutal stories of violence and sex peopled by a sadistic older cop, a paedophile, a daddy's girl, a rich banker.
publisher Quercus
Insomnia
by Aamer Hussein
An elusive Japanese girl leads a teenage boy into a world of passion and conflict; in Andalusia, a man talks to his painter friend about longing and belonging.
A translator finds himself drawn into the personal and political turmoil of the poet he translates; a woman's quiet world is eroded by the onset of war and the movement for independence and nationhood.
publisher Telegram
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves
by Karen Russell
Beneath the stories’ tricksy titles and their bonkers-sounding enterprises lie moving tales of youth, loss, old age, and the fight against conformity.
There is crazy-with-a-capital-K fun here, but also thoughtfulness; if the set-ups verge on the absurd, the characters and situations feel disarmingly real.
Read an interview with the author
publisher Chatto & Windus
Collected Stories
by Ruth Rendell
Well kown for her Inspector Wexford mysteries, Ruth Rendell is also a prolific short story writer.
This collection brings together her three volumes Means of Evil, The Fallen Curtain and The Fever Tree.
publisher Hutchinson
Missing Kissinger
by Etgar Keret
translated by Mirian Schlesinger and Sondra Silverston
More surreal, violent and compassionate tales from a writer praised for this wit profundity.
These are, for the most part, very short short stories, but they pack a punch.
Read an interview with the author
publisher Chatto & Windus
Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2
by Ian Jack (ed.)
Short story writers are gratifyingly represented in Granta's second collection of young American novelists. The book contains stories by ZZ Packer, Karen Russell, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Yiyun Li and Nell Freudenberger among others.
publisher Granta
Magic for Beginners
by Kelly Link
'Sweetly strange, liberally scattered with brilliance, a mgaical lens on the stuff of life that moves and makes us.'
publisher Harper Perennial
Walk the Blue Fields
by Claire Keegan
In her second collection, Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past: a woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture; a forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife; a farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone.
publisher Faber
A Fragile Hope
by Ken Kamoche
Kamoche's (short) short stories explore themes of exile and constraint. Trapped in lives and locations that range from Birmingham to Denmark to Hong Kong, many of his characters make emotional breaks for freedom. This is a small collection with a world-wide reach.
publisher Salt Publishing
In Praise of Navigation: Twentieth Century Short Stories from the Dutch
by PC Evans and Paul Vincent (eds.)
translated by the editors
From the West Indies to Shanghai via Amsterdam, these tales range across the Dutch Empire or focus on a confining homeland. Contributors include Harry Mulisch, Hugo Claus, Bernlef and Margriet de Moor.
publisher Seren
More Pricks Than Kicks
by Samuel Beckett
A collection of stories about an Irish student and ne'er do well called Belacqua. His adventures and amours are played out on the streets of 1920s Dublin.
publisher Calder Publications
A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories
by Primo Levi
translated by various
This collection of Levi's unpublished stories marks the twentieth anniversary of his death.
An office worker composes the most beautiful poem ever, only to find events taking on a strange life of their own; researchers develop a paint that mysteriously protects them from misfortune, but they dangerously miscalculate the outcome; and in 'Gladiators' and 'The Knall', Levi explores modern-day mass violence.
publisher Penguin
Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women
by Roseanne Saad Khalaf (ed.)
The stories in this collection are by established writers - Emily Nasrallah, Hanan Sheikh, Alaweeya Sobh - and younger women. They explore themes of war, romance, emigration and Lebanon rich yet complex society.
publisher Telegram
So, What Kept You?
by Tess Gallagher, Claire Malcolm and Margaret Wilkinson (eds.)
'New stories inspired by Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver.'
Contributors include David Almond, Rajeev Balasubramanyam, Andrew Crumey, Julia Darling, Georgi Gospodinov, J Robert Lennon, David Means, Courttia Newland, Andrew O'Hagan, Evgeny Popov, Nadya Radulova, Natalia Smirnova, Ali Smith, and Margaret Wilkinson.
publisher Flambard Press
Antarctica
by Claire Keegan
A married woman takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind - to sleep with another man; Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date with her lover that has been nine years in the waiting; a local postman visits two sisters bearingfishy gifts in the hope that his favour will be returned in kind.
Keegan's characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory and chance can have crippling consequences for those involved.
publisher Faber
Astral Bodies
by Jay Merill
Merill’s narratives are charged with restless energy, her characters seek to come to terms with disappointment, ambivalence and compulsion. Her stories explore themes of transcendence, change and escape, often at odds with a fast-changing, indifferent world.
publisher Salt Publishing
Call It Tender
by John Saul
A collection of contemporary love stories commenting, often wryly, on the tangles and absurdities of modern life.
Set in Mallorca, Berlin, Wiltshire and Suffolk, Mannheim and New Jersey, they tell of lovers meeting, of how a prisoner struggles, a forester grows curious, a patient survives, a girl falls and falls through space.
publisher Salt Publishing
Third Class Superhero
by Charles Yu
Moisture Man, the hero of the title story, is tired of watching his former classmates kick ass while he struggles to maintain his good-guy accreditation. Someday soon he’ll have to decide whose side he’s really on, and how far he’s willing to push the panels of his storyline ...
Yu’s characters tackle the terrifying aspects of existence: mothers, jobs, spouses, the need to express feelings.
publisher Salt Publishing
We're In Trouble
by Christopher Coake
In Coake-world, ordinary people get into deep trouble: unwanted responsibilities; the fragility of life; the withering of love; caught out in the freezing cold.
publisher Penguin
The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2006-7
by David Marcus (ed.)
Previously unpublished author join more established names - Sebastian Barry, Joseph O'Connor, John Banville - in this anthology of Irish writing.
publisher Faber
Missing
by Walter de la Mare
With London in the grip of a heat-wave, a man takes refuge from the scorching sun in a nearby tea-shop, only to share his table with a stranger who seems determined to make conversation.
'Missing' is the first of three unsettling stories of guilty secrets, past hurts, and haunted lives from one of England's foremost writers of the twentieth century.
publisher Hesperus Press
The Gipsy's Baby
by Rosamond Lehmann
The five stories in this volume represent Lehmann's entire output of shorter fiction written to commission.
They are dark tales of materially privileged lives undercut by despair and shadowed by war. As Niall Griffiths says in his foreword, 'Well-tended lawns are here ... and the best china, but there is neat vodka in the tea-cups.'
publisher Hesperus Press
The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity
by HP Tinker
This zany and surreal collection features (among others) Paul Gauguin, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr, Pierre Boulez, Bertrand Russell, Jean Vigo, Morrissey and - most splendidly - Tom Paulin, who 'leaves the top button of his shirt undone to affect a more casual appearance'.
publisher Social Disease
No One Belongs Here More Than You
by Miranda July
A child stands in the sidewalk; a woman lies motionless in bed beside her husband; a teacher pauses at the chalkboard. Suddenly the daily drone is disrupted by something completely unexpected.
July's characters are awkward and often remote, yet they are also profoundly sympathetic. With great compassion and generosity she reveals the idiosyncrasies, vulnerability, longing, and odd logic that govern our lives.
publisher Canongate
The Separate Heart and Other Stories
by Simon Robson
Robson’s stories offer up the notion that separateness exists between adults, and between children and the adult world, no matter how well one may seem to know the other. They are also very, very English.
Here are tea parties in Oxbridge rooms, a vicar’s concern for a cantankerous tramp, an old man digging potatoes. Characters are called Lydia, Emily and Jonathan, Mary, Dinah and Josh. Stories are played out in a Cotswold village, a school on the Sussex Downs, a London house with an apricot-coloured sofa in its living room.
publisher Jonathan Cape
X-24 Unclassified
by Tash Aw and Nii Ayikwei Parkes
From South America to Morocco, and Wales to Chicago, the stories in this collection transcend location, nationality, reality and time.
Contributors include Sefi Atta, Naomi Alderman, Peter Hobbs, Jennifer Kabat, Clare Wigfall, Daniel Alarcon and Laila Lalami.
publisher Flipped Eye
Dinaane: Short Stories by Women from South Africa
by Maggie Davey (ed.)
Stories in South Africa kept the dream of freedom alive during the colonial and apartheid years; and the tradition of the people and elders of a village meeting under the shade of a tree is based on telling stories as a way of arriving at an understanding.
The rich tradition of storytelling is brought to life here, by women who write of and from the landscape and its people.
publisher Telegram
Katha: Short Stories by Indian Women
by Urvashi Butalia (ed.)
Whether it is in the kitchen or elsewhere, Indian women's stories have been handed down from generation to generation, enriched and embroidered along the way. But with the coming of political change and print culture many women's voices were silenced.
It is only in more recent times that these voices can again be heard, in all their confidence and variety. This collection covers many languages and cultures and reflects the vast and complex cultures of India.
publisher Telegram
Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women
by Jo Glanville (ed.)
These stories reflect the everyday concerns of Palestinians living under occupation. Writers who were children during the first intifada appear alongside those who remember the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war.
Palestinian women offer compassionate, often critical insight into their society in times of hardship and turmoil, yet look to the warmth of human relations and the hope that better times will come. Contributors include authors from the occupied territories, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and writers from the Palestinian diaspora.
publisher Telegram
London Pub Reviews
by Paul Ewen
All the stories in Ewen's surreal collection are set in real London pubs. they follow one man's love of ale and the bizarre experiences he encounters as he enjoys a few pints around the capital.
publisher Shoes with Rockets
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God
by Etgar Keret
Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Keret’s stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. Hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work.
Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain — from a father’s first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens.
publisher Toby Press
Gaza Blues
by Etgar Keret and Samir el-Yousseff
Two writers, Israeli Etgar Keret and Palestinian Samir el-Youssef, have collaborated to produce this book of short stories and a novella exploring different aspects of a fraught and complex situation.
Their bleak, hip, urban tales reflect the dreams and nightmares of living in contemporary Israel and during the first Intifada.
publisher David Paul Books
The Sermon and Other Stories
by Haim Hazaz
translated by Various
This is a representative volume of stories by Hazaz, spanning his career and interests, from Shtetl life, to the spiritual life of the Yemenite community and his understanding of Zionism and Jewish history.
publisher Toby Press
Leading the Dance
by Sarah Salway
A bored housewife welcomes the nomadic painter of family pets into her home and commissions a portrait of her fridge; a schoolboy learns how to survive when his gang turns against him; a man's life is turned around when he hears his wife make a new noise in bed, and in the title story, a dance between husband and wife at a school ceilidh turns into a battle for survival.
This is domestic life turned on its head, with Salway's witty and economic prose capturing the private moments of transformation by some very different characters on the edge.
publisher Bluechrome
There Are Little Kingdoms
by Kevin Barry
Fast girls cool their heels on a slow night in a small town; a bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identity; lonesome hillwalkers take to the high reaches in hope of a saving embrace.
Kevin Barry's collection of Irish stories was awarded the 2007 Rooney Prize.
publisher The Stinging Fly
These Are Our Lives
by Declan Meade (ed.)
The Stinging Fly magazine was established in 1997 to publish and promote new Irish and international writing.
This anthology includes 22 mainly Irish stories by well-known and new writers. Contributors include Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Toby Litt, Kevin Barry, Claire Keegan and Antonia Hart.
publisher The Stinging Fly
Decapolis: Tales from Ten Cities
by Maria Crossan (ed.)
translated by Various
Decapolis brings together ten writers from across Europe, who have each written snapshots of life in their cities.
From Amsterdam - where a lonely woman cooks for a circle of middle-aged bachelors - to Zagreb in the shadow of the Balkan conflict, these stories offer us a continuum of urban experience.
publisher Comma Press
Mere Anarchy
by Woody Allen
Woody Allen's collection of stories is surreal, absurd, rich in verbal play, bitingly satirical and just plain daft.
A nanny secretly writes an expose of of her Manhattan employers; a pretentious writer id forced to novelise a Three Stooges film; a body double is mistaken for the film's star and kidnapped by outlaws.
publisher Ebury Press
Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction
by Alison MacLeod
Tales of lovers, would-be lovers and love gone wrong.
An ECT patient falls for her anaesthetist; cerebral Nick chases after pregnant Katie at an Ikea sale; Abelard and Heloise are re-imagined for the 21st century.
publisher Penguin
Sea Stories
by Various
The National Maritime Museum is celebrating its 70th anniversary with this collection of sea stories, set in coastal landscapes from Orkney to the North-West Passage to Norway.
Contributors include Chris Cleave, Erica Wagner, Margaret Elphinstone, Tessa Hadley, Jim Perrin and Niall Griffiths.
publisher National Maritime Museum
The National Short Story Prize 2007
by Various
The judges of the 2007 prize (Monica Ali, AS Byatt, Alex Linklater, Di Speirs and Mark Lawson) chose stories by Julian Gough - who won the overall prize - Jonathan Falla, Hanif Kureishi, David Almond and Jackie Kay.
publisher Atlantic Books
The Mechanics' Institute Review (issue 4)
by Various
MIR4 features work by well-known writers alongside stories by students on the Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck, University of London. The anthology is edited by five of the students.
Contributors include David Bezmozgis, Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace, Zoe Fairbairns and cartoonist Tom Gauld, as well as students Jill McGivering, Gabriela Blandy and Elizabeth Sarkany.
publisher Birkbeck
The New Granta Book of the American Short Story
by Richard Ford
Richard Ford's first Granta Book of the American Short Story became the definitive anthology of American short fiction written in the last half of the twentieth century.
In the fourteen years since its publication in 1992, Ford has been reading new stories and re-reading old ones and selecting new favourites. This new collection expands Ford's orginal choice to include stories that he regretted overlooking first time around as well as many by a new generation of writers, among them Sherman Alexie, Junot Diaz, Deborah Eisenberg, Nell Freidenberg, Matt Klam, Jhumpa Lahiri, and ZZ Packer.
publisher Granta
The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets
by Sophie Hannah
Everybody has their secrets, and in Sophie Hannah's fantastic stories the curtains positively twitch with them. Who, for instance, is the hooded figure hiding in the bushes outside a young man's house? Why does the same stranger keep appearing in the background of a family's holiday photographs?
What makes a woman stand mesmerised by two children in a school playground, children she's never met but whose names she knows well? And which secret results in a former literary festival director sorting soiled laundry in a shabby hotel?
publisher Sort Of Books
Words from a Glass Bubble
by Vanessa Gebbie
Gebbie's stories pivot around the recognition that those who seem powerless can prove to be the strongest catalysts for change, both in themselves and others.
publisher Salt Publishing
Brace: A New Generation in Short Fiction
by Jim Hinks (ed.)
Brace is the latest in Comma's bi-annual series of new writer anthologies, which features the work of recent graduates from creative writing courses alongside short story prizewinning authors.
None of the authors in the collection had published a novel or full single author collection of stories at the time of submitting work to the anthology, but several of them have since gone on to secure publishing deals.
publisher Comma Press
The Book of Other People
by Zadie Smith (ed.)
The authors in this anthology had a simple brief: make somebody up. The results range from Andrew O'Hagan's short tale about a Scottish man called Gordon who comes to London, to David Mitchell's cautionary tale about how not to dump someone. There are also graphic contributions from Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware and Posy Simmonds.
The beneficiary of this collection is 826 New York, a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting students aged 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills.
publisher Hamish Hamilton
Short FICTION 1
by Anthony Caleshu (ed.)
The first volume of the handsomely produced Short FICTION journal features writing by Kevin Barry, Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Julian Gough (winner of the 2007 National Short Story Prize) and Philip Gross among others, and a photo essay by Sarah Chapman.
Short FICTION is edited by Anthony Caleshu; contributing editors are the writers Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Toby Litt, Mike McCormack, Helen Oyeyemi and Ali Smith.
publisher University of Plymouth Press
The Dream Lover: Short Stories
by William Boyd
Funny, moving and sharply observed, these stories are confirmation of Boyd's status as one of English fiction's finest writers. Here are twenty-four gripping tales told in bold, distinct voices from Brazil to Africa and from Nice to Hollywood.
publisher Bloomsbury
Bonne Route
by Ian Daley (ed.)
Bonne Route is a title in Route's series of contemporary anthologies designed as the ideal reading choice for commuters.
The stories in this collection 'wander off the beaten track and reflect on the moments which change people's direction in life'. Contributors include Sophie Hannah and Michael Nath.publisher Route
Elsewhere: Stories from Small Town Europe
by Maria Crossan (ed.)
translated by Various
The second in Comma Press's short story translation project (the first was Decapolis) concentrates on smalltown Europe, rather than cities.
Here are tales of a German house husband sent over the edge by his successful neighbours; a Norwegian Morrissey fan in search of a girlfriend; and a Polish question of paternity.
Contributors include Olga Tokarczuk and Roman Simic.
publisher Comma Press
Alternative Medicine
by Laura Solomon
A couple are torn apart by a renegade duvet, an upstaged Santa takes revenge on his rival, a girl’s father is abducted by aliens, a man is relentlessly bullied by his sister on their annual holiday, a manufactured genius turns out to be not so perfect after all.
Alternative Medicine offers an entertaining and insightful journey into the shortcomings of being human, and the wonder of our graces. Solomon’s absurd scenarios reveal the even more ridiculous habits and behaviours which are hidden beneath our everyday lives.
publisher Flame Books
Body Parts: The Anatomy of Love
by Richard Bardsley
Human anatomy and affairs of the heart take on a whole new dimension in this book of stories, each one dedicated to a part of the human body and all on the theme of love.
From head to feet via freckles and fingers, every aspect of the body is explored through stories that are humorous, at times disturbing and never predictable. By the end of the journey, the agony and enchantment of love in all its guises has been dissected.
publisher Salt
Aromabingo
by David Gaffney
More of Gaffney’s weird and edgy ultra-shorts, plus several longer works. Though many of his stories are shorter than a Napalm Death snarl, these precision-engineered slivers of fiction leave you with the dying chords of a symphony.
These tales will have you laughing, though there’s something hideous gnawing at the door to get in. Be careful, a spoonful weighs a ton.
publisher Salt
Some New Ambush
by Carys Davies
Love, loss, birth, death, betrayal, madness – they all lie in wait for Davies’s characters in their startlingly different worlds: a dry cleaner’s shop in contemporary Chicago, a mining town in South Wales in the sixties, a lunatic asylum in nineteenth century northern England.
These stories tell of how we attempt to confront the things life throws in our path – often when we least expect them, and in places where we never thought to look.
publisher Salt
Balancing on the Edge of the World
by Elizabeth Baines
These are stories about power: children without it, adults vying to get or keep it — the boy caught between divorced parents, the arts worker conman, the avenging wife. Sometimes funny, sometimes moving, and always surprising: for it’s a slippery thing, power, and nothing is ever quite want it seems.
publisher Salt
Broken Things
by Padrika Tarrant
Broken Things encompasses a world of fractured realities and urban magic. Here are voices lost inside themselves, where the world is lopsided and nothing may be trusted. A kitchen knife crawls after a little girl to keep her safe and an old lady hears her mother calling from a cupboard.
publisher Salt
The Searching Glance
by Linda Cracknell
The second collection from one of Scotland’s leading short story writers.
The worlds inhabited by the characters in these stories are diverse. Linda Cracknell’s stories are multi-layered and brooding with longing and loss, allowing the reader a ‘searching glance’ at characters’ lives. The collection contains touches of the surreal and hard strokes of reality.
publisher Salt
The I Love You Book
by William Guy
A hundred very different men and women talk about the people, the feelings, the places, the life, the things they love. Here are the affairs of the heart confided by the stand-up comic working his audience, the gangsta defying the world for his girl, the other woman coping with her guilt.
Here is love in the family circle, and among lifetime friends and those on society’s fringe easy only with their kind. Here are those who take but cannot give, the love that leads to paradox, and scores more.
publisher Salt
I Love Dollars
by Zhu Wen
translated by Julia Lovell
I Love Dollars makes comedy out of modern everyday life
In the title story, a young man, acutely aware of his filial duty, sets out to secure a prostitute for his father, only to haggle his old man out of a good time. This and other stories amplify China's identity crisis in a post-Mao world ranging from an old Yangtze River vessel to failing factories, cheap diners and a for-profit hospital run according to dated socialist norms.
publisher Penguin
Tiny Deaths
by Robert Shearman
Shearman’s debut collection offers a procession of what-ifs floating just above the real world, self-contained hypotheticals all buoyed up by a single, infinitely variable theme: mortality.
Whether questioning our deepest metaphysical assumptions about death, or playing tricks with its analogies – the death of a relationship, or the petit mort of the title – Shearman continually surprises and subverts. Themes include alien intelligence, reincarnation, imaginary children, and conversations with Hitler’s childhood pet.
publisher Comma
Instruction Manual for Swallowing
by Adam Marek
Robotic insects, in-growing cutlery, flesh-serving waiters in a zombie cafe... Welcome to the surreal, misshapen universe of Adam Marek’s first collection; a bestiary of hybrids from the techno-crazed future and mythical past; a users’ guide to the seemingly obvious (and the world of illogic implicit within it).
Whether fantastical or everyday in setting, Marek’s stories lead us down to the engine room just beneath modern consciousness, a place of both atavism and familiarity, where the body is fluid, the spirit mechanised, and beasts often tell us more about our humanity than anything we can teach ourselves.
publisher Comma
A White Afternoon
by Meic Stephens (ed.)
translated by Meic Stephens
An anthology of 30 Welsh short stories by young writers working in the Welsh language, translated into English for the first time.
publisher Parthian
Strange Language
by Mari Jose Olaziregi (ed.)
translated by Various
A compilation of short stories from fourteen of today's best Basque writers, Strange Language provides an insight into modern Basque society and literature. It includes stories by Bernardo Atxaga, Lourdes Onederra, and Iban Zaldua, among others.
publisher Parthian
The Collected Stories
by Lorrie Moore
Collected here for the first time are the stories from Self-Help, Like Life, Birds of America, and those from Anagrams, along with three new stories in which Moore turns her attentions to life’s middle years.
In ‘Paper Losses’, a middle-aged couple who fell in love as peaceniks deal with the collateral damage of a broken marriage; a woman is given the second chance to say goodbye to a friend who is dying of cancer in ‘The Juniper Tree’; and in the hilarious ‘Debarking’, Ira struggles through the indignities of the divorcee dating scene.
publisher Faber
Roll Up for the Arabian Derby
by Susan Wicks
Roll up for the Arabian Derby, a sinister fairground booth where children are tempted, become addicted and can never escape.
Roll up for an unpredictable and threatening ride where death is a body in the road, a binbag of shoes, or a pair of unlikely female voyeurs – where babies grow as big as adults and a meeting with a ventriloquist’s dummy can change your life.
publisher bluechrome
The People on Privilege Hill
by Jane Gardam
A new collection by one of the finest proponents of the short story genre.
The title story, which features Sir Edward Feathers (the irascible judge from Gardam's novel Old Filth), has been shortlisted for the 2008 BBC National Short Story Award.
publisher Chatto & Windus
Say You're One of Them
by Uwem Akpan
This collection ranges from the depiction of a street family's poverty in Kenya and illegal trading of children in Gabon to inter-religious conflicts in Nigeria and Ethiopia and the terrible situation faced by a mixed Hutu-Tsutsi family in Rwanda.
Akpan's stories, told from the viewpoints of children (the innocent victims) are powerful, vivid and deeply moving.
publisher Abacus
BBC National Short Story Award 2008
by Various
This anthology contains the five stories shortlisted for the 2008 Award. The authors are Richard Beard, Jane Gardam, Erin Soros, Adam Thorpe and Clare Wigfall
Subject matter ranges from an MEP in trouble to a gathering of old judges at a lunch party, a rite of passage on a Canadian beach, an old bottle that reveals a wartime atrocity and a hard life on a bleak, remote island.
publisher Short Books
Short Stories with Appealing Human Passions
by David Eric Hagan
A collection of nostalgic African folk tales that reflect the culture and lifestyle of yesteryear in Ghana.
The author was inspired by the storytellers of his youth, who would gather children under moonlight and tell them what is known in Ghana as Kweku Ananse stories: the spider known to weave webs with yarn.
publisher Rebecca's Free Enterprise
Breaking Knees: Modern Arabic Short Stories from Syria
by Zakaria Tamer
translated by Ibrahim Muhawi
Syrian author Zakaria Tamer is acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of the modern Arab world.
The general theme of this collection of short stories is repression: of the individual by the institutions of state and religion and of individuals by each other, particularly women by men. Many stories stress religious hypocrisy and the unfilled sexual expectations of women.
In bringing together religion, politics and sexuality (sometimes all three in the same story), the author is telling us indirectly that these forms of oppression are all connected.
publisher Ithaca Press
A Casualty of War
by Peter Burton
This anthology of gay-themed short stories based around the conflicts of war includes work by Neil Bartlett, Francis King, Hugh Fletwood, Richard Zimler, Scott Brown, Alan James, Neal Drinnan and Patrick Roscoe.
publisher Arcadia
Unsafe Attachments
by Caroline Oulton
These stories explore the relationships between a loosely interlinked group of Londoners.
Here are alluring women and compromised professionals, footloose mothers and heartless boys, the confused, the conscientious and the carefree.
publisher Hutchinson
Caravan Thieves
by Gerard Woodward
Woodward's debut collection of stories has some of the trademarks of his novels. Here are stories of infidelity, bad sex, mundane jobs, betrayal and revenge.
These stories might be slight in length (even for short stories), but they pack a punch that leaves you feeling disconcerted, mildly disgusted or highly amused.
publisher Chatto & Windus
The Other Garden and Collected Stories
by Francis Wyndham
Wyndham's writing is full of gestures that celebrate the day-to-day while at the same time reaching out for a more profound engagement, a larger truth.
Just over the horizon is the Second World War, its progression touching the lives of women left behind, of young men awaiting call-up, and of those people who have simply been passed by, left to spend their days in their own familiar worlds.
publisher Picador
The Garden of Bad Dreams
by Christopher Hope
A nostalgic circus man is compelled to collect small people; an industrious monk strives to push a mountain away from his monastery; desperate soldiers eat all of the animals in a zoo apart from a pale South American jaguar.
Hope, born in South Africa, transports his readers from Serbia to Malaysia via England i these stories.
publisher Atlantic Books
Bad News of the Heart
by Douglas Glover
A seeing-eye dog leads a blind man into a frozen river; a southern Baptist loses his memory and finds true love in Bel Air; an obese dot.com executive has anorgasmic latex sex with her CEO; and a homeless man in New York creates an intellectual universe based on post-it notes stuck to the inside of his cardboard box shelter.
Glover's stories are wildly inventive, deadpan comedies of the universal human catastrophe.
publisher Dalkey Archive Press
Liver
by Will Self
Each of these four stories feature the largest of our internal organs: the liver, in varying states of disease and decay.
Self tells us about the denizens of a Soho drinking club; a dazzlingly successful advertising copywriter; a subterranean Kensington flat that is a realm of cocaine and heroin; and a terminal liver cancer patient who travels to Zurich to commit assisted suicide.
publisher Viking
The First Person and Other Stories
by Ali Smith
Intellectually playful, but also very moving and funny, Smith explores the ways and whys of storytelling.
In one, a middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her gauche fourteen-year-old self. In another, an innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting and beautiful child.
Challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality, a third presents its narrator, 'Ali', as she drinks tea, phones a friend and muses on the relationship between the short story and - a nymph.
publisher Hamish Hamilton
Letters from my Windmill
by Alphonse Daudet
translated by Frederick Davies
Throughout his career, celebrated Parisian novelist Daudet remained a true son of Provence. This collection of wryly humorous stories, admired by Flaubert, Dickens, and Henry James, evokes the vital rhythms of Provençal life and Daudet’s youth in the mid–nineteenth century.
publisher Penguin
Malgudi Days
by RK Narayan
Here Narayan portrays an astrologer, a snake-charmer, a postman, a vendor of pies and chappatis - all kinds of people, drawn in full colour and endearing domestic detail.
And under his magician's touch the whole imaginary city of Malgudi springs to life, revealing the essence of India and of human experience.
publisher Penguin
The Deportees
by Roddy Doyle
For the past few years Roddy Doyle has been writing stories for Metro Eireann, a newspaper started by, and aimed at, immigrants to Ireland. Each of the stories took a new slant on the immigrant experience, something of increasing relevance and importance in today’s Ireland.
Stories range from an open-minded father who is forced to confront his feelings when one of his daughters brings home a 'black fella', to a ghost story in which a Polish nanny grows impatient with her charge’s older sisters and decides – in a phrase she has learnt – to ‘scare them shitless’.
publisher Vintage
Modern Arabic Short Stories
by Daniel Newman and Ronak Husni
The twelve stories collected in this bilingual reader are by leading authors of the short story form in the Middle East today. In addition to works by writers already well-known in the West such as Idwar al-Kharrat, Fuad al-Takarli and Nobel Prize-winning Naguib Mahfouz, key authors whose fame has hitherto been restricted to the Middle East are also included.
Author biographies, notes on context and background, and a glossary and discussion of problematic language points are also included.
publisher Saqi
The Bridegroom
by Ha Jin
The twelve stories in The Bridegroom capture a China in transition, moving from Maoism towards a more open society. For these men and women, starting to feel the influence of the West, the daily dramas of a system that still struggles to control their every move and thought are made all the more painful by this.
Ha's other collections are Under the Red Flag and Ocean of Words.
publisher Vintage
Amok and Other Stories
by Stefan Zweig
translated by Anthea Bell
A doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his medical duty to help and his own mixed emotions; a middle-aged maidservant whose devotion to her master leads her to commit a terrible act; a hotel waiter whose love for an unapproachable aristocratic beauty culminates in an almost lyrical death; and a First World War POW longing to be home again in Russia.
Zweig's four tragic and moving cameos of the human condition are played out against cosmopolitan or colonial backgrounds in the first half of the 20th century.
publisher Pushkin Press
If You Liked School, You'll Love Work
by Irvine Welsh
How do three young Americans find themselves lost in the desert, and why does one find himself performing fellatio on another while being watched by the bare-breasted Madeline and two armed Mexicans? Who is the mysterious Korean chef who has moved upstairs to Chicago socialite Kendra Cross, and what does he have to do with the disappearance of her faithful pooch Toto?
These, and other equally bizarre, scenarios are brought to life in Welsh's first collection since The Acid House.
publisher Vintage
The One Marvelous Thing
by Rikki Ducornet
In the tradition of Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Angela Carter, Ducornet creates modern-day fables filled with characters as complex and surprising as any in American short fiction.
This collection of new stories is generously illustrated by T Motley, whose gritty, fantastical cartooning explores the same post-magical realism that has been the subject of Ducornet’s distinguished career.
publisher Dalkey Archive Press
Taking Pictures
by Anne Enright
These stories are snapshots of the body in trouble: in denial, in extremis, in love.
From Dublin to Venice, from an American college dorm to a holiday caravan in France, these are stories about women stirred, bothered, or fascinated by men they cannot understand, or understand too well. Enright’s women are haunted by children, and by the ghosts of the lives they might have led – lit by new flames, old flames, and flames that are guttering out.
publisher Jonathan Cape
Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories
by Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev’s works usually focus on class, love and suffering. This collection, with its themes of the supernatural was, therefore, something of a departure for a writer who was well-known for his more humanitarian and liberal views.
He uses these supernatural elements as a vehicle for exploring the irrationalities of the human psyche and he leaves the rational explanations for apparently supernatural events ambiguous.
This title, and other Turgenev collections, are published as print-on-demand titles by Faber.
publisher Faber
Cheating at Canasta
by William Trevor
A husband sits in Harry's Bar in Venice, thinking of his wife — lost to him now — whose plea has brought him back to one of their favourite haunts. On another table, a young couple quarrel.
'Cheating at Canasta' is the title story of this collection, Trevor's first since A Bit on the Side (2004), and its themes of missed opportunities, the inevitability of change and the powerful but fragmentary quality of our memories.
publisher Penguin
Crimini: The Bitter Lemon Book of Italian Crime Fiction
by Giancarlo de Cataldo
translated by Various
Nine gripping, often darkly humorous short stories by some of Italy's finest crime writers, with settings ranging from Milan to Palermo by way of Rome and even Guadeloupe.
These tales do not feature psychopathic cannibals or obscure power-mad sects but ordinary criminals: a drug-addled cosmetic surgeon, inept blackmailers and various other low-lifes lusting after easy money.
publisher Bitter Lemon Press
The Complete Prose Tales
by Alexander Pushkin
translated by Gillon Aitken
Beyond his perfect expression of Russian mood, Pushkin’s universality of vision has made him a permanent place in the history of world literature.
Gillon Aitken’s distinguished translation is the only volume that contains all his prose fiction, including some tales which remained unfinished when Pushkin was tragically killed in a duel at the age of thirty-seven.
publisher Vintage
The Atmospheric Railway
by Shena Mackay
This collection contains not only thirteen brilliant new stories, but a selection of twenty-three more from Shena Mackay's previous collections, making The Atmospheric Railway a delight for her existing admirers and the perfect introduction to her work for newcomers.
publisher Jonathan Cape
Fine Just the Way It Is
by Annie Proulx
In Proulx's third volume of Wyoming stories, the war in Iraq rears its ugly head, as does the usual grinding mix of poverty, death and hopelessness. And then there are all those funny-named characters.
publisher Fourth Estate
Knockemstiff
by Donald Ray Pollock
This pitch-dark and often hilarious collection of stories is set in the tiny Appalachian town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, a community so deprived and diminished it no longer appears on any map.
The youth of the town grow up in the malignant shadow of their parents; raised on abuse, alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, they are stunted in every possible way: emotionally, mentally, sometimes physically. They talk a lot about escape but they never so much as cross the county line.
publisher Harvill Secker
Country of the Grand
by Gerard Donovan
These stories magnify a New Ireland as it copes with the rewards and pressures of its fresh success: immigration, mid-life crisis, adultery and divorce, a lost sense of place and history, and of course, what to do with all that prosperity.
publisher Faber
A Chapter of Hats
by Machado de Assis
translated by John Gledson
Translator John Gledson has selected for this volume a number of the greatest short stories by nineteenth-century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis. They range from the philosophical to the comic, echoing Poe and Gogol, anticipating Joyce, and worthy of comparison to contemporary works by Chekhov, Maupassant, and Henry James. Yet they are not quite like any of these.
publisher Bloomsbury
How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories
by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
‘Someone once said that the definition of the highest art is that one should feel that life is this and not otherwise. I do not know of a writer living who gives that feeling with more unqualified certainty than Mrs Jhabvala.’ So wrote CP Snow, reviewing this collection of the stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Set in India, these stories are concerned not so much with Europeans in India as with Indians themselves. They are about universal human passions – yet interwoven with India itself.
publisher Capuchin Classics
The Pyramid
by Henning Mankell
translated by Ebba Segerberg and Laurie Thompson
When Kurt Wallander first appeared in Faceless Killers back in 1990, he was a senior police officer, just turned forty, with his life in a mess. His wife had left him, his father barely acknowledged him; he ate badly and drank alone at night.
The Pyramid chronicles the events that led him to such a place. We see him doing hours on the beat whilst trying to solve a murder off-duty; witness the beginnings of his fragile relationship with Mona, the woman he has his heart set on marrying; and learn the reason behind his difficulties with his father.
publisher Vintage
UEA Creative Writing Anthology 2008
by Various
This collection of writing from the University of East Anglia's renowned Creative Writing MA takes readers from the mudflats an English estuary to the sweat of a Bombay love affair and many places in between.
publisher Egg Box
The White Road and Other Stories
by Tania Hershman
Fleeing from tragedy, a bereaved mother opens a cafe on the road to the South Pole. A town which has always suffered extreme cold enjoys sudden warmth. A stranger starts plaiting a young woman's hair. A rabbi comes face to face with an angel in a car park... These are just some of the stories in Hershman's debut collection.
publisher Salt
Jesus Out to Sea
by James Lee Burke
Eleven short stories by one one of the masters of US crime fiction. Written over a 15-year period, they explore Burke's perennial themes of dignity in poverty; violence; and the beauty of the landscape.
publisher Phoenix
Confessions of a Falling Woman
by Debra Dean
This collection of short stories by the author of The Madonnas of Leningrad explores turning points in lives on the brink of change. The characters are either facing up to, or coming to terms with, a significant moment in their lives, from the prodigal daughter returning home for an intervention with her domineering alcoholic mother, to a woman unexpectedly rediscovering love with her ex-husband.
publisher Fourth Estate
Just After Sunset
by Stephen King
The dead gather on a railway platform in Wyoming; a survivor of the 9/11 attacks becomes trapped by the belongings of the victims; an obsessive-compulsive counts endlessly counts the seven (or eight?) stones of an ancient circle.
Guaranteed strangeness from one of the best in the business.
publisher Hodder & Stoughton
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead
by Jeffrey Eugenides (ed.)
A collection of short stories on the theme of love in its various forms: romantic, erotic, impossible, undying and exhausted. From passionate declarations to clinical analysis, writers of every age have been fascinated, tormented and inspired by love.
Edited and introduced by the author of Middlesex, this anthology includes stories by Faulkner, Chekhov, Lorrie Moore, Milan Kundera, Maupassant and others.
publisher Harper Perennial
Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black
by Nadine Gordimer
A woman gauges the state of her marriage by the tone of her husband's cello; a wife reads her husband's mood by the scent in the nape of his neck; a newly emigrated couple are divided by visual obsession, he with his native Budapest, she with South African suburbia.
Gordimer illustrates the show downs, standoffs and highlights of human intimacy while penetrating the nuances of immigration, national identity and race.
publisher Bloomsbury
Big Grey Water
by Robin Llywelyn
translated by Diarmuid Johnson
Among the features that define Llywelyn's work are surrealism, the personification of natural phenomena, (wind and rain for example, called Morys and Ifan), and a choice of animals - an armadillo, a squirrel - as characters in stories in which humans also feature.
publisher Parthian
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
by Daniyal Mueenuddin
In this beautiful and assured collection, Mueenuddin works and reworks the eternal themes of life, love and death. His control never wavers – neither does his compassion.
The stories are loosely linked, describing the overlapping worlds of an extended Pakistani landowning family, headed by the elderly patriarch KK Harouni.
publisher Bloomsbury
I Love You When I'm Drunk
by Empar Moliner
translated by Peter Bush
These stories lay bare every pretension ever to have offered comfort to the middle class psyche. From the zeal of a mothers' group staging a world record breastfeeding attempt to couples role-playing their way into parenthood at a third world ‘adoption workshop’, every well-meaning fad and right-on gesture is brilliantly observed and astutely exposed.
Moliner’s sharpest weapons are saved for relationships, interrogating love for the competitive sport it really is.
publisher Comma Press
Stone Tree
by Gyrdir Eliasson
translated by Victoria Cribb
Situated on the lonely western shores of Iceland, or out in the vast mountain ranges or barren lava fields of this spectacular country, each one of these stories is a study in self-exile.
In almost every story we find people taking leave of their normal lives in order to take their dreams more seriously. But even in the most desolate surroundings Elíasson’s characters find strange company.
publisher Comma Press
Amuse-Bouche
by Arnon Grunberg
translated by Lisa Friedman and Ron de Klerk
From the rich widow blowing her husband’s fortune on slot machines because she ‘doesn’t believe in an afterlife’, to the language student telling of her arrival in America under the hood of a truck, Grunberg moves effortlessly between worlds.
publisher Comma Press
Long Days
by Maike Wetzel
translated by Lyn Marven
A young woman sees a dead body for the first time; a sister watches her anorexic sibling transform into different person; a girl pieces together the facts of a custody battle she’s not been let in on.
Wetzel’s stories catch people when some part of their lives has been put on pause, leaving them so adrift only acts of obsession or self-destruction provide direction.
publisher Comma Press
Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful
by Deborah Kay Davies
Davies's collection of linked stories about two Welsh sisters follows them from childhood to adolescence and beyond, as they bicker, fight, compete and very occasionally bond with each other.
Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful won the 2009 Wales Book of the Year.
publisher Parthian Books
The Maples Stories
by John Updike
Written over a period of more than twenty years, John Updike’s stories about Richard and Joan Maple and their family sit handsomely together in this beautiful little volume.
As the author says in his introduction, ‘Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared’.
publisher Everyman
One More Year
by Sana Krasikov
A numbing, almost debilitating melancholia infects the exiled, as Sana Krasikov shows in this haunting debut collection.
Set primarily in the United States, Krasikov’s tender stories shine a light on the plight of people who have left their homeland of Georgia, mainly out of necessity, but occasionally of their own free will.
publisher Portobello Books
The Real Louise and Other Stories
by Ailsa Cox
The Real Louise brings together a selection of new and published stories by Ailsa Cox. Some are love stories; others deal with family relationships or characters coming to terms with conflicting identities. All of them are rooted in the modern city and the multiple voices of contemporary experience.
publisher Headland
Sign-up for our e-newsletter find out more
Free short stories by the best writers for you to download find out more
BBC National Short Story Award find out more
all content © Booktrust 2006-24 contact us