Anthologies featuring bestselling authors alongside rising stars. Short story collections from some of our beloved authors with Roald Dahl, Raymond Carver and Anita Desai among the better known
Anthologies & Short Stories
Little, Brown & Company Barrel Fever Stories and Essays
Book SynopsisWith a skewed sense of wit uniquely his own, satirist and popular NPR storyteller David Sedaris presents a collection of short stories and essays, wherein home surgery and an elf-abusing Santa prevail.
£16.19
Random House USA Inc The Early Stories
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£19.00
Vintage Espanol Asà es como la pierdes This Is How You Lose Her
Book SynopsisAsí es como la pierdes es un libro sobre mujeres que quitan el sentido y sobre el amor y el ardor. Y sobre la traición porque a veces traicionamos lo que más queremos, y también es un libro sobre el suplicio que pasamos después –los ruegos, las lágrimas, la sensación de estar atravesado un campo de minas– para intentar recuperar lo que perdimos. Aquello que creíamos que no queríamos, que no nos importaba. Estos cuentos nos enseñan las leyes fijas del amor: que la desesperanza de los padres, la acaban sufriendo los hijos, que lo que les hacemos a nuestros ex amantes nos lo harán inevitablemente a nosotros, y que aquello de “amar al prójimo como a uno mismo” no funciona bajo la influencia de Eros. Pero sobre todo, estos cuentos nos recuerdan que el ardor siempre triunfa sobre la experiencia, y que el amor, cuando llega de verdad, necesita más de una vida para des
£16.16
Random House USA Inc Make Something Up
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£15.30
Random House USA Inc Problems with People
Book SynopsisFrom the award-winning, bestselling author of Snow Falling on Cedars—an extraordinary collection of short stories spanning across America, Nepal, South Africa, and Germany that explores the mysteries of love and our complex desire for connection. “First-rate.... Humorous, ironic, and satiric.... Each story is realistic, bordering on surrealistic.” —The Boston GlobeThese stories showcase Guterson’s gifts for psychological nuance, emotional suspense, and evocation of the natural world. In these pages, we meet, among others, a lonely landlord trying to reach out to his tenants; a middle-aged widower looking for love online; an American Jew traveling to Berlin to confront his haunted past. Celebrating the surprises that lurk within the dramas of our daily lives, Problems with People marks the return of a contemporary American master to the form that launched his literary career.
£10.94
Mariner Books Land of Big Numbers Stories
Book Synopsis Dazzling...Riveting.''New York Times Book ReviewChen has one of the year''s big debut books. ''Philadelphia Inquirer''Gripping and illuminating . . . At the heart of Te-Ping Chen''s remarkable debut lies a question all too relevant in 21st Century America: What is freedom?'' ''Jennifer Egan ''Immensely rewarding, from the first sentence to the last . . . An exceptional collection.'' ''Charles YuA ''stirring and brilliant'' debut story collection, offering vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora, ''both love letter and sharp social criticism, from a phenomenal new literary talent bringing great ''insight from her years as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal'' (Elle). Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled''messily, violently, but still beautifully''into the present. Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen''s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist. A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend. A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of China''s volatile stock exchange. And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave. With acute social insight, Te-Ping Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.
£14.39
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Best American Short Stories 2022
Book SynopsisTrade Review“As guest editor of this year’s entry in the Best American Short Stories series, [Jesmyn] Ward has assembled a brilliant and moving collection...These 20 stories capture beautiful and devastating human experiences and the tales we tell to persevere. Contributors' captivating prose and incredible storytelling will plunge readers into fascinating worlds and challenge them to take on new perspectives.” — Booklist (starred review) on The Best American Short Stories 2021 “If you feel uneasy choosing just one author’s collection, let a witty novelist pick the best stories of the year for you.” — Nicole Y. Chung, Washington Post “This terrific and surprising collection of tales by a diverse group of writers lives up to Diaz’s ‘rah-rah’ (his term) rallying cry for the form... Count on them to transport you.” — USA Today on Best American Short Stories 2018 “This year’s collection brings together fine stories by famous fiction writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Karen Russell... [while] a great deal of the magic is generated by the appearance of less familiar names... Each of these outstanding stories is, as Diaz observes, a chance to listen ‘to some other lone voice struggling to be heard against the great silence.’” — National Book Review on The Best American Short Stories 2018 “This anthology rejoices in its range of subject matter, its emotional complexity and its depiction of quietly powerful moments.” — Shelf Awareness on The Best American Short Stories 2019
£12.99
HarperCollins The Vanishing Point
Book SynopsisFrom the bestselling novelist, travel writer, and ?master of the short story? (NPR) comes a brilliant new collection.The stories in Paul Theroux?s fascinating new collection are both exotic and domestic, their settings ranging from Hawaii to Africa and New England. Each focuses on life?s vanishing points?a moment when seemingly all lines running through one?s life converge, and one can see no farther, yet must deal with the implications. With the insight, subtlety, and empathy that has long characterized his work, Theroux has written deeply moving stories about memory, longing, and the passing of time, reclaiming his status, once again, as a master of the form.
£24.00
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Bliss Montage
Book SynopsisA National Indie BestsellerWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Story Prize, and a Windham-Campbell Literature PrizeA Best Book of the Year at The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Houston Chronicle, Roxane Gay's The Audacity, Mashable, Polygon, Kirkus Reviews, and Library JournalA New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceUncanny and haunting . . . Genius. Michele Filgate, The Washington PostDazzling. Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh AirWhat happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end?In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of ho
£20.80
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Book SynopsisIn this collection of short stories, originally published in 1974, Grace Paley makes the novel as a form seem virtually redundant (Angela Carter, London Review of Books). Her stories here capture the itch of the city, love between parents and children and the cutting edge of combat (Lis Harris, The New York Times Book Review). In this collection of seventeen stories, she creates a solid and vital fictional world, cross-referenced and dense with life (Walter Clemons, Newsweek).
£15.30
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Collected Stories of Colette
Book SynopsisThe Collected Stories of Colette beings together in one volume for the first time in any language the comprehensive collection of short stories by the novelist known worldwide as Colette, and now acknowledged, with Proust, as the most original French narrative writer of the first half of our century. of the one hundred stories gathered here, thirty-one appear for the first time in English and another twenty-nine have been newly translated for this volume.
£24.00
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc The Collected Stories
Book SynopsisThis reissue of Grace Paley''s classic collectiona finalist for the National Book Awarddemonstrates her rich use of language as well as her extraordinary insight into and compassion for her characters, moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again. Whether writing about the love (and conflict) between parents and children or between husband and wife, or about the struggles of aging single mothers or disheartened political organizers to make sense of the world, she brings the same unerring ear for the rhythm of life as it is actually lived.The Collected Stories is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.
£16.20
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc Suddenly a Knock on the Door
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£13.30
Fsg Originals You Will Never Be Forgotten
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£13.50
MCD X Fsg Originals How to Wrestle a Girl
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£13.60
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc Valleyesque
Book SynopsisIn this exuberantly strange story collection, Flores asks: Whose reality? What rules? Jean Chen Ho, The New York Times Book ReviewThese are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. Flores's deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of the best contemporary fiction now lives. Kelly Link, author of Get in TroublePsychedelic, dazzling stories set in the cracks of the Texas-Mexico borderland, from an iconoclastic storyteller and the author of Tears of the Trufflepig.No one captures the borderits history and imagination, its danger, contradiction, and redemptionlike Fernando A. Flores, whose stories reimagine and reinterpret the region's existence with peerless style. In his immersive, uncanny borderland, things are never what they seem: a world where the sun is both rising and setting, and where conniving possums efficiently ta
£12.34
MCD If I Survive You
Book SynopsisFINALIST FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE. LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION.Finalist for the 2023 Pen/Faulkner Award, the DUBLIN Literary Award, the Southern Book Award, and the Gordon Burns Award. Nominated for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the 2023 Pen/Jean Stein Open Book Award, the 2023 Pen/Bingham Prize, the 2022 Story Prize, the Dublin Literary Prize, the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, and the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize. National Bestseller. IndieNext Pick. One of The New York Times Book Review''s 100 Notable Books of 2022.If I Survive You is a collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level. Ann PatchettA major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami,
£21.60
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Highway Thirteen
Book SynopsisA gripping, enigmatic collection of linked short stories about the reverberations of a serial killer's crimes in the lives of everyday people. In the small town of Barrow, Australia, people go about their ordinary lives. They drive to work through the dense state forest. They raise their families. They flirt and yearn. They lie and confess. Some of them leave home. Some of them return. Darkness thrums beneath the surface of these ordinary lives: the violence of one man, a serial killer whose murders made Barrow infamous. His twelve victims-women, men, mostly young-are long gone, but their deaths are felt, beyond the forest where they were buried, beyond this country, beyond even this time. In the past, where a young woman on a school trip to Rome sees something she shouldn't have. In the present, where a man confronts an ancient grief on the suburban streets of Texas. In the future, in the hands of journalists and podcast hosts and television actors whose live
£21.60
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Wednesdays Child
Book SynopsisFinalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Story Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature AwardNamed a Best Book of the Year by Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Esquire, NPR, and Kirkus ReviewsA new collectionabout loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary lifeby the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday's Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forcesdeath, violence, estrangementcome to light. Even before such moments, everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen. Yiyun Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and her memoir, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and other publications. Taken together, these stories, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of livingexile, assimilation, loss, lovewith Li's trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.
£21.60
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Complete Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville
£23.80
Random House USA Inc Collected Stories of Henry James
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£32.00
Random House USA Inc Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler
Book SynopsisThe only complete edition of stories by the undisputed master of detective literature, collected here for the first time in one volume, including some stories that have been unavailable for decades. When Raymond Chandler turned to writing at the age of forty-five, he began by publishing stories in pulp magazines such as “Black Mask” before later writing his famous novels. These stories are where Chandler honed his art and developed his uniquely vivid underworld, peopled with good cops and bad cops, informers and extortionists, lethally predatory blondes and redheads, and crime, sex, gambling, and alcohol in abundance. In addition to his classic hard-boiled stories–in which his signature atmosphere of depravity and violence swirls around the cool, intuitive loners whose type culminated in the famous detective Philip Marlowe–Chandler also turned his hand to fantasy and even a gothic romance. This rich treasury of
£32.40
Random House USA Inc Maldito Amor Sweet Diamond Dust SpanishLanguage
Book SynopsisUnas veces liricamente encantadora, y otras astutamente satírica, Rosario Ferré es una de las más originales escritoras de Latinoamérica. En Maldito amor, ella explora las luchas de clases y la evolución política de su Puerto Rico natal a través de la historia de una familia, los aristocráticos y belicosos De la Valle, y su lucha por la dominación y control del vecino ingenio azucarero.El cuento titular narra la vida del pirático Don Julio; su hijo, el astuto político Nino Ubaldino; y los hijos de Ubaldino, Arístides y Nicolás, envueltos en una lucha a la muerte por el control de la fortuna familiar y por la mujer que ambos quieren. Los tres cuentos siguientes relatan las vidas de las nuevas generaciones de los De la Valle, creando un drama en cuatro partes que presenta las cuestiones fascinantes de la independencia, la religión y la raza, con todo el ingenio
£14.41
Random House USA Inc Little Kingdoms
Book SynopsisThe Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler delivers an inventive collection of three novellas that are a magical companion to his acclaimed longer fictions. • Millhauser makes our world turn amazing! —The New York Times Book ReviewCartoons that draw their creator into another world; demonic paintings that exert a sinister influence on our own. Fairy tales that express the secret losses and anxieties of their tellers. These are the elements that Steven Millhauser employs to such marvelous—and often disquieting—effect in Little Kingdoms. In The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne, a gentle eccentric constructs an elaborate alternate universe that is all the more appealing for being transparently unreal. The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon is at once a gothic tale of nightmarish jealousy and a meditation on the human need for exaltation and horror. And Catalogue of the Exhibition introduces us to the oeuvre
£12.56
Random House USA Inc Original Bliss
Book Synopsis'Kennedy is a world class writer.'--The New York Times Book ReviewA brilliant American debut from one of Scotland's most acclaimed writers, named by Granta as one of the Twenty Best Young British Novelists.Emotionally numb, crippled with insomnia, and caught in a frightening, abusive marriage, Helen Brindle believes that God has recently left her. She spends her days performing banal domestic chores in front of a blaring television. On the BBC one day she watches a self-help guru expound on, among other things, the 'rules' of masturbation and the importance of 'interior lives.' Edward G. Gluck, she discovers has developed a program that guides lost souls toward contentment. Helen seeks him out, hoping to find an answer. Instead she discovers Gluck's own sadomasochistic obsession, and his profound shame and disgust. And what they both encounter, painfully, is the love each fears and both yearn to embrace.'A darkly comic tale.... [that] is hilariously funny about sexual obsession and brilliantly perceptive about the dynamics of human relationships.'--The Baltimore Sun
£11.70
Random House USA Inc Fast Lanes
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£13.30
Random House USA Inc Whos Irish
Book SynopsisIn this dazzling collection of short stories, the award-winning author of the acclaimed novels Thank You, Mr. Nixon and Mona in the Promised Land—presents a sparkling ... gently satiric look at the American Dream and its fallout on those who pursue it (The New York Times). The stories in Who's Irish? show us the children of immigrants looking wonderingly at their parents' efforts to assimilate, while the older generation asks how so much selfless hard work on their part can have yielded them offspring who'd sooner drop out of life than succeed at it. With dazzling wit and compassion, Gish Jen looks at ambition and compromise at century's end and finds that much of the action is as familiar—and as strange—as the things we know to be most deeply true about ourselves.
£13.50
Random House USA Inc Everybody Pays
Book SynopsisA hit man defies the confines of a life sentence to avenge his sister's batterer. An immaculately dressed man hires a street gang to extract his daughter from a Central American prison, for reasons as mysterious as they are deadly. A two-bit graffiti artist with a taste for Nazi-ganda finds himself face-to-face with three punks out to make a mark of their own—literally—with a tattoo needle. From neo-noir master Andrew Vachss comes Everybody Pays, 38 white-knuckle rides into a netherworld of pederasts and prostitutes, stick-up kids and fall guys—where private codes of crime and punishment pulsate beneath a surface system of law and order, and our moral compass spins frighteningly out of control. Here is the street-grit prose that has earned Vachss comparisons to Chandler, Cain, and Hammett--and the ingenious plot twists that transform the double-cross into an expression of retribution, the dark deed into a thing of beauty
£10.44
Random House USA Inc Stories of Fatherhood
Book SynopsisStories of Fatherhood gathers more than a century of classic short stories about having, becoming, loving, and losing fathers. Frank O’Connor’s hilarious tale of a tiny boy’s war against his paternal rival in “My Oedipus Complex” sits beside Ann Packer’s touching portrait of a man preparing for the wonder and terror of his first child’s birth. At the other end of the lifespan, John Updike’s “My Father’s Tears,” Jim Shepard’s “The Mortality of Parents,” and William Maxwell’s “The man who lost his father” bring us face to face with a loss that is like no other. In between, we encounter a full range of emotions connecting men and their offspring: tenderness and devotion, anxiety and incomprehension, admiration and regret. Powerful patriarchs cast a long shadow in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”
£20.00
Random House USA Inc Stories of Art and Artists
Book SynopsisStories of Art and Artists gathers two centuries of classic stories from around the world. From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” and Albert Camus’s “The Artist at Work” to Bernard Malamud’s “Rembrandt’s Hat” and Aimee Bender’s “The Color Master,” the tales collected here range from haunting fables about the power of art to vivid portraits of those who create. Writers have long been fascinated by the idea of artistic genius, the relationship between portraits and their subjects, the inspirational role of muses, and the effects on artists of ambition, failure, and success. Art forms featured in these pages include sculpture, pottery, architecture, miniatures, landscapes, portraits, and abstract painting, illumined in brilliant stories by such great writers as Honoré de Balzac, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Berger, William Boyd, Doris Lessing, Va
£20.40
Random House USA Inc Olinger Stories
Book SynopsisFrom one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century—and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series—the first one-volume hardcover edition of the eleven autobiographical stories closest to his heart. With full-cloth binding and a silk ribbon marker. EVERYMAN'S POCKET CLASSICS.In an interview, Updike once said, If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories. These stories were originally published in The New Yorker and then in various collections before Vintage first put them together in one volume in 1964, as a paperback original. They follow the life of one character from the age of ten through manhood, in the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger (pronounced, according to Updike, with a long O and a hard G), which was loosely based on Updike's own hometown. All the stories draw from the same autobiographical well, Updike explained, the only child, the small town, the grandparental home, the move in adolescence t
£20.00
Random House USA Inc Hopscotch BlowUp We Love Glenda So Much
Book SynopsisThese three groundbreaking works by Julio Cortázar—a major figure of world literature and one of the founders of the Latin American Boom—are published together in one volume for the first time, in honor of the centenary of his birth. With his influential “counternovel” HOPSCOTCH and his unforgettable short stories, Cortázar earned a place among the most innovative authors of the twentieth century. HOPSCOTCH is a nonlinear novel about an Argentinean writer living in Paris; it consists of 155 short chapters that the author advises the reader to read out of order. BLOW-UP and WE LOVE GLENDA SO MUCH bring together the most famous of Cortázar’s short fiction, including “Axolotl,” “End of the Game,” “The Night Face Up,” “Continuity of Parks,” “Bestiary,” and “Blow-Up”. These are stories in which invisible beasts stalk children in their homes, the reader of a mystery finds out that he is the murderer’s intended victim, an injured motorcyclist is pursued by Aztec warriors, and a man becomes a salamander in a Parisian zoo. In Cortázar’s work, laws of nature, physics, and narrative fall away, leaving us with an astonishing new view of the world.
£27.00
Random House USA Inc A Brief History of the Flood
Book SynopsisLillian Anderson is a strong-minded, backwoods-Minnesota girl, well-versed in the basics of survival. She can find air to breathe under a capsized boat, drive in a blizzard, or capture a wild duck. As part of a large struggling family, she tiptoes around her explosive father whose best days always come right after he’s poached something and her neurotically optimistic mother whose bursts of vigor bring added chaos. Lillian barrels through adolescence with no illusions about her future, honing her clerical skills while working the nightshift as a salad girl in the airport kitchen. Just as she’s on her feet and moving out, their house is literally sinking into the marsh. Stunningly honest, this story explores the fierce love that binds family together.
£10.80
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Ash Wednesday
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£13.60
Random House USA Inc Wonderful Town
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£18.00
Random House USA Inc Bluebeards Egg
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£13.56
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Stories
Book SynopsisA collection of wistful, witty stories. --Esquire Hilarious, deep and a little bit dirty. --Harper's BazaarA grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending.Here are sto
£14.36
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Ford County Stories
Book Synopsis#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In his first collection of short stories John Grisham takes us back to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his first novel, A Time to Kill.Wheelchair-bound Inez Graney and her two older sons, Leon and Butch, take a bizarre road trip through the Mississippi Delta to visit the youngest Graney brother, Raymond, who's been locked away on death row for eleven years. It could well be their last visit.Mack Stafford, a hard-drinking and low-grossing run-of-the-mill divorce lawyer gets a miracle phone call with a completely unexpected offer to settle some old, forgotten cases for more money than he has ever seen. Mack is suddenly bored with the law, fed up with his wife and his life, and makes drastic plans to finally escape.Quiet, dull Sidney, a data collector for an insurance company, perfects his blackjack skills in hopes of bringing down the casino empire of Clanton's most ambitious hustler, Bobby Carl Leach, who, among other crimes, has stolen Sidney's wife.Three good ol' boys from rural Ford County begin a journey to the big city of Memphis to give blood to a grievously injured friend. However, they are unable to drive past a beer store as the trip takes longer and longer. The journey comes to an abrupt end when they make a fateful stop at a Memphis strip club.The Quiet Haven Retirement Home is the final stop for the elderly of Clanton. It's a sad, languid place with little controversy, until Gilbert arrives. Posing as a lowly paid bedpan boy, he is in reality a brilliant stalker with an uncanny ability to sniff out the assets of those seniors he professes to love.One of the hazards of litigating against people in a small town is that one day, long after the trial, you will probably come face-to-face with someone you've beaten in a lawsuit. Lawyer Stanley Wade bumps into an old adversary, a man with a long memory, and the encounter becomes a violent ordeal.Clanton is rocked with the rumor that the gay son of a prominent family has finally come home, to die. Of AIDS. Fear permeates the town as gossip runs unabated. But in Lowtown, the colored section of Clanton, the young man finds a soul mate in his final days.Featuring a cast of characters you'll never forget, these stories bring Ford County to vivid and colorful life. Often hilarious, frequently moving, and always entertaining, this collection makes it abundantly clear why John Grisham is our most popular storyteller.
£22.40
Random House USA Inc Normal Rules Dont Apply
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£21.00
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc The Age of Grief
Book SynopsisFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres—a luminous novella and short stories that explore the vicissitudes of love, friendship, and marriage. • “A glorious achievement….. Infinitely satisfying….. A triumph.” —The New York Times Book Review In “The Pleasure of Her Company,” a lonely, single woman befriends the married couple next door, hoping to learn the secret of their happiness. In “Long Distance,” a man finds himself relieved of the obligation to continue an affair that is no longer compelling to him, only to be waylaid by the guilt he feels at his easy escape. And in the incandescently wise and moving title novella, a dentist, aware that his wife has fallen in love with someone else, must comfort her when she is spurned, while maintaining the secret of his own complicated sorrow. Beautifully written, with a wry intelligence and a lively comic touch, The Age of Grief captures moments of great intimacy with grace, clarity, and indelible emotional power.
£13.50
Random House USA Inc Country of Cold
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£11.70
WW Norton & Co The Burning Ground Stories
Book SynopsisA debut collection of stories by a poet with a “painter’s eye for detail and pianist’s touch for sounding the right notes” (Simon Armitage).Trade Review"Never once reads like the work of a newcomer to fiction. . . . O'Riordan's noticing eye is sharply attuned to the grit and grime of Los Angeles and its inhabitants." -- Bookforum"[O'Riordan's] poetic talent for simile and image is certainly transferred intact to prose." -- Los Angeles Review of Books"Lovers are lost and mourned in these sharp and sometimes violent stories, and characters suffer through turbulence both literal and metaphorical, haunted by questions they never asked. O'Riordan is particularly skilled at finding the perfect image or detail to bring these worlds to life." -- Publishers Weekly"These are subtle fictions, a work in which mannerisms and casual gestures count for a lot. . . . [A] work that feels fully lived in." -- Kirkus"A quietly excellent collection of short stories. . . . You are never in doubt that you are reading the work of an elegant and greatly accomplished writer." -- Guardian"O'Riordan willfully mines the less glossy side of LA . . . with haunting effect." -- GQ"Wonderfully lyrical and bittersweet." -- Observer"An impressive range of stories that run from reflective to highly dramatic, and O’Riordan’s verbal polish as a poet shines." -- Irish Times"This is a wonderful, beguiling collection of short stories. Written with a cool, knowing lyricism, they haunt and enthrall." -- William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart and Restless"Adam O’Riordan’s stories have an uncanny ability to draw us into the lives of characters who are at once self-possessed and vulnerable. It means that we read about them in a state of excited anxiety—impressed by their worldly competence, but sensing that failure and even tragedy are never far away. The effect is compelling, and all the more so for being achieved through a range of forms and voices which make the collection as ambitious in its reach as it is concentrated in its vision of human behavior." -- Andrew Motion, former poet laureate of the United Kingdom
£18.89
WW Norton & Co We Come to Our Senses Stories
Book SynopsisFor readers of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Redeployment, a searing debut exploring the lives of veterans returning to their homes in the South.Trade Review"This is almost a novel in stories, thematically linked like Phil Klay’s Redeployment, but more particular in its examination of the new American veteran." -- New York Times Book Review"Lindsey writes with quiet confidence and sometimes arch humor that invites comparison to Ben Fountain and Phil Klay but that wouldn't displease Flannery O'Connor. Superb atmospherics coupled with arresting story lines." -- Kirkus (starred review)"Lindsey’s debut artfully portrays the American South....Lindsey’s lyrical, frenetic prose calls to mind Barry Hannah; and, like Hannah, he imparts a grim and pitying hope to his characters." -- Booklist (starred review)"I read Odie Lindsey’s We Come to Our Senses in a way that books rarely compel me to…Not only compulsively readable, the thoughts these war stories stirred were rich and complex and heartening in their universal humanity. This is a remarkable collection by a splendid new writer." -- Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain"Brutal, precise, like a bullet to the heart, Lindsey's prose is exactly right for conveying what war does to the human soul. Whether comic or tragic, the characters in these stories feel so vibratingly alive they seem to be whispering directly into your ear." -- Helen Benedict, author of Sand Queen and The Lonely Soldier"The writing here is nuanced, correct, and felt enough that, for once, ‘Support Our Troops’ is not political pablum. One might say that in Odie Lindsey's care ‘Support Our Troops’ is a literary imperative." -- Padgett Powell, author of Cries for Help, Various"The debut we hope for: heart-quickening, kinetic, relentless in its engagement with our time." -- Paul Yoon"With a searing insightfulness and a dark humor all his own, Odie Lindsey holds up a powerful lens to an experience of modern American warfare that has been largely ignored in fiction—that of female veterans. This is collection about how the battles we wage with the external world are really only half the fight." -- Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award Finalist and author of Once Upon a River"[A] gritty and ambitious debut collection…Odie Lindsey is an innovative and consummate prose stylist." -- Mary Miller, author of The Last Days of California"Here's an exciting, even thrilling new voice I'm delighted to read, to hear in my head. He's got all the notes, he's all in. Odie Lindsey's a terrific writer—pitch-perfect, entirely under control at high speed—who doesn't hold anything back." -- Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Primes of Their Lives
£19.94
WW Norton & Co Your Father Sends His Love Stories
Book SynopsisYour Father Sends His Love heralds the powerful American debut of a bold new literary talent.Trade Review"Wit is a precision weapon, and Stuart Evers is astonishingly precise. It takes an enormous and well-calibrated brain to put together a collection like Your Father Sends His Love. It is one of the funniest—savagely funny, tenderly funny—and therefore one of the most moving books I’ve read in a long time." -- Teju Cole"Proof that the story form remains in rude health. Quietly brilliant and moving." -- Ian Rankin"A thrillingly inventive collection of stories about alienation and longing and dread. Stuart Evers writes with great subtlety about all the ways we estrange ourselves from the people we love and about the rare moments of grace in which we somehow stumble home again." -- Jenny Offill"Evers’s everymen break my heart." -- Eimear McBride
£16.99
WW Norton & Co The Dark and Other Love Stories
Book Synopsis“The emotional range and depth of [Willis’s stories], the clarity and deftness, are astonishing.”—Alice MunroTrade Review"In her second collection, Willis zooms in and out on her chosen subjects, adroitly examining the physical and emotional distances that separate people from one another—and from the mysteries of their lives." -- New York Times Book Review"The Dark and Other Love Stories announces the emergence of a wonderfully gifted storyteller whose stories enlarge our perceptions about the human capacity to love." -- Chicago Review of Books"Deborah Willis tapes deep into the surreal in the real in her second collection, and every story will pull on a different heartstring while bringing tears to your eyes (both from laughing and crying)." -- Newsweek"Willis is an immensely talented writer, and her new collection is a thing of beauty: sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes funny, always sharply observed, elegant and incisive." -- Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven"The Dark and Other Love Stories is an exhilarating book—funny and fearless, empathetic and sharp—and Deborah Willis is a dazzlingly smart and strikingly original writer. I didn’t want this book to end." -- Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans"A bright, adventurous, and lively collection. Deborah Willis seems to be able to go anywhere and do anything, taking the reader from the Ukraine to Mars. Beautifully told and strangely moving, these stories made the world seem like a slightly different and much more interesting place after I had read them." -- Kevin Canty, author of The Underworld"These poignant, sharply observed stories examine love in its many guises. A marvelous collection." -- Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of Night at the Fiestas"The Dark and Other Love Stories is a kaleidoscopic, dazzling meditation on the switchback nature of love. Who do we choose to love, and who do we choose to leave behind? Every story is ultimately a love story, Willis reminds us, even and especially the strange, wondrous stories of our own lives." -- Marjorie Celona, author of Y
£18.99
WW Norton & Co All That Is Left Is All That Matters Stories
Book SynopsisA searing, poignantly rendered collection of stories chronicling the lives of ordinary people battling the forces of love and loss, from "one of the great unsung writers of our time" (Colum McCann).Trade Review"Slouka showcases not merely his productivity and versatility, but his gift for creating consistently engaging and emotionally resonant stories in whatever literary form he chooses. . . . stories as tender and beautiful as these are among those things that might, paradoxically, serve to persuade thoughtful readers that life is worth living." -- Shelf Awareness"Crisp, poignant. . . . These are subtle, meditative, well-crafted stories, death-backed but life-affirming." -- Kirkus"The power in the memories [Slouka] so intensely evokes is heart stopping in its beauty, liberating in its acknowledgment of essential truths. . . . Put Slouka's work in the hands of fans of the Richards—Ford, Powers, and Russo—and watch what happens." -- Booklist, starred"Disquieting, sharply compressed short stories. . . . Even the most seemingly casual of these tales vibrate with danger, and together, they create the sense of a world where unendurable loss is just one misplaced footstep away." -- Publishers Weekly"Mark Slouka is one of the best American writers alive today, and the title of his new story collection is perfect: this is essential stuff, and it will break your heart." -- Brian Hall, author of Fall of Frost"The subtlety of these wonderful stories takes you by stealth. They leave you with the startled feeling that you’ve traveled a long distance and emerged in an unexpected new place. Mark Slouka is a writer of enormous and unusual gifts, and he offers them graciously and with an appealing wryness." -- Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of Two-Part Inventions"Mark Slouka perfectly breaks open my heart with each truthful, gorgeous sentence. I wish I could write out for you all the sentences and passages I underlined. But that would be the whole shebang, the whole damn book." -- Victoria Redel, author of Before Everything"Few writers convey the urgencies of the heart like Mark Slouka does. Remorse, betrayal, fear, mortality—love, most of all—in these wondrous stories the most powerful emotions shine from the smallest details: the lonely creak of oarlocks, the silence of a man about to cry, the groan of a screen door opening a lifetime ago, the lies with which we console ourselves against inevitable loss." -- Andrew Foster Altschul, author of Lady Lazarus"Mark Slouka knows the secrets of story-making: the complex characters registered with the flick of a gesture, the catch-breath moments of collapsing certainty, the unerring recoil of memory—and in every line the razor’s edge, the frightful mortal implication. All That Is Left Is All That Matters is a perfectly titled and brilliantly written collection." -- Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age
£19.00
WW Norton & Co Flash Fiction 72 Very Short Stories
Book Synopsis"These stories are not merely flashes in the pan; there's pay dirt here!" —DeWitt Henry, editor of PloughsharesTrade Review"In just a little more time than it will take you to read this paragraph you can sample any one of the seventy-two very short stories in this anthology of brilliant miniatures. Some of the selections have already become so-called 'modern classics,' while many others deserve to become much more widely known. You can space out your reading of these epiphanic delicacies over a week or even months. Dear Browswer, I have to confess, I gobbled them up in a day!" -- Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio"Flash Fiction is fun. I loved the variety and surprise of these stories. They should spark great dinner conversation, class discussion, and perhaps inspire some marathon writers to sprint and see what happens." -- Jerome Stern, author of Making Shapely Fiction"Flash Fiction is purely and simply a delight. Lots of stars are mustered here, but best of all for my money are the newer names and voices that speak well to and for the future." -- George Garrett, Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing, University of Virginia
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Last Days of the DogMen Stories
Book Synopsis"His people and dogs—those wonderful dogs!—come alive with honest, thrumming energy." —The New York Times Book Review
£11.99