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
Penguin Putnam Inc Cowboy Graves
Book SynopsisOne more journey to the universe of Roberto Bolaño, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literatureCowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño''s boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. In Cowboy Graves, Arturo Belano--Bolaño''s alter ego--returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. French Comedy of Horrors takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen year old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in Fatherland, a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead.These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño''s extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.
£15.20
McClelland & Stewart The Journey Prize Stories 20 The Best of Canadas New Writers Journey Prize Stories Short Fiction from the Best of Canadas New Writers
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£15.29
McClelland & Stewart Inc. The Journey Prize Stories 22
Book SynopsisDiscover the next generation of great Canadian writers with this highly acclaimed annual anthology.For more than two decades, The Journey Prize Stories has been presenting the best short stories published each year by some of Canada''s most exciting up-and-coming new writers. Previous contributors — including such now well-known, bestselling writers as Yann Martel, Elizabeth Hay, Michael Crummey, Annabel Lyon, Lisa Moore, Heather O''Neill, Pasha Malla, Timothy Taylor, M.G. Vassanji, and Alissa York — have gone on to win prestigious literary awards and honours, including the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers'' Trust Fiction Prize, the Governor General''s Award, the Commonwealth Writers'' Prize, and CBC''s Canada Reads competition.The stories included in the anthology are contenders for the $10,000 Journey Prize, which is made possible by Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener''s donation of Canadian royalties from his nov
£15.29
McClelland & Stewart Inc. The Journey Prize Stories 29
Book SynopsisThe 29th edition of the celebrated annual fiction collection showcasing the best stories by the best new writers in Canada
£14.39
McClelland & Stewart Inc. Storm Glass
Book SynopsisWith stunning virtuosity, the stories in Jane Urquhart’s dazzling first book of fiction unearth universal truths as they reach across countries and eras. A woman runs away to a cottage in the English moors to escape a love affair; shards of glass reconcile a middle-aged wife to her husband’s estrangement; a grandmother makes a startling confession from her youth; a young woman discovers herself through the life of an Italian saint; and, in a spellbinding story of artistic jealousy, we enter the mind of poet Robert Browning at the end of his life. In these beautifully crafted stories, ordinary objects brim with meaning and memories radiate with significance as Jane Urquhart illuminates the things that lie just beneath the surface of our lives.
£16.14
MJ - Ohio University Press Goodbye Son and Other Stories
Book SynopsisLewis’ only collection of short fiction was first published in 1946, but remains as quietly haunting today as it was then. Set in small communities of the upper Midwest and northern California in the ’30s and ’40s, these midcentury gems focus on the quiet cycles connecting youth and age, despair and hope, life and death.Trade Review“Any consideration of the writing of Janet Lewis becomes inevitably a consideration of style. In Good-bye, Son, she exhibits a classical purity that is rare.” * New York Times *“The collection may remind you of some of the quiet stories of Willa Cather.” * The New Yorker *“(Good-bye, Son, and Other Stories) is … an unaccountably neglected book, a collection [that explores] the apprehension and experiencing of death, and the consolatory power inherent in understanding one’s place and part in the natural cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.” * Christian Science Monitor *“(Janet Lewis) is a striking example of a quiet talent working quietly through almost the entirety of a noisy, celebrity-heavy century.” * New York Review of Books *“[Lewis] thrusts us into the essence of a situation, startling us out of the role of complacent observer and into that of active participant. This steady movement and these brief revelations work together to give the stories a collective meaning.” * Western American Literature *“Janet Lewis…has now written some very fine short stories, of which at least one (‘Good-bye, Son,’ the title story or novelette), I predict will live a long time, not only in memories, but in the anthologies of outstanding short prose in which it is bound to turn up. It is a story not easily classifiable among the different kinds of supernatural tales; it is, in essence, a story of divine guidance, and as such has nothing but the appearing of the dead in common with the usual ‘ghost story.’” * Weekly Book Review *
£999.99
Hogarth Press The Room
Book Synopsis“The daily grind got you down? Escape into this Swedish dark comedy about a scaldingly contemptuous office drone who discovers a secret room in his workplace.”—O: The Oprah Magazine The inspiration for the upcoming feature film Corner Office, starring Jon Hamm Björn is a compulsive, meticulous bureaucrat who discovers a secret room at the government office where he works—a secret room that no one else in his office will acknowledge. When Björn is in his room, what his co-workers see is him standing by the wall and staring off into space looking dazed, relaxed, and decidedly creepy. Björn’s bizarre behavior eventually leads his co-workers to try and have him fired, but Björn will turn the tables on them with help from his secret room.Debut author Jonas Karlsson doesn’t leave a word out of place in this brilliant, bizarre, delightful take on how far we will go—in a world rule
£10.78
PRH Grupo Editorial Demasiada felicidad Too Much Happiness
Book Synopsis
£14.36
Random House Publishing Group The Collected Short Stories Of Louis Lamour
Book SynopsisThe Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour, Volume 4, Part 1 kicks off this collection of L’Amour’s classic adventures and includes his very first published short story. Here are timeless tales of danger and daring, wanderlust and heroism, filled with ordinary men and women facing often life-threatening challenges with courage, dignity, and honor. The first of two parts, this volume contains breathtaking thrills and dynamic characters: from the down-on-his-luck fortune hunter who risks everything to save a married couple in the wilds of Borneo to the mysterious hero aboard a downed airliner dangling six hundred feet above certain doom. This unique collection is guaranteed to delight readers again and again, proving why Louis L’Amour remains America’s favorite storyteller.
£10.24
Schocken Books Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories
Book SynopsisOf all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem and in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations.And no Yiddish writer was more beloved than Tevye’s creator, Sholem Rabinovich (1859-1916), the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl.
£14.24
Louisiana State University Press Visitations
Book SynopsisIn this latest collection from Lee Upton, characters navigate often bewildering situations, from the homeschooled girl trying to communicate telepathically with an injured man she finds on the beach to the experimental theater troupe (called the Community Playas) composed primarily of actors the story's narrator has wronged or been wronged by.
£21.95
MP-SIL Southern Illinois Uni Bottom of the Ninth Great Contemporary Baseball
Book SynopsisThis volume collects 19 contemporary baseball short stories characterized by the same elements that draw people to the sport itself: the mythologizing of the players; the obsessions and romance of the game; and the bonds between players and fans, parents and children.
£999.99
Northwestern University Press Shamara and Other Stories
Book SynopsisThis collection features Svetlana Vasilenko's novel Little Fool, nominated for the Russian Booker Prize. Rich in folklore, legend, and history, the story follows the transformation of Ganna, a girl from the Volga shores, into a modern-day Madonna. Also included are the novella Shamara and several short stories, including the acclaimed Going After Goat Antelopes.Table of ContentsEditor's acknowledgements -- Editor's introduction -- Shamara -- Piggy -- The gopher -- Going after goat antelopes -- Poplar, Poplar's daughter -- Little fool.
£999.99
Northwestern University Press The Grand Prize and Other Stories Writings from
Book SynopsisAn unhappily married woman waits in vain for a call from a potential lover, and a foul-mouthed mother of seven accuses a war hero of conning her out of her life savings. This work portrays the lives of people so used to hardship, that it never occurs to them to surrender.
£999.99
Northwestern University Press City with Houses
Book SynopsisFirst published in 1995, this work announced the arrival of a major talent, followed by two related volumes. At home in many spheres - business dealings, nitty-gritty romance, practical hells - Handler writes as a literary outsider, a businessman familiar with philosophical movements.
£999.99
Northwestern University Press A Land the Size of Binoculars Writings from an
Book SynopsisThis volume contains the five short pieces and novella that comprise Klekh's Galician Motifs, plus two more recent novellas. Throughout, Klekh passes over landscapes as intimate as the terrain between fathers and sons and as broad as the wild and mysterious Carpathian Mountains.
£999.99
Northwestern University Press Zigzagger
Book SynopsisSet mainly in California's Central Valley, Manuel Munoz's collection of stories goes beyond the traditional family myths and narratives of Chicano literature and explores, instead, the constant struggle of characters against their physical and personal surroundings.
£15.95
Northwestern University Press The Bolero of Andi Rowe Stories
Book SynopsisThis collection of inter-related stories delves into the life of Andi Rowe - a young woman of Mexican and Irish heritage - to give an intimate account of one family's passage from the immigrant story to the American story, and the cycle of loss, adaptation, and rediscovery that is innate to that experience.
£999.99
Northwestern University Press The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal Stories
Book SynopsisA collection of stories that focuses on multigenerational tales of intertwined Filipino families. Set in the huge yet relatively overlooked and misunderstood Filipino diaspora in the United States, this book follows characters who live in the shadow of the histories of the United States and its former colony, the Philippines.Trade ReviewA grandmother obsesses over her granddaughter’s un-Catholic upbringing. A son visits his estranged father at a hospital where he is under a suicide watch. A family imports a young maid from the Philippines, and all hell, with love, breaks loose. In the eyes of a dog, a boy reconnects with his deceased father. A war veteran migrates to Los Angeles and moves into the overcrowded home of his sister’s family to take care of their aging mother.Written in a seemingly effortless grace and clean-eyed prose, the short stories in Roley’s long-awaited collection, The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal, is poignant, intimate, and heartbreaking. These interlinked narratives – all the characters are from the same multi-generational family – offer refreshing perspectives of the Philippine experience in America and what it means to be a Filipino, or a Filipino American, in the country of dreams where they have to constantly make do with the odds, surrender to the scars of war, childhood, and family, endure failed hopes and loves, and grapple with the contradictions of living in-between cultures, homes, and memories."" -- R. Zamora Linmark, author of Leche and These Books Belong to Ken Z
£999.99
Northwestern University Press Dare the Sea
Book SynopsisThe debut short-story collection in English from acclaimed fiction writer Ali Hosseini. The stories in Dare the Sea explore Iranâs landscape, culture, and the undercurrent of change affecting its people - both in Iran and the United States.Trade ReviewThe stories in Dare the Sea highlight the complexity of Iranian identity, with plots challenging myopic tropes about the Middle East and the American Dream. Deftly employing moments of unexpected humor and joy in dire situations, Hosseini's fiction never leans on convenient trauma or a singular narrative of Iran or Iranians. The depth and breadth of these stories is remarkable." —Aram Mrjoian, editor of We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora“Each of Ali Hosseini’s remarkable stories creates a vivid world that is both familiar and eerily new. They dazzle with deep insights, the characters swept up in dramas that are both intensely personal and yet communal as well. I found myself laughing out loud at the abundant wit, but also caught up in the mystery and sadness that strike at the heart of the human. The stories in Dare the Sea sweep us up—they are a cause for joy and celebration.” —David H. Lynn, editor emeritus of The Kenyon ReviewTable of Contents Acknowledgments PART ONE City of Chaos There’s a Tale with the Wind Land of Miracles Rising Waters Turning Bread to Stone Black Mountain Pass Shireen Fast Friends In Those Days This Lame and Stubborn Mule PART TWO Traffic Lights Chicle Un Cordoba Koh-i-noor When the Rain Stops Smiling Pistachios Conference of the Birds Dare the Sea NowRuz Gifts Earth Angels Magic Island Departures Day of Solitude
£999.99
Northwestern University Press Triquarterly 101
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Northwestern University Press Triquarterly 102
Book Synopsis
£999.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Cosmological Eye
Book SynopsisThis collection, first published by New Directions in 1939, contains a number of Henry Miller's most important shorter prose writings.Trade Review"Henry Miller is the nearest thing to Céline America has produced.... He aims not at the ears, brains or consciences, but at the viscera and solar plexus." -- The New Leader"His is one of the most beautiful prose styles today." -- H. L. Mencken"Miller is a natural bom writer, and he sees things as nobody else sees them." -- Edmund Wilson
£14.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Wall Intimacy
Book SynopsisOne of Sartre’s greatest existentialist works of fiction, The Wall contains the only five short stories he ever wrote. Set during the Spanish Civil War, the title story crystallizes the famous philosopher’s existentialism.Trade Review"Leaves Lady Chatterley’s Lover asleep at the post." -- Punch
£11.39
New Directions Publishing Corporation Fresno Stories
Book SynopsisEleven of William Saroyan's most delightful tales, Fresno Stories springs straight from the source of the author's visionthe archetypal Armenian families who inhabit Saroyan country, in and around Fresno, California. (Chicago Tribune)
£9.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Last Vanities
£10.44
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories 0
Book Synopsis
£11.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Red Notebook
Book SynopsisThe Red Notebook brings together in one volume all of Paul Auster's short, true-life stories—a remarkable collection of tales that documents the curious, miraculous, and sometimes catastrophic turns of everyday reality.Trade Review"A literary original who is perfecting a genre of his own." -- The Wall Street Journal"The Red Notebook stories, pulled from Auster’s own life or from the lives of those close to him, are explorations of unexpected coincidences. A wrong number becomes the genesis for a famous novel; a hero appears at an inopportune moment; a lightning storm harries a group of campers; a daughter plunges from a terrifying height only to land improbably safely; a Paul Auster imposter materializes. Like a magic show, The Red Notebook demonstrates that “there is much to life that is special and serendipitous — if only we allow ourselves to perceive it this way.”" -- The Washington Post"Paul Auster is definitely a genius." -- Haruki Murakami"Our pre-eminent novelist of ideas." -- Kirkus Reviews"Auster has added some new dimensions to modern literature and—more importantly even—to our perspectives on the planet." -- Boston Globe
£9.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Ghost Stories
Book SynopsisEight spooky stories from the mistress of the unexpected.
£11.39
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Bridge Over the Neroch
Book SynopsisFrom the acclaimed author of Summer in Baden-Baden, a collection of short work finally in English.Trade Review"Excellent translations of Tyspkin's...small literary oeuvre of astonishing originality." -- Rachel Polonsky - New York Review of Books"The word “Jewish,” as translator Jamey Gambrell points out in the introduction, appears rarely for how often the story concerns otherness within one’s own country and family. The narrator’s son is beaten up, held down in front of the girls during a jokey teenage gathering because he is Jewish, though the reason is never made explicit. That’s the book for you—the surreal treated as commonplace and vice versa until it’s all the same." -- Dan Duray - New York Observer"There is no prose quite like Tsypkin’s. Inside his dependent clauses, nested in his parentheses, the past is preserved, intact, contemporary with the present. The effect is vertiginous and profoundly moving." -- BookList"One of the great pleasures of seeing The Bridge Over the Neroch become available is that it should make clear that Tsypkin’s novel was not an aberration. The seven stories collected here will, I hope, confirm Tsypkin’s reputation as a writer of peculiar distinction." -- The Quarterly Conversation"Tsypkin’s prose glows with ingenuity and experimentation as he creates a chaotic, raging river of consciousness in which present, past, and future; dream, reality, and memory all collide within the same paragraph, even within the same sentence." -- The Jewish Book Council
£12.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Final Martyrs New Directions Paperbook
Book SynopsisAn affirmation of faith and identity by Japan's leading Christian novelist.Trade Review"If you like it, you have a lot of reading to look forward to." -- John Wilson - Christianity Today" In a calm, delicate, unobtrusive manner, several of these 11 deceptively simple stories by Japanese novelist Endo (The Golden Country) show people wrestling with central issues. In "The Last Supper," an alcoholic corporate executive confesses to a psychiatrist the source of his torment: as a starving soldier in WWII, he ate a dead earlier, in order to cremate her remains and place them with the ashes of his recently deceased brother. In the title story, set in the 1860s, when the Meiji government outlawed Christianity, a village coward recants his Christian faith to avoid the torture meted out to his fellow converts, but he ultimately redeems himself through an act of quiet courage. This deftly translated collection, comprised of stories written as early as 1959 and as late as 1985, also includes semi-autobiographical tales in which Endo deals with the traumatic impact He also writes with grace, compassion and gentle humor about old age, love betrayed, Japanese tourists and the marks we leave on the lives of others. "" This ably translated compilation of short stories clearly demonstrates the tension inherent in practicing a nonorganic religion in a culture foreign to the philosophy it espouses. contexts the trials and triumphs of Christians practicing their religion in Japan. Both Westerners and Japanese are in the mix of situations presented, and the short story format sharply focuses the ideas and the events described, which present cultural differences in a bright light. From the cowardice turned into resolve shown in the title story to the gruesome and startling revelations of "The Last Supper," Endo demonstrates his mastery of a delicate and endlessly fascinating juncture of philosophies. Recommended for informed readers. "" Somber, haunting stories that resonate with compassion, eloquence, and metaphor. Once again, Endo (Foreign Studies, 1990, etc.) explores the themes for which he is famous: Roman Catholics in Japan, the illness and fear of aging, the pain of divorce, the loneliness of childhood. In this collection of 11 stories written over the last 30 years, autobiography continues to take a front seat: Endo finds inspiration in his own experience with lung disease to address physical suffering; in his of innocence and compromise; in his own experience with Christianity to address, as the apostate in the almost epic title story, the question of whether or not it is all right to be afraid and run away from a commitment to Christianity in the face of persecution; and in his increasing age to tackle nostalgia, regret, and resignation. To make these heavy topics even murkier, they often overlap in ways that would be overwhelming to gentle touch. Spiritual decline feels natural as "A Fifty-year-old Man," a disillusioned husband, offers an almost comic look at watching his dog relief when a writer finally understands that he childhood mentor, nemesis, and betrayer. And we recognize the writer in "The Box" who follows the trail of postcards he finds in an antiques shop to discover love, betrayal, and espionage while wondering if "perhaps I think up such nonsensical, irrational things because I am getting old." What might otherwise feel like giving up becomes giving in to the unrecognized power of the human condition. This is the precious uncertainty of all of strange celebration of life and death that is wise but never weary. "
£10.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia And Other
Book SynopsisThe absurd becomes the truth in these magnificent eight short stories by the contemporary post-Soviet Union author.Trade Review"Pelevin has emerged as that unusual thing: a genuinely popular serious writer. (The New York Times) Antic and allegorical, these tales chronicle the absurdities of post-Soviet, postmodern Russia. (New York Times Book Review) Brilliantly and poignantly satirizes the economic, cultural and spiritual decay of Mother Russia under Communism. (Publishers Weekly) These are the kind of stories you just delight in reading and re-reading. (NPR, Morning Edition, Nancy Pearl) These short stories are so irretrievably weird that they glow like the bears must glow in the woods around Chernobyl. (Bruce Sterling, The Week)"
£13.29
New Directions Publishing Corporation The King of Trees
Book SynopsisThree classic novellas—The King of Trees, The King of Chess, The King of Children—that completely altered the landscape of contemporary Chinese fiction.Trade Review"Nearly all the Chinese critics who discuss Ah Cheng’s work go to great lengths to praise the spare, concentrated expressiveness of his prose style…. But they see in Ah Cheng’s powerful language an indicator of something else, too—they see in his style an extraordinary evocation of the Chinese national spirit, something that years of class struggle under Mao’s aegis had sought simply to efface." -- Theodore Huters - Modern China"Beginning in 1984 with the publication of Ah Cheng’s novella The King of Chess, the last half of the 1980s represented a major turning point in contemporary Chinese fiction. From that time on, contemporary Chinese fiction has been ‘walking toward the world’ (zuoxiang shijie), a phrase that may be taken to mean approaching the quality of the finest in world fiction." -- Michael Duke - World Literature Today
£12.34
New Directions Publishing Corporation In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other
Book SynopsisA new edition of the definitive book on the depression-era immigrant experience in New York City.Trade Review"The greatest man I ever met… [His] titles were more than enough to raise the muse of fire on my neck. " -- Lou Reed"Delmore Schwartz catapults past the fickleness of mere reputation(that posture and position that Lionel Trilling defined as characterizing a ‘figure’) into something close to legend." -- Cynthia Ozick"Nostalgic odes to the city are everywhere, but the best thing ever written on the subject is In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." -- The Village Voice"‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ is as good as a story can be, I’d say after reading it again for the fifth or sixth time, comparable with Kafka, Babel, or Through the Looking Glass." -- Dwight MacDonald
£12.34
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Musical Brain
Book SynopsisA delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of micro-fiction.Trade Review"Once you start reading Aira, you don't want to stop." -- Roberto Bolaño"Aira’s cubist eye sees from every angle. The stories in “The Musical Brain” exhibit the continuing narration of Aira’s improvisational mind. His characters — whether comic-strip ruffians, apes, subatomic particles or a version of his boyhood self — enter a shifting and tilting landscape of events that unhinge our temporal existence and render it phantasmagorical yet seemingly everyday in the unfolding. His matter-of-fact approach, accepting even the most outlandish episodes, suspends disbelief and encourages one’s own sense of displacement, of being released from the commonplace. Hail César!" -- Patti Smith - The New York Times Book Review"Astonishing–turns Don Quixote into Picasso." -- Harper's"Everything in Aira has that Mad Scientist feel to it. " -- The Millions"Exhilarating. César Aira is the Duchamp of Latin American literature. Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in spanish today and should not be missed." -- Natasha Wimmer - The New York Times"Wildly Funny." -- Paris Review"An Aesop in Breton's clothing. " -- Thomas Hachard - Los Angeles Review of Books"César Aira is Argentina's greatest living author." -- Marcela Valdes - The Nation"Cerebral, witty, fanciful and idiosyncratic." -- Aura Estrada - Boston Review"Aira oversteps the bounds of realism, forcing the world to live up to his imagination." -- Benjamin Lytal - The New York Sun"Aira delivers one surreal unraveling of reality after another that proceeds paradox by paradox into psychic realms" -- Michael Upchurch - The Seattle Times"Surreal, witty, and funny. " -- The Guardian"Aira’s novels parody narrative form, destroy normal cause and effect, and contain bold conceptual dialogues." -- Michael Eaude - Times Literary Supplement"Aira stresses the sublime without falling back on the props of magical realism" -- Cristopher Byrd - The Believer"The first collection of Aira's stories might be his masterpiece." -- Publishers Weekly, (starred review)"Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald, those great late modernists for whom fiction was a theater of ideas." -- Mark Doty - Los Angeles Times"Aira seems fascinated by the idea of storytelling as invention, invention as improvisation, and improvisation as transgression, as getting away with something." -- The New York Review of Books"Aira conjures a languorous, surreal atmosphere of baking heat and quietly menacing shadows that puts one in mind of a painting by de Chirico." -- The New Yorker"César Aira's body of work is a perfect machine for invention." -- Maria Moreno - Bomb"This prolific Argentine writer has inspired a cult following." -- Scott Esposito - Tin House"Logic-defying brilliance." -- Publishers Weekly"Argentine author César Aira is an exquisite miniaturist who toys with avant-garde techniques. His work has drawn comparisons to Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino for its gleeful literary gamesmanship and stories-within-stories." -- The Wall Street Journal"His novels are eccentric clones of reality, where the lights are brighter, the picture is sharper, and everything happens at the speed of thought." -- Jacob Mikanowski - The Millions"What a gift: to look forward to reading a new Aira novel from New Directions every year for the rest of one's life." -- Thomas McGonigle - Los Angeles Times"Irreverent inventiveness…without analogue in contemporary literature" -- Megan Doll - San Francisco Chronicle"One of the most celebrated authors in Latin America." -- New York Observer"A quixotic chemist." -- Michael H. Miller - The American Reader"The novelist who can't be stopped. Aira's novels are dense, unpredictable confections delivered in plain, stealthily lyrical style capable of accommodating his fondness for mixing metaphysics, realism, pulp fiction, and Dadaist incongruities." -- Michael Greenberg - The New York Review of Books"Outlandish B-movie fantasies are all part of the game. His best-known works are nonsensically hysterical. To love César Aira you must have a taste for the absurd, a tolerance for the obscurely philosophical, and a willingness to laugh out loud against your better judgment." -- Marcela Valdes - NPR Books"A distinctive hallucinatory style, which blends together reality and fiction, the waking world and the dream world" -- Chloe Schama - The New Republic"César Aira is the energizer bunny of Latin American literature." -- Tess Lewis - The Hudson Review"Genius. César Aira is a deconstructed Kafka; a compact comprehensible Roberto Bolaño obsessed with the frightening nonsense of civilization." -- Joe Gallagher - Ploughshares"Uncanny imagination a la Calvino." -- Laura Pearson - Chicago Tribune"Unsettling and elegant parables." -- Los Angeles Times"César Aira is wild. The laws of gravity do not apply." -- James S. A. Correy - The Denver Post"Aira's works are like slim cabinets of wonder, full of unlikely juxtapositions. His unpredictability is masterful." -- Rivka Galchen - Harper's"César Aira's novels are the narrative equivalent of the Exquisite Corpse, that surrealist parlor game in which players add to drawings or stories without knowledge of previous or subsequent additions. Wildly heterogeneous elements are thrown together, and the final result never fails to surprise and amuse. Aira is wacky enough to play the game by himself, but the reader isn't left out either." -- The Millions"South America's answer to Haruki Murikami." -- Andrew Irvin - Miami Herald"A lampoon of our need for narrative. No one today does megafiction like Aira." -- Robyn Creswell - Paris Review
£21.59
New Directions Publishing Corporation Story of Love in Solitude
Book SynopsisA notable discovery of a truly original voiceTrade Review"Lewinter perfectly captures the strangeness of infatuation and the way in which it becomes all too easy to project one’s own narrative onto the bodies of those around us." -- Thea Hawlin - Asymptote Journal"Lewinter’s uncanny gift for dissecting the abstract and unspoken aspects of attraction and self-awareness raises fiction to a higher level." -- Monica Carter - Best Translated Book Award"The Attraction of Things and Story of Love in Solitude, two short books by Roger Lewinter, are the first by the French author, editor, and translator to appear in English. Majestically rendered by Rachel Careau, their publication represents an opportunity to give Lewinter the prominence he deserves..." -- K. Thomas Kahn - BOMB Magazine"[W]riters working at this level of care, the shifting of a word, a comma, can have a tremendous impact, even a secret drama." -- Brian Evenson - Electric Literature"[Lewinter’s] unique literary voice...is that of an obsessive, a philosopher, and a miniaturist." -- Karl Wolff - NY Journal of Books"Lewinter’s prose—lengthy sentences, punctuated largely by commas, semicolons, and dashes—has hypnotic appeal when combined with his tendency toward meandering asides and lovely melancholy." -- Publisher's Weekly"Arriving in elegant, bilingual editions beautifully translated by Rachel Careau, The Attraction of Things and Story of Love in Solitude are the first two books by Roger Lewinter to be published in English. Although written in the 1980s, these works seem anything but dated. Instead they feel immune to literary fashion. They exert the fascination of something done carefully, even exhaustively, for its own sake rather than to please anyone else." -- Dorian Stuber - The Quarterly Conversation"The work of Roger Lewinter is essentially a work of reflection on meaning, on units of meaning and the logical problems posed by their ordering in the sentence: each word, each sense, leading to a calling into question of the text as a whole. This sentence, which can be compared to a Kashmir shawl in its infinite interlacing, woven in one piece and from a single thread, raises, beyond the simple syntactic difficulties, logical problems of thought that no writing had up to now approached." -- Lorenzo Valentin
£8.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Teeth of the Comb Other Stories
Book SynopsisWonderful short stories that sharpen awareness, from a brilliantly gifted Syrian refugeeTrade Review"Alomar’s sly moral fables and sharp political allegories are shrewd and full of intelligence." -- Rabeea Saleem - Chicago Review of Books"Elegant, often elegiac sketches by Syrian-born writer Alomar, now a resident of Chicago.“He was born with a silver knife in his mouth. And he was its first victim.” Thus, in its entirety, one of Alomar’s short stories, this one with the simple title “The Knife.” Others stretch out to a page, a few others a little more than that, but all are masterpieces of compression, presented with the generally unironic matter-of-factness of a fable that, no matter how improbable the circumstances, behaves perfectly well according to its own logic: that knife could be literal just as easily as metaphorical, considering the violence and mayhem of the world. The title story is a sly allegory about the human desire for—well, for better circumstances than most of us enjoy, anyway, the teeth of the comb standing for aspirations that, even when fulfilled, do not go unpunished. Occasionally Alomar goes full-tilt for the classical fable, letting animals and sometimes even plants stand in for human beings; when humans and the natural world meet, it is seldom to our credit, as when an ear of wheat beholds a throng of human ears on heads that “were bent before their tyrant leader” and mistakes their posture for a boon. No good deed goes unpunished, indeed; in one fable worthy of Kafka, a writer is made to sit on his pen in torture, and his blood turns blue in the bargain. “He became prominent...and slowly came to his senses,” Alomar writes, leaving us to guess whether the writer became complicit in the regime that afflicted him or came to his senses in some other way, pleasant or horrific.Swamps and streams, lightning and dogs all play a part in these beguiling, suggestive fables. The stories are of perfect length, but one wishes the book went on for much longer." -- Kirkus (starred review)"Alomar's work speaks to the power that words can have when they’re constrained, be it by style or by necessity... a master of the form." -- Bradley Babendir - New Republic"There are no wasted words in Alomar’s beautiful collection of very short fictions. Philosophical and subversive, these tiny parables deconstruct human failings with a keen insight. The title story, an anecdote about the uneven teeth of a comb, reveals a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of social stratification. “Love Letter” tells the story of a couple separated by class, culture, and distance both metaphorical and physical. The nameless narrator emigrates during an era of oppression, mirroring Alomar’s exile from Syria. The lovers continue a written correspondence, but, as revolution and civil war divide their homeland, chaos threatens to sever the pair forever. In “The Shining Idea,” a cynical father debates with his optimistic son about the inherent darkness of humanity. “The world is a blank page,” the boy explains. The collection delves into universal themes of aging—“Journey of Life”—and love and loss. These stories deliver the kind of stunning maxims that a cunning master might spout to an eagerly waiting acolyte. By working together with C.J. Collins on the translation, the author succeeds in highlighting the inherent poetics of his prose....Alomar’s work swims in the aspects of the modern world that do not make sense upon closer inspection, like the correlations between poverty and capitalism. These brief narratives are not nihilistic; they convey a plea for progress and improvement. Alomar’s writing brims with hope, and this slim volume is full of compassion and depth." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Alomar's stories are alternatively hilarious, portentous and utterly poetic." -- Ben Tripp - The Brooklyn Rail"In the Arab world, the Syrian writer Osama Alomar has a growing reputation as the author of short, clever parables that comment obliquely on political and social issues. But here in Chicago, where he has lived in exile since 2008, he spends most of his time as the driver of Car 45 at the Horizon Taxi Cab company." -- Larry Rohter - The New York Times"In Alomar’s stories, fantasy never devolves into mere whimsy. His magical imaginative creations are, every one, inspired by his deeply felt philosophical, moral, and political convictions, giving these tales a heartfelt urgency." -- Lydia Davis - The New Yorker"Despite their apparent playful wit, Alomar’s deceptively slight short stories have teeth and bite. In spare, accessible prose, one encounters the painful and bitter poetry of exile running like a blood-red thread through this slim but dense collection." -- Yahia Lababidi - World Literature Today
£10.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation This Is Not Miami
Book SynopsisA searing collection of true stories from “one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices” (The Guardian)Trade Review"Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive." -- Julian Lucas - The New York Times"While her writing turns an unsparing eye on the dysfunction and violence of her native Veracruz, Melchor makes clear that it is neither her job nor her intention to explain her homeland. Her novels are less portraits of Mexico than they are literary MRIs, probing unseen corners of the human heart and finding that many of its darker shades are universal." -- Benjamin P. Russell - The New York Times"Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage and has the skill to pull it off." -- Samanta Schweblin"Melchor draws empathetic portraits of deeply unsympathetic figures, forcing her readers to understand the mindsets of monstrous characters." -- The Millions"Some of the most wrenching prose to come around in years. Skillfully translated by Hughes, this is a book that’s as gorgeous as it is dark, and it proves that Melchor is one of the finest writers working today." -- Kirkus Reviews"Melchor writes unjudgementally and with great respect for her interlocutors. Even when her narratives are fragmentary or end abruptly, she teases out the diversity of life in Veracruz—from the mysterious, and the ordinary, to the gruesome. In the introduction she writes that “a city cannot tell its own story.” Luckily, for that we have Melchor. " -- Daniel Rey - Americas Quarterly"Many of the stories in this collection by an author hailed as the next big thing in Latin American literature are written in a genre known as cronica, a blend of reportage and interpretation that has no obvious equivalent in English. Set in and around Veracruz, Fernanda Melchor’s hometown, each is spare and grippingly devastating in its own way, as with the tale of a glitzy carnival queen who, in 1989, murdered her two young boys and buried their remains in planter pots on her balcony." -- Emily Donaldson - The Globe and Mail"Melchor aims to understand the world out of which violence transpires: the airlessness of poverty, the frustrations of thwarted ambition, the desire for power and freedom. … Melchor writes a new kind of folklore that allows us to hear the ferocious reality of contemporary violence." -- Jess Cotton - Jacobin"Faced with tragedy, Melchor holds a steady gaze, focused tightly on the individual; rather than give a bird’s-eye view, her instinct is to always get closer." -- Laura Adamczyk - The Nation"Over the course of This Is Not Miami, a picture emerges of the Zetas’ takeover of Veracruz. Melchor moves through this world, compelled by macabre and mysterious stories, while always standing a little outside of them. This wider perspective implies that the current violence, the shadowy machinations in high places, will pass or change." -- Philip Luke Johnson - Los Angeles Review of Books
£12.34
New Directions Publishing Corporation Toddler Hunting
Book SynopsisKirkus Reviews Best Books of 2018 An unforgettable collection of stories from “the most carnally direct and the most lucidly intelligent woman writing in Japan” (Kenzaburo Oe)Trade Review"Kono’s intimate descriptions of unhappy relationships are not only unexpectedly frank, but often genuinely shocking." -- Boston Review"Japanese master of the unsettling: Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction. Each story unburies something that feels both thrillingly specific and surprisingly contemporary." -- Kirkus (starred)"Provocative and eerily moving in their confrontation of the terrifying and the taboo. Each of Kono’s stories features characters confronting new ways to live with their own secret selves: a strikingly original and surprising collection." -- Publishers Weekly (starred)"Both the sadism and masochism here is very raw—but pain and pleasure mingle in ways that never cease to be surprising or poetic." -- Thessaly La Force - T-Magazine"The fiery, beguiling stories in Toddler Hunting and Other Stories are vertiginous tightrope walks between two planes of reality. Kono’s writing is shocking, ominous, and subversive; it lays bare the destruction and the renewal that freedom and desire can cause." -- The Paris Review Daily"Two currents are constantly crossing in the stories, the first depicting the polite forms of public interactions and the second pulsing with taboo fantasies and hallucinations. There are resonances here with Tanizaki, but Kono’s subversions feel somehow scarier, in part because of her deadpan prose and in part because she strikes at sacred paradigms of motherhood and femininity." -- The Wall Street Journal"Reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s works, Kono’s stories explore the dark, terrifying side of human nature that manifests itself in antisocial behavior." -- World Literature Today"I was not prepared for this unsettling and unforgettable collection. These stories left me shaken and in awe; they are incendiary, beautiful, and frightening confrontations of the lives we keep hidden from others. Taeko Kono fearlessly writes into the abyss, and there is no one like her." -- Gabe Habash, author of Stephen Florida"Kono’s unsparing gaze penetrates the depths of human nature, and she sets forth what she finds there with absolute precision." -- Shusaku Endo"Tranquil and matter of fact." -- Hiromi Kawakami - The New York Times
£12.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation An Inventory of Losses
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£999.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Lucky Breaks
Book SynopsisPowerful, off-beat stories about women living in the shadow of the now-frozen, now-thawing war in UkraineTrade Review"Lucky Breaks is a book in Russian about the war in Ukraine that does not describe combat operations and that forbears to generalize in any way. The protagonists, many of whom are refugees, think of themselves as has-beens. To be, like one of them, a woman formerly from Alchevsk, in the contested Luhansk region, becomes the support structure for a new identity: an identity of which all we know is that it’s irreversible, the world will never go back to being what it was. This is the point at which the tender and terrible stories of Yevgenia Belorusets, where bogeyman tales of childhood dress in the language of Jean Genet, and the documentary dilates into the epic, become the history we all have in common." -- Maria Stepanova - Music & Literature"A daring, unsettling book about displaced women telling luminous stories to survive the darkness that surrounds them." -- Jenny Offill"Belorusets, who came to fiction from photojournalism (her own images appear in the book), excels at building stories that serve as striking snapshots of lives—strange, beautiful, and absent the interpretative context that might render them neater and less unsettling. As it is, this singular collection brings Ukraine, “the land of residual phenomena,” entirely to life." -- Kirkus"Belorusets is interested in the histories of the defeated, of the unseen and unheard, and above all in the experiences of eastern Ukrainian women in wartime. [Her] willingness to exist between document and fiction is daring, even provocative. This is a moment when facts are both utterly compromised and vastly overvalued—asked to do all the work of politics, to justify whole worldviews with single data points. Belorusets, by contrast, is for plurality, subjectivity, a kind of narrative democracy. She wants us to remember that even documentary photographs and factual narratives are determined, and sometimes distorted, by the worldview that shaped them." -- Sophie Pinkham - The Baffler"Belorusets, a documentary photographer and activist, captures the extraordinary lives of ordinary Ukrainian women in her arresting fiction debut, a story collection. The brief entries survey lives upended by the political and military turmoil over the past two decades... Two of Belorusets’s photo series supplement her writing, but her words speak for themselves. The combination makes for a powerful exercise." -- Publishers Weekly"In Yevgenia Belorusets's collection of short stories, Lucky Breaks, the machine-gun is fired and the mortar explodes, but offstage. Her stories are about anonymous women who trace new existences or disappear in the fog and ruins of the frozen conflict." -- Julian Evans - TLS"Against the present and looming risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, [Belorusets] produces an especially unsettling awareness of the myriad ways in which imagination walks hand in hand with violent reality." -- Bryan Karentnyk - Financial Times"If Isaac Babel and the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich had offspring." -- Claire Messud - Harper's"A polyphonic portrait of a resilient society under siege." -- Ali Kinsella - World Literature Today"…hackle-raising fairytales of women set adrift, their homeland torn out at the roots." -- John Domini - Brooklyn Rail"Magic, witchcraft and astrology infuse Belorusets’s collection of absurdist stories about women in Ukraine...In vignettes no longer than a few pages, Belorusets recounts stories of women existing in the margins." -- Ella Creamer - The Guardian
£12.17
New Directions Publishing Corporation Collected Stories
Book SynopsisDylan Thomas’s magisterial stories all in one volume, available in a beautiful new paperback edition. Trade Review"Thomas meant much to me and my generation, he is still singing in his chains like the sea—a force driving the flowers." -- Seamus Heaney"His prose, his images, his stories all pulsate with life, with a beat and a variety that captivate, invigorate, and clarify." -- Los Angeles Times"Thomas’s stories appeal to me because he is required to snake his poetics in between the dialogue and exposition (such as it is), and the form reins in his Biblical tendencies. … In the same way that compilation albums often reveal the hidden strengths of a band, allowing someone else to decide what works, Collected Stories has always been my favorite Thomas, because of its balance. I need a touch of zinc white to even out the purple with this one. The demands of successful fiction bring Thomas and his rambles into the light, where we can see the triumph and regret in every drop." -- Sasha Frere-Jones - 4columns
£17.09
Random House USA Inc A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Book Synopsis
£14.45
Random House USA Inc Love Stories in This Town
Book Synopsis
£12.60
Random House USA Inc The Suicide Run
Book Synopsis
£13.50
Random House USA Inc Get in Trouble
Book Synopsis
£16.15
Random House USA Inc Welcome to the Monkey House Stories The Special
Book SynopsisSince its original publication in 1968, Welcome to the Monkey House has been one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved works. This special edition celebrates a true master of the short-story form by including multiple variant drafts of what would eventually be the title story. In a fascinating accompanying essay, “Building the Monkey House: At Kurt Vonnegut’s Writing Table,” noted Vonnegut scholar Gregory D. Sumner walks readers through Vonnegut’s process as the author struggles—false start after false start—to hit upon what would be one of his greatest stories. The result is the rare chance to watch a great writer hone his craft in real time.Includes the following stories:“Where I Live”“Harrison Bergeron”“Who Am I This Time?”“Welcome to the Monkey House”“Long Walk to Forever”“The Foster Portfolio”“Miss Temptation
£15.19
The University Press of Kentucky Patchwork
Book SynopsisBobbie Ann Mason burst onto the American literary scene during a renaissance of short fiction that Raymond Carver called a "literary phenomenon."Trade ReviewBobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader."" - New York Review of Books, reviewing Shiloh and Other Stories""Synopsis cannot begin to do justice to the complexity, drama, and ultimate benevolence of Mason's vision."" - Chicago Tribune, reviewing Feather Crowns
£32.26
