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
Comma Press Ellipsis 1 Comma Modern Shorts v 1 Ellipsis Comma
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£999.99
Swan Isle Press Winter Journey Translated by Patricia Lunn
Book SynopsisA collection of short stories.
£999.99
MP-ARK University of Arkansas Halal Pork and Other Stories
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£999.99
Tin House Books Call it What You Want
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£12.02
Dorothy a Publishing Project Creature Dorothy a Publishing Project
Book Synopsis“Amina Cain is a beautiful writer. Like the girl in the rearview mirror in your backseat, quiet, looking out the window half smiling, then not, then glancing at you, curious to her. That is how her thoughts and words make me feel, like clouds hanging with jets, and knowing love is pure.” —Thurston Moore Amina Cain’s Creature brings together short fictions set in the space between action and reflection, edging at times toward the quiet and contemplative, at other times toward the grotesque or unsettling. Like the women in Jane Bowles’s work, Cain’s narrators seem always slightly displaced in the midst of their own experiences, carefully observing the effects of themselves on their surroundings and of their surroundings on themselves. Other literary precursors might include Raymond Carver and John Cage, with Carver’s lucid prose and instinct for the potency of small gestures and Cage’s ability to return the modern wor
£14.41
Dorothy a Publishing Project Wild Milk
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£14.41
£8.99
BookBaby Boy Who Watches Brother Devil
£9.89
BookBaby To Solace or to Silence Stories
£9.89
BookBaby Dialogues of the Loon
£17.84
Random House USA Inc Stories from the Kitchen Everymans Library Pocket
Book SynopsisStories from the Kitchen is a one-of-a-kind anthology of classic tales showcasing the culinary arts from across the centuries and around the world.Here is a mouthwatering smorgasbord of stories with food in the starring role, by a range of masters of fiction—from Dickens and Chekhov to Isaac Bashevis Singer, from Shirley Jackson to Jim Crace and Amy Tan. These richly varied selections offer tastes as decadent as caviar and as humble as cherry pie. They dazzle with the sumptuous extravagance of Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast” and console with a prisoner’s tender final meal in Günter Grass’s The Flounder. Choice tidbits from famous novels make an appearance: the triumphant boeuf en daube served in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Marcel Proust’s rhapsodic memories of the family's cook preparing asparagus in Remembrance of Things Past, Émile Zola’s outrageously sensual
£20.00
Random House USA Inc Shaken and Stirred
Book SynopsisShaken and Stirred is an enticing literary cocktail of stories about drinking and making merry by great writers from the past two centuries. In this lively collection, wine snobs receive their comeuppances at the hands of Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe; riotous partying exacts a comic price in stories by P. G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis; Charles Jackson and Jean Rhys chronicle liquor-soaked epiphanies; while John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Coover set their characters afloat on surreal, soul-revealing adventures. Here, too, are well-lubricated tales by Dickens, Twain, Beckett, Colette, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, Clarice Lispector, Joy Williams, Penelope Lively, and many more. The settings include hotels and restaurants, a wine cellar in Italy, a café in Paris, a bar in Dublin, a New York nightclub, Jazz Age speakeasies, suburban lawn parties, and the occasional jail cell, and are peopled by lovers and loners, bartenders and chorus girls, youths taking their first sips and experienced tipplers waking with hangovers. Whether living it up or drowning their sorrows, the vividly drawn characters in these sparkling pages will leave you shaken and stirred.
£14.40
Random House USA Inc Wedding Stories Everymans Library Pocket Classics
Book SynopsisA bouquet of great wedding stories--by turns funny, passionate, bittersweet, and romantic--by famous writers from across the past two centuries. From F. Scott Fitzgerald to Lorrie Moore, and from Stephen Crane to Edwidge Danticat. EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET CLASSICS.The stories collected here--including such gems as Stephen Crane's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, O. Henry's The Marry Month of May, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Bridal Party, Joy Williams's The Wedding, and Lorrie Moore's Thank You For Having Me--encompass comic wedding mishaps, engagements broken and mended, honeymoon adventures, and scenes both heartwarming and heartbreaking. There are glamorous weddings in Paris and New York, and more eccentric ones in the Wild West and on a remote island beach. There are nervous brides, forgetful grooms, meddling guests, interrupted nuptials, second thoughts, and second chances. Above all, there are all kinds of people--young and old, rich and poor, divorced and widowed
£12.33
Random House USA Inc Selected Stories Everymans Library Pocket
Book SynopsisA beautifully jacketed hardcover selection of 53 darkly witty, whimsical, and macabre short stories by an acknowledged master of the form.Saki's dazzling tales manage the remarkable feat of being anarchic and urbane at the same time. Studded with Wildean epigrams and featuring well-contrived plots and surprise endings, his stories gleefully skewer the pompous hypocrisies of upper class Edwardian society. But they go beyond mere satire, raising dark humor to extremes of entertaining outrageousness that have rarely since been matched. Saki's elegantly mischievous young heroes sow chaos in their wake without breaking a sweat, and are occasionally joined by werewolves, tigers, eavesdropping house pets, and casually murderous children. This selection includes such famous stories as Tobermory, The Open Window, Sredni Vashtar, Mrs. Packletide's Tiger, The Schartz-Metterklume Method, and many more.
£20.00
Random House USA Inc That Old Country Music
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£14.45
Random House USA Inc Notes from the Fog Vintage Contemporaries
Book SynopsisBen Marcus returns with a collection of timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world. Here a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured from testing his employer’s newest nutrition supplement; a father starts to suspect that his son’s precocity has turned sinister; and two architects in a failing marriage must consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion as they construct a memorial to a terrorist attack. It’s these characters and others that over the course of thirteen short stories showcase Marcus’s compassion, imagination, and mordant humor. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.
£14.40
Random House USA Inc Chance Developments
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£14.40
Random House USA Inc Trajectory
Book SynopsisThis dazzling collection of four stories features characters bound together by their parallel moments of reckoning with their pasts—and proves the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls is also a master of the short story. “Beautiful…. Will abruptly break your heart.” —The New York TimesThe characters in these four expansive stories are a departure from the blue-collar denizens that populate so many of Richard Russo’s novels. In “Horseman,” a young professor confronts an undergraduate plagiarist—as well as her own regrets. In “Intervention,” a realtor facing a serious medical prognosis finds himself in his late father’s shadow. “Voice” gives us a semiretired academic who is conned by his estranged brother into joining a group tour of the Venice Biennale. And “Milton and Marcus” takes us into a lapsed novelist’s attempt to rekindle his screenwriting career—a career that depends wholly, at a crucial moment, on two Hollywood icons (one living, one dead). Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.
£14.45
Penguin Books Ltd The Sea Beast Takes a Lover Stories
Book Synopsis“This debut author rightfully earns his place on the storytelling totem pole with this wildly original short story collection.”—San Francisco ChronicleDazzling and delightful, with its feet only slightly tethered to the world we know, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover explores family, faith, and longing through a kaleidoscope of surreal landscapes and spellbinding characters.Andreasen's stories unfold in wildly inventive worlds that invite the supernatural into our familiar routines: in “Bodies in Space,” an extramarital affair is rudely interrupted by an alien abduction, while in “Blunderbuss,” a third-grade class takes an ill-advised field trip to a floundering time travel institute. “Jenny” follows a reluctant caretaker's attempts to manage his kind-hearted headless sister, and in the title story, a group of sailors find their ship commandeered by an aggressively lovestruck kraken.
£14.45
Picador USA Cant and Wont
Book SynopsisNATIONAL BESTSELLERThe New York Times Los Angeles Times The Boston GlobeHer stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of Bloomington reads, Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before. Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates, a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert''s correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author''s own dreams, or the dreams of friends.What does not vary throughout Can''t and Won''t, Lydia Davis''s fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all,
£15.30
St Martin's Press Children of the New World Stories
Book SynopsisChildren of the New World introduces readers to a near future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. The book grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society.
£11.99
Flatiron Books salt slow
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year AwardFrom White Review Short Story Prize winner Julia Armfield, a brilliant, provocative debut story collection for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link.In her electrifying debut, Julia Armfield explores women's experiences in contemporary society, mapped through their bodies. As urban dwellers' sleeps become disassociated from them, like Peter Pan's shadow, a city turns insomniac. A teenager entering puberty finds her body transforming in ways very different than her classmates'. As a popular band gathers momentum, the fangirls following their tour turn into something monstrous. After their parents remarry, two step-sisters, one a girl and one a wolf, develop a dangerously close bond. And in an apocalyptic landscape, a pregnant woman begins to realize that the creature in her belly is not what she expected. Blending elements of horror, science fiction, mythology, and femini
£15.29
Picador USA Instructions for a Funeral
Book SynopsisPoetic, insightful, and deeply moving. David Means is one of my very favorite writers. -Tara Westover, author of EducatedFollowing the publication of his widely acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia, David Means here returns to his signature form: the short story. Thanks to his four previous story collections, Means has won himself an international reputation as one of the most innovative short fiction writers working today: an established master of the form. (Laura Miller, The Guardian). Instructions for a Funeral-featuring work from The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, and VICE-finds Means branching out beyond the explorations of violence and trauma with which he is often identified, prominently displaying his sly humor and his inimitable way of telling tales that deliciously wind up to punch the reader in the heart. With each story Means pushes into new territory, writing with tenderness and co
£14.45
St Martin's Press We Love Anderson Cooper
Book SynopsisIn this quirky, humorous, and deeply human short story collection, Pushcart Prize-nominated author R.L. Maizes reminds us that even in our most isolated moments, we are never truly alone.In We Love Anderson Cooper, characters are treated as outsiders because of their sexual orientation, racial or religious identity, or simply because they look different. A young man courts the publicity that comes from outing himself at his bar mitzvah. When a painter is shunned because of his appearance, he learns to ink tattoos that come to life. A paranoid Jewish actuary suspects his cat of cheating on him-with his Protestant girlfriend.In this debut collection, humor complements pathos. Readers will recognize themselves in these stories and in these protagonists, whose backgrounds are vastly different from their own-we've all been outsiders at some point.
£14.44
Picador USA PERSONAL VELOCITY
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£12.41
Picador USA Highway Thirteen
£15.30
Picador USA The Sun on My Head
Book SynopsisA bestselling literary sensation in Brazil, a powerful debut short-story collection about favela life in Rio de JaneiroIn The Sun on My Head, Geovani Martins recounts the experiences of boys growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the early years of the twenty-first century. Drawing on his childhood and adolescence, Martins uses the rhythms and slang of his neighborhood dialect to capture the texture of life in the slums, where every day is shadowed by a ubiquitous drug culture, the constant threat of the police, and the confines of poverty, violence, and racial oppression. And yet these are also stories of friendship, romance, and momentary relief, as in Rolézim, where a group of teenagers head to the beach. Other stories, all uncompromising in their realism and yet diverse in narrative form, explore the changes that occur when militarized police occupy the favelas in the lead-up to the World Cup, the cycles of violence in the narcotics trade, and the
£999.99
Holt McDougal Love Like That
Book SynopsisNamed a Best New Book of 2021 by Vogue and Refinery29Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Lit HubNamed one of 5 Hot Books by The National Book ReviewLonglisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a Debut Short Story CollectionFor a friend who needs a reminder that love is weird, humans are complicated, and bad things often get better or at least later become funny stories to tell our friends. Vanity FairA sharp, witty book about brilliant, broken women that are just the right amount wrong.Whether diving into complicated relationships or wrestling with family ties, the girls and women who populate Love Like Thatmisfits and misanthropes, bickering sisters, responsible daughters, and unhappy wivesdon''t always find themselves making the best decisions. A woman struggles with a new kind of love triangle when she moves in with a
£14.44
St Martin's Press Cool for America
Book SynopsisThe follow-up to his classic-in-the-making debut Early Work, Andrew Martin's Cool for America is a collection of overlapping stories that explores the dark zone between artistic ambition and its achievement
£15.57
Picador USA Likes
Book SynopsisA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Library Journal, Electric Literature, The New York Public Library, PopMattersA Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Story PrizeNational Book Award finalist Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's highly anticipated return weaves together like and unlike, mythic and modernIn nine stories that range from the real to the unreal, strange to familiar, funny to frightening, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum reminds us why her wildly original debut, Madeleine Is Sleeping, and her masterful Ms. Hempel Chronicles have become contemporary classics--celebrated and beloved.In a nimble dance of lightness and gravity, Likes explores the full range and contradictions of our contemporary moment. Through unexpected visitors, Waldorf school fairs, aging indie-film stars, the struggle to gain a foothold in the capitalist shell-game of work, the Instagram posts of a twelve-year-oldthese stori
£14.45
Picador USA Collected Stories
Book SynopsisCollected Stories includes both volumes of the National Book Awardwinning author Shirley Hazzard's short-story collectionsCliffs of Fall and People in Glass Housesalongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished storiesShirley Hazzard''s Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical send-ups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard''s heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the twentieth-century world of office jobs and dreary marriages. After all, as she writes in The Picnic, It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn''t cope with love. And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendor of love, the pursuit and the ab
£17.10
Holt McDougal Learning to Talk
Book SynopsisA dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall trilogy.In the wake of Hilary Mantel's brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, Learning to Talk is a collection of loosely autobiographical stories that locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.Absorbing and evocative, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues. For the young narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In King Billy Is a Gentleman, the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. Curved Is the Line of Beauty is a story of friendship, faith and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manc
£14.44
St Martin's Press Africa Risen
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2023 World Fantasy Award for Best AnthologyWinner of the 2023 Locus Award for Best AnthologyA 2023 NAACP Image Award NomineeA 2023 British Fantasy Award NomineeA NPR Best of the Year pickA Book Riot Best SFF of the Year pick[A] magnificent and wide-ranging anthology . . . A must-read for all genre fans.Publishers Weekly, starred reviewFrom award-winning editorial team Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight comes an anthology of thirty-two original stories showcasing the breadth of fantasy and science fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora.A group of cabinet ministers query a supercomputer containing the minds of the country's ancestors. A child robot on a dying planet uncovers signs of fragile new life. A descendent of a rain goddess inherits her grandmother's ability to change her appearanceand perhaps
£16.14
Picador USA Manywhere
Book SynopsisFINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES ART SIEDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION, THE 2022 LAMBDA LITERARY PRIZE FOR TRANSGENDER FICTION, AND THE 2023 PUBLISHING TRIANGLE EDMUND WHITE AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTIONThese breathlessly imaginative stories are all the more remarkable for the elegant, organic ways in which the author unhooks language from its entrenched assumptions about men and women. The New York Times Book ReviewMorgan Thomas''s Manywhere features lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas's subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body
£17.10
Picador USA The Trouble with Happiness
Book SynopsisThe Trouble with Happiness is a powerful new collection of short stories by Tove Ditlevsen, a terrifying talent (Parul Sehgal, The New York Times).A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of marriage and family life in midcentury Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence, and despair, as women and men struggle to escape from the roles assigned to them and dream of becoming free and happywithout ever truly understanding what that might mean.Tove Ditlevsen is one of Denmark's most famous and beloved writers, and her autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy was hailed as a masterpiece on republication in English, named a New York Times Best Book of the Year, and lauded for its wry humor, limpid prose, and powerful honesty. The poignant and understated stories i
£14.45
St Martin's Press 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,
£15.30
St Martin's Press Two Nurses Smoking
Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates PrizeA new collection of stories by David Means, a visionary master of the form (The Observer). Two nurses meet in the hospital parking lot to share a cigarette. They flirt and imagine a future together. They tell stories of patients lost and patients saved, of the darkest corners of human suffering and the luminous moments that break through, even here, in the shadow of death.In David Means's virtuosic new collection, time unfolds in unexpected ways: a single, quiet moment swells with the echoes of a widower's complicated marriage; a dachshund, given a new name and a new life by a new owner, catches the scent of the troubled man who previously abandoned her; young lovers become old; estranged couples return to their vows; and those who have died live on in perpetuity in the memories of those whom they touched. The stories in this collectionwhich have won the O. Henry Prize and the Pushcart Prize, a
£15.30
Picador USA Reward System
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£15.30
Picador USA Total
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£15.30
St Martin's Press Always Unique
Book SynopsisAlways Unique gathers together three popular Unique novellas from the New York Times bestselling, African-American powerhouse author Nikki Turner.I: With only two hundred dollars, Unique packed her suitcase and headed to New York City for a brand new start. It''s there that Unique meets big time boxing promoter, Kennard, and it is love at first sight. After nine months of living in the lap of luxury with Kennard, skeletons from Unique''s past show up and it will cost her a cool million dollars to not only keep her relationship but her life. Unique isn''t about to lose it all. With the help of her best friend, she devises a major heist, to pull it off all she has to do is stay alive. II: Living the life she has always dreamed of, Unique isn''t about to let her past ruin her future with her fiancé, Kennard. But the tables are turned on her and Unique is fighting for her very life. As for Kennard, he is stunned to learn about her past, but more impo
£13.41
Pan MacMillan The Insufferable Gaucho
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£13.60
WW Norton & Co The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories
Book SynopsisA debut collection of inventive, fresh, and richly human stories at once uncanny and startlingly real.Trade Review"Bucak's luminous debut taps folklore and real life to flesh out complex characters with an agile, inventive hand." -- O, The Oprah Magazine"A surrealist wunderkammer in which the lines between history and myth, reality and performance, and the cultural and personal are blurred and redrawn." -- The Millions"Ayse Papatya Bucak shares with Jhumpa Lahiri the gift of fusing distinctive subject matter with an unusually restrained and elegant voice. This marvelous debut collection is truly rare in its range and depth, its deft mastery of history and myth, and its fearless storytelling." -- Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel"The author astutely deploys a range of styles and techniques that create a cerebral, multifarious collection. Bucak's remarkable, inventive, and humane debut marks her as a writer to watch." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Bucak’s stories are wide-ranging and capacious, formally playful, and moving. They speak on behalf of women who are subject to fate and the tides of history. They convey history’s full force, but also the individual’s willfulness, cunning, and compassion. These stories are entirely contemporary and unique." -- Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party"Cerebral yet high-spirited." -- Kirkus Reviews"One of the best and most surprising collections I’ve read in a long time. This is a wonder cabinet of stories so singular and marvelous that I spent a long time after each, wanting to linger in the space it had created." -- Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble"This is a truly lovely, truly surprising book. Ayse Papatya Bucak’s stories are narratively precise, and they are also beautiful vignettes on human culture, deftly probing the fissures and pressure points of history and bringing up new forms like the sponge divers in one of her stories. This collection absolutely glows with life." -- Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State"What a beautiful, wildly imagined book. The Trojan War Museum gives us stories with branching paths, and they resemble fairy tales, historical accounts, news reports, and dreams. This is fiction of great originality and great delight." -- Joan Silber, author of Improvement
£18.99
WW Norton & Co Reality and Other Stories
Book SynopsisA Kirkus Reviews Best Short Fiction of 2021 Selection Ghost stories for the digital age by the Booker Prize–longlisted author of The Wall.Trade Review"A smart book, scary as hell, and also a whole lot of fun…[Reality and Other Stories is] as endlessly entertaining as it is legitimately frightening." -- Michael Schaub, NPR.org"Ingenious…[Lanchester's stories] send a shiver down the spine." -- Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal"John Lanchester's collection of tech-y ghost stories seems especially appealing right now...The eight tales in Lanchester's Reality and Other Stories are meant to entertain, to take you out of yourself for a space—and that they deftly do." -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air"This intriguing debut collection grapples with technology and its illusion of convenience, choice and escape. Lanchester, a British novelist and journalist, has a sharp eye for social class and setting in his ghost stories for the digital age." -- Vanessa Hua, New York Times Book Review"Brisk, vinegar-sharp satires that horrify and amuse in equal measure." -- Guardian"A mind-bending collection about the multifaceted scariness of the way we live now." -- Times Literary Supplement (UK)"Very clever, very modern 'entertainments.'" -- Financial Times (UK)"Across these immensely enjoyable and varied tales, Lanchester embraces the camp silliness of the gothic sensibility, while also making astute observations about our ever-developing digital reality." -- Booklist
£13.41
WW Norton & Co Ship Fever
Book Synopsis1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.Trade Review"[Andrea Barrett's] work stands out for its sheer intelligence, its painstaking attempt to discern and describe the world's configuration. The overall effect is quietly dazzling." -- Thomas Mallon - New York Times Book Review
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Innards Stories
Book SynopsisThis incendiary debut of linked stories narrates the everyday lives of Soweto residents, from the early years of apartheid to its dissolution and beyond.Trade Review"A gut punch of a collection.…Makhene brings together interlocking narratives that astonish as they reveal how malignant political forces can both ravage and vitalize the human spirit." -- Laura Warrell - New York Times Book Review"An unforgettable debut that hits with all the force of the sun. Complex and breathtaking, Innards is a book haunted by apartheid’s monstrous shadow and illuminated by the radiant talent of one of our generation’s most original voices. Makhene writes like liberation should feel: transcendently." -- Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of This is How You Lose Her and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"Innards by the brilliant Magogodi Makhene is a wonder. Magnificent and devastating." -- NoViolet Bulawayo, author of Glory and We Need New Names"Innards reads like a relay of fearless, burning emblems, each story lit by the one before and each igniting the next. Beautiful, lethal, funny, righteous visions… ablaze with the utterly familiar and the utterly mysterious. This work is prophetic—not because it shows us what will be, but because it shows us how it all really is. Simply, marvelous." -- Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of This Other Eden"Linked stories of life in Soweto, South Africa, animate the region’s fraught history of colonization and apartheid. Makhene shapes her debut story collection around suburban Soweto, from its inception during apartheid as the South-Western Townships until its eventual incorporation into Johannesburg proper.…Makhene's vividly rendered stories are propulsive and challenging." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"A much-needed addition to contemporary fiction.... Makhene’s stories capture the heart and soul of the Soweto people through her rich use of the vernacular and celebration of their lives. Readers will feel deeply connected to these characters." -- Booklist (starred review)
£21.59
WW Norton & Co Emergency
Book SynopsisOne of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023 • One of LitHub's 38 Best Books We read in 2023 "Best short stories for an instant escape."—Oprah Daily From an “exquisite” (The New Yorker) writer, a searing volume of prizewinning stories starring women facing points of no return.Trade Review"[A] richly layered collection... Alcott’s prose, both sensuous and cerebral, abounds with insight into people and the shapes life contorts them into." -- Kate Folk - New York Times Book Review"In supple, self-assured prose, Alcott highlights the ambivalence that can come with intimacy and violence, asking whether love is merely another form of circumscription, and whether brutality can sometimes be an antidote to numbness." -- The New Yorker"[Alcott's] sentences [have] startling aphoristic strength... The demanding directness of the writing scales up the sense of unfolding crisis... [A] high point in this impressive author’s evolution." -- Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal"'Anything can be lived around,' muses one of Alcott’s arresting narrators, 'so long as it’s only you who has to do it.'... We’d recommend reading this cunning collection with a pen in hand—you’re going to want to underline half the sentences." -- Charley Burlock - Oprah Daily"The world falls away as Kathleen Alcott’s stories unfold in her sublime collection, Emergency. The smallest moment, the briefest description, the single telling detail are given the attention a stonecutter would give a gem. Alcott’s gift is breathtaking... These stories are lovely and tart and marvelously peculiar, the product of an interesting and interested mind." -- Louise Marburg - Hudson Review"Exquisite... Each of these seven stories—about unmoored women dealing with crises of identity, creeping despair, and the psychic wounds left by corrosive men—is a small marvel: intense, cerebral, and tender." -- Dan Sheehan - LitHub"Alcott’s sentences are tightly constructed and indelible... As the best fiction does, Emergency refuses to offer simple diagnoses for today’s social and personal conditions... This is a book you must wade into, slowly immersing yourself in its murky and unsettling world." -- Margot Lee - ZYZZYVA"If Alcott has always been interested in how people bargain with forces bigger than them, then Emergency is about what happens when women bet against themselves; when women use their own autonomy as a bargaining chip in a wager that might gain them some power within a system inherently built against them. Whatever they might gain—Helen’s bourgeois life, Hannah’s coupled bliss—can never make up for what they’ve already given up." -- n + 1"Alcott twines financial and feminine anxieties to create particular women wondering who they are if they live like this. It is seductive to read about money when it is neither the obvious, suffocating focus nor shrouded in euphemism. It is arresting to read about this female experience of capitalism, where that impossible quest for identity includes the perhaps impossible calculation of social standing." -- Cleveland Review of Books"I've long loved Kathleen Alcott's novels for her whip-smart voice and her taut prose. I was delighted to discover that her collection of short stories, Emergency, is also wonderful, spiny and wry and thrumming with subversive power." -- Lauren Groff, author of Matrix"Skillfully wrought and possessed of an exquisite eye for detail, this marvel of a collection contains enough insight and wisdom to fill several books. Kathleen Alcott proves again that she is one of her generation’s sharpest and most gifted writers, with her hand over the beating heart of our complicated, crisis-ridden nation." -- Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun"Kathleen Alcott’s Emergency left me windswept and altered—this is a book that reveals to us our forgotten joys and secrets, all the unexpected paths of our days. There is an abundance of the world here, a bright, haunted pulse you want to follow endlessly. Alcott is a mesmerizing writer, and this is her best book yet." -- Paul Yoon, author of Run Me to Earth"Stories that are worth reading twice." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Alcott’s prose is precise and evocative, and the plots are consistently tight. There’s much to enjoy." -- Publishers Weekly"Deftly blending acerbic observations with tender admiration for the ways her protagonists must tackle contemporary challenges, Alcott brings an intense and unflinching presence to the worlds she creates." -- Booklist
£21.59
WW Norton & Co Hunger A Novella and Stories
Book Synopsis“A masterwork of enormous power.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko The searing debut of “one of the most influential writers in American letters…Hunger is a masterpiece, a necessary haunting” (Justin Torres, author of We the Animals).Trade Review"[Lan Samantha Chang’s] stories constitute a delicately calculated balance sheet of the losses and gains of immigrants whose lives are stretched between two radically different cultures…Complex and rueful, her fiction gives voice to internal struggles, withheld catalogues of loss." -- Claire Messud - New York Times Book Review"Moving and thought-provoking…Chang’s stories open up to readers a world of sadness and regret." -- Chicago Tribune"Impeccable. . . . Delicately specific tales of Chinese immigrant life . . . capturing the universal struggles of the human heart. . . . So luminous is this collection, the result is something like a pearl." -- San Diego Union-Tribune"This remarkable first book has a deeply tragic sensibility, but it whispers its tragedy, thereby heightening it. Hunger evinces in many ways the quintessential voice of the immigrant, obscured by longings, distance and nostalgia, muted by language itself, yet resolutely insistent: These stories…will not be silenced." -- Portland Oregonian"In clear, often shining prose she paints the world of Asian-American immigrants…Hunger places Chang firmly among the group of novelists whose writing about lost homelands has received high acclaim: Oscar Hijeulos, Christina Garcia, Amy Tan, Edwige Danticat, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Diaz." -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel"These radiant, heartbreaking, soul-touching tales form a working definition of all we hunger for. Lan Samantha Chang writes beautifully of the hungers of the heart: of desire, of ambition; of all we might be, and aren’t; of all we most want, and can’t have." -- Andrea Barrett, author of Natural History"Lan Samantha Chang writes superbly about the intricacies of exile and especially about women in exile, caught between the present and the past, their husbands and their children. Hunger is a wonderfully accomplished first collection from a writer whose work we will be reading for many years to come." -- Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field"That Chang is able to evoke so nuanced a reaction is a testament to her unrelenting dramatic vision, her depth and subtlety of insight and her beautiful, merciless prose." -- Boston Book Review"Poignant…Chang is able to sketch quickly complex personalities caught in a ghetto-like emotional condition. [Her] descriptions recall Henry Roth’s or Bernard Malamud’s immigrant families of the turn of the century." -- Philadelphia Inquirer"Chang’s clear, crisp prose makes the everyday world of Chinese immigrants depicted in her short stories and novella one of great intensity." -- Harvard Book Review"A wonderfully written debut collection…with considerable insight and originality…somber, vivid, deeply original vision of Asian-American life…the debut of a writer possessing a distinctive, fresh imagination and voice." -- Kirkus Reviews
£13.29
WW Norton & Co Archangel
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Barrett frequently telescopes out of human frailty to an almost cosmic realm." -- John Freeman - Boston Globe"[Barrett] writes lovely, lambent prose, balanced and graceful." -- Michael Lindgren - Washington Post"Does anyone write with a calmer authority than Andrea Barrett?" -- Lloyd Sachs - Chicago Tribune"Andrea Barrett is a consummate literary artist." -- Jess Row - New York Times Book Review"Who but Barrett can take on the inscrutable elegance of the cosmos and the messy complexity of the human heart in a single story? In her joy-to-read prose, with scientific precision and warm insight, Barrett translates the unknown into our world of reference. Her characters’ thirst for discovery is contagious, and every story in Archangel is suffused with the most miraculous horizon light." -- Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove"Celebrates the vitality of critical scientific inquiry in a time still anchored in the old thinking.…[The] final story achieves a fusion of life and wonder." -- Alan Cheuse - NPR"Like Darwin, and Einstein, and all her other heroes, Barrett the storyteller pulls us relentlessly away from false comforts, into the dazzling, often chaotic, world as it really is." -- April Bernard - New York Review of Books"We’re used to seeing politics and religion as beliefs we act on, but Ms. Barrett has plots about shifts in scientific thought. The outside world (rich in strangeness, often violent) casts its shadow into these subtle, complicated stories." -- Joan Silber - Wall Street Journal"Finely crafted." -- Michael Upchurch - Seattle Times"The best way to savor this author’s work is to read all of it, but Archangel is a fine starting point for those new to Barrett Country." -- Susan Balee - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"Stories that shiver with an awe…realizations occur that can only be called sublime, everything preceding them consisting of the mundane stuff of the world transformed by the alchemy of story." -- John Repp - Cleveland Plain Dealer"The award-winning author returns with another collection of stories distinguished by uncommon scope and depth.…Barrett’s stories rank with the best." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Barrett’s consummate historical stories of family, ambition, science, and war are intellectually stimulating, lushly emotional, and altogether pleasurable." -- Booklist (starred review)"In this powerful collection of five long stories, the facts come through the eyes of lost, lonely, elusive ‘investigators.’…[T]here is indeed a sense of expansion as one travels onward in Barrett’s world, and pleasure in watching it fill out." -- Publishers Weekly"Readers familiar with Barrett’s work will embrace this new volume; those who have yet to discover her intriguing style will find much to consider. A delight for informed readers of challenging literary fiction." -- Library Journal
£12.34
