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
WW Norton & Co Natural History Stories
Book SynopsisFinalist for the Story Prize Longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction A BookPage and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A masterful collection of interconnected stories from the "genius enchantress" (Karen Russell) author of Ship Fever, winner of the National Book Award.Trade Review"Each story here offers [Barrett's] signature gifts: lyrical distillation of scientific complexity, artful wonder at the natural world, exquisitely observed details, and prose as precise and inevitable as a mathematical proof…With their kaleidoscopic interconnectedness, the overlapping circles of Barrett's stories, from this collection as well as her earlier works, add up to something large and delightful." -- L.A. Taggart - San Francisco Chronicle"Exhibits a shrewd understanding of the fragility and resilience of the human heart.…Barrett revisits her themes with a scientist’s precision and a poet’s grace." -- Connie Ogle - Minneapolis Star Tribune"[A] confident, quiet, richly imagined collection…Barrett is bold yet deft in handling timelines, lifetimes, and points of view. Each individual story feels complete, even as the connections between them…reinforce the collection’s central conviction that there is no such thing in nature as self-containment; everything is part of something bigger than itself." -- Justin Taylor - New York Times Book Review"An imaginative miracle woven of complexly connected stories…Immersing oneself in Natural History is an experience both bracing and magical… [T]he blurring of distinctions, of past and present, reality and fiction, is enhanced by a narrative consciousness that doesn’t hover over the characters so much as live in between them, switching at will from one perspective to the next, allowing us to see the world through Henrietta’s eyes as well as look at her the way others do." -- Christoph Irmscher - Wall Street Journal"The elegant linked-story collection Natural History returns the National Book Award-winner to familiar characters—drawn to natural wonders, searching for their own place in science—from her celebrated Ship Fever." -- Chicago Tribune"Andrea Barrett’s rewarding short story collection spans the Civil War era to the present day. Women’s roles evolve, as succeeding generations explore science, writing, teaching, and even flying, while still finding room for love and community." -- Christian Science Monitor"Telling the untold story is the heart of Natural History…The two stories merge, a kind of palimpsest in which the past is visible through the present and then shaded, artfully, by another hand. The effect is at once familiar and fresh, like being reminded of something half-forgotten and all the more treasured in the recollection, which has been the enduring feeling of all of these stories Andrea Barrett has written, across all these years." -- Holly M. Wendt - Ploughshares"[A] beautiful new collection." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch"Barrett depicts the natural world and the human heart with wonder, tenderness, and deep understanding. More superb work from an American master." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Barrett transforms deep knowledge of history, science, and human nature into gorgeously vital and insightful stories in which every element is richly brewed, mulled, and redolent." -- Booklist (starred review)"You need not have read earlier stories to be informed and dazzled by Natural History…Barrett demonstrates that while history organizes and distills events, fiction brings messy humanity gloriously to life." -- Bookpage (starred review)"A finely crafted linked collection…This offers rich rewards." -- Publishers Weekly
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Servants of the Map Stories Reissue
Book Synopsis"Gemlike stories that sparkle with intelligence and fire." —O, The Oprah Magazine A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, this wonderfully imagined collection from the "genius enchantress" (Karen Russell) author of Ship Fever, winner of the National Book Award, explores the crossroads of science and desire.Trade Review"These stories possess a wonderful clarity and ease, the serene authority of a writer working at the very height of her powers." -- Michiko Kakutani - New York Times"Like Alice Munro, Barrett writes stories so richly imbricated with detail…that they read like distilled novels rather than conventional short stories." -- Joyce Carol Oates - New York Review of Books"A most distinguished collection of stories." -- Barry Unsworth - New York Times Book Review"Like fossil-hunters, most of Barrett’s characters are looking for a way to piece together fragments of the past; when, in the last story, a cherished belonging of one character shows up in the life of another, we feel rescued and redeemed." -- The New Yorker"Barrett constructs out of these half-dozen long stories about scientists and explorers a fictional archipelago that extends back in time as well as space." -- Alan Cheuse - NPR"A reader familiar with the immediate predecessors of Servants of the Map gradually senses that Barrett is writing a huge serial novel, akin to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha cycle or Louise Erdrich’s interconnected Native American novels…[B]lends exactitude and compassion, giving clarity and emotional force to Barrett’s investigation of people seeking to understand the laws that govern and trouble both the visible universe and their own invariably distinctive bodies and minds." -- Bruce Allen - Atlantic"Ms. Barrett has made the waters that swirl between a love of science and the science of love her special domain." -- Economist"Time and space course through these stories like a river slowly eroding its banks and altering the land upon which we stand." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review"Barrett, wise and restrained, can say more about grief in one exchange than many authors can force into an entire book." -- Entertainment Weekly"[Barrett] is surely among the very best writers writing in English today." -- San Diego Union-Tribune"Six short stories that read like a novel. Prose so exquisite it reads like poetry. A natural order so awesome it puts science to shame." -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"Barrett is one of those rare authors who successfully blend literary finesse with sheer intelligence." -- Denver Post"Luminous…Each [story] is rich and independent and beautiful and should draw Barrett many new admirers." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"One understands how the intricacies of the complex phenomena Barrett has studied have possessed her imagination…Gorgeous, illuminating, entrancing fiction." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
£12.34
WW Norton & Co The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus
Book SynopsisOne of “the best writers of our time” (Ann Patchett) offers this hilarious yet haunting cycle of stories—all previously uncollected.
£12.34
Random House USA Inc Mendocino and Other Stories Vintage
Book SynopsisWith humor, wisdom and tenderness, Ann Packer offers ten short stories about women and men--wives and husbands, sisters and brothers, daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, friends, and lovers--who discover that life's greatest surprises may be found in that which is most familiar.In the title story, on the anniversary of their father's suicide a young woman discovers that her brother may have found a 'reason for living' in the love of a good woman. In 'Nerves,' a young man realizes that the wife he is separated from no longer loves him but that it is his own life he misses, not her. The narrator of 'My Mother's Yellow Dress' is a gay man remembering his deceased mother and their vital and troubling intimacy. In 'Babies'--which was included in the prestigious O. Henry anthology series --a single woman in her mid-thirties finds that everyone, including her best friend at work, is pregnant, and that their joy can only be observed, not shared. In these and six
£12.56
Vintage Espanol Doce Cuentos Peregrinos Vintage Espanol
Book SynopsisEn Barcelona, una prostituta que va entrando en la vejez entrena su perro a llorar ante la tumba que ha escogido para sí misma. En Viena, una mujer se vale de su don de ver el futuro para convertirse en la adivina de una familia rica. En Ginebra, el conductor de una ambulancia y su esposa acogen al abandonado y aparentemente moribundo ex presidente de un país caribeño, sólo para descubrir que sus ambiciones políticas siguen intactas. En estos doce relatos magistrales acerca de las vidas de latinoamericanos en Europa, García Márquez logra transmitir la amalgama de melancolía, tenacidad, pena y ambición que forma la experiencia del emigrante.ENGLISH DESCRIPTIONIn Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortunetelling position with a wealthy
£14.36
Random House USA Inc Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham
Book Synopsis
£26.60
Random House USA Inc Field Study Vintage International
Book SynopsisRachel Seiffert, author of The Dark Room, powerfully evokes our need for human connection in this dazzling and haunting group of stories. Set against immense political upheaval, or evoking the intimate struggles between men and women, parents and children, this astonishing collection charts our desire for love, our fragility, and our strength. From the title piece, in which a young biologist conceals his discoveries at a polluted river from a local woman, to the family aided by an enemy in “The Crossing,” to the old man weighing his regrets in “Francis John Jones, 1924-” Seiffert’s acclaimed, refined prose movingly captures the lives of her characters in their most essential, secret moments.
£11.70
Random House USA Inc The Lemon Table Vintage International
Book SynopsisIn this widely acclaimed collection of short stories, the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending addresses the most poignant aspect of the human condition: growing old. A master at work…. Sweet, sour, bitter, wistful, ruminative, comic, elegiac … A joy to read. —San Francisco Chronicle The characters in The Lemon Table are facing the ends of their lives—some with bitter regret, others with resignation, and others still with defiant rage. Their circumstances are just as varied as their responses. In 19th-century Sweden, three brief conversations provide the basis for a lifetime of longing. In today’s England, a retired army major heads into the city for his regimental dinner—and his annual appointment with a professional lady named Babs. Somewhere nearby, a devoted wife calms (or perhaps torments) her ailing husband by reading him recipes. In stories brimming with
£13.60
Random House USA Inc Runaway
Book Synopsis
£16.15
Random House USA Inc What You Call Winter
Book Synopsis
£13.46
Random House USA Inc Calamity and Other Stories
Book SynopsisTwelve luminous stories alive with friendship and secrets introduce a remarkable writer. Daphne Kalotay’s characters confront regrets and unrealized hopes in tales tinged with gentle humor. A newly independent woman finds herself in bed with an ex-husband of long ago. A little girl gets a surprising glimpse into adulthood when she catches her mother in a moment of uninhibited pleasure. A thirteen-year-old boy contends with the unwanted attentions of a younger girl. And for two older women, a tie formed in their youth sustains them through varied twists of fate. These are dazzling intertwined tales of love, failure, and the comedy of human relationships.
£11.66
Gale, a Cengage Group Harbor Lights
Book Synopsis
£22.95
Thorndike Press, a Cengage Group Waltzing with Tumbleweeds
£29.30
Kessinger Publishing The Horla
Book Synopsis
£18.05
Union Square & Co. GAME WITHOUT RULES
Book Synopsis
£12.53
Little, Brown & Company This Is How You Die
Book Synopsis
£16.20
Poisoned Pen Press Deep Waters
£14.24
Poisoned Pen Press Settling Scores Sporting Mysteries British
Book Synopsis
£13.49
Poisoned Pen Press Guilty Creatures
Book Synopsis
£14.24
Overlook Press Escape Velocity A Charles Portis Miscellany
Book Synopsis
£18.05
Headline Publishing Group Three Decades of Stories
Book SynopsisTHREE DECADES OF STORIES is a unique collection of Patrick Gale''s two volumes of dark, moving, often witty and eccentric stories, GENTLEMAN''S RELISH and DANGEROUS PLEASURES.It also includes the acclaimed long story, CAESAR''S WIFE. Ranging from a lonely prisoner governor''s wife, to a housewife desperate for a makeover; a father''s trip to his former school to a long-term mistress offered an unexpected marriage, this is a volume that highlights Patrick Gale''s skill of digging beneath the surface of relationships and exposing the often brutal mechanisms that drive them.Trade ReviewSly, cool and mischievous * Guardian *
£17.94
Sourcebooks, Inc Snowdrift and Other Stories
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Amazon Publishing Rivers
Book SynopsisA critically acclaimed, award-winning collection drawing sparkling prose from the inspiration of three rivers passing through different times and places. On the storm-swollen Aisne in northeastern France, an alcoholic actor combats both his demons and nature’s tempests. Along the Main and Rhine in Germany, a kindhearted logger has but one wish: to travel with the lumber from his small Franconian hometown to the end of the river in the Netherlands, where it feeds into the majestic North Sea. In a bucolic vale in the French region of Brittany, two families, divided by religion and an unnamed stream, sustain a centuries-old feud, their resolve no match for the constantly shifting flow of water. These three stories span countries and eras, but they are all connected by, and reliant on, the unpredictable power and languid beauty of rivers that give life as quickly as they take it away.
£11.58
Open Road Integrated Media, Inc. After the People Lights Have Gone Off
Book Synopsis
£17.95
Random House USA Inc The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories
Book SynopsisGhost stories tap into our most primal emotions as they encourage us to confront the timeless question: What comes after death? Here, in tales that are by turn scary, funny, philosophic, and touching, you’ll find that question sharpened, split, reconsidered—and met with a multitude of answers. A spirit who is fated to spend eternity reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, ghostly trees that haunt the occupant of a wooden house, specters that snatch anyone who steps into the shadows, and parakeets that serve as mouthpieces for the dead: these are just a few of the characters in this extraordinary compendium of one hundred ghost stories. Kevin Brockmeier’s fiction has always explored the space between the fantastical and the everyday with profundity and poignancy. As in his previous books, The Ghost Variations discovers new ways of looking at who we are and what matters to us, exploring how mysterious, sad, strange, and comical it is to be alive—or, as it happens, not to be.
£22.40
Random House USA Inc Terra Incognita: Three Novellas
Book Synopsis
£14.45
Random House USA Inc How to Love a Jamaican: Stories
Book Synopsis
£12.87
Grand Central Publishing The Moment of Tenderness
Book Synopsis
£21.88
Vehicule Press A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream: Stories
Book SynopsisA career-focused woman finds her life taken off course by an unexpected pregnancy. A troubled doctor abandons her family on her daughter’s birthday, the three-tiered pastel layer cake in the passenger seat beside her. A young mother must contend with how to explain her husband’s suicide to their child. In her first story collection, Lesley Trites digs bravely into the dilemmas faced by contemporary women who must be everything to everyone. Written with keen insight and deep affection, Lesley Trites’s A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream unearths pearls of wisdom from the secret lives of everyday women.
£14.20
Vehicule Press Dominoes at the Crossroads
Book SynopsisIn Dominoes at the Crossroads Kaie Kellough maps an alternate nation—one populated by Caribbean Canadians who hopscotch across the country. The characters navigate race, class, and coming-of-age. Seeking opportunity, some fade into the world around them, even as their minds hitchhike, dream, and soar. Some appear in different times and hemispheres, whether as student radicals, secret agents, historians, fugitive slaves, or jazz musicians.From the cobblestones of Montreal’s Old Port through the foliage of a South American rainforest; from a basement in wartime Paris to a metro in Montreal during the October Crisis; Kellough’s fierce imagination reconciles the personal and ancestral experience with the present moment, grappling with the abiding feeling of being elsewhere, even when here.
£13.25
Vehicule Press Fear the Mirror: Stories
Book SynopsisA fusion of biography and history, art and politics, told through the lives branching off one family tree.In Fear the Mirror, Cora SirÉ brings together thirteen stories of moments that have marked the dark intersections within her own history. A feminist mother who fled Estonia. A father who arrived in Canada with nothing but a violin. A Catalan boy whose parent is dying. A love triangle among novelists. Bodies stolen in the night and never found. Blending essay, memoir, and fiction, the MontrÉal author draws on her encounters in Latin America and elsewhere to compose loving and conflicted portraits—of family members, writers, filmmakers, and gravediggers—culminating in the persistent legacies and strange alchemies that haunt the person she sees in the mirror. In this masterful fifth book, SirÉ has written her most urgent, beguiling, and personal work to date.
£14.20
Exile Editions Begging Questions
Book SynopsisFocusing on the universe of beauty and dreams with an intensity that delves into self-recognition, these stories written over the last 15 years engage the reader with questions about our public and private lives. The stories touch on questions of identity and belief, the phantoms of memory, and the oppositions of beauty to experiences. Told in a language of brilliant power, these tales enable the reader with their enigmatic and dreamlike quality.Trade ReviewFor his craft, his knowledge and originality of thought, his ear for the rhythm and poetic weight of language, Virgo deserves the highest regard among fiction writers. Neither modernist nor post-modernist, although embracing characteristics of both, this writer belongs to a longer line of storytellers, whom he honours throughout these short fictions." —The Toronto Star"Implicit in [Virgo's] fiction is a reverence before both the miracle of consciousness and the miracle of nature." —Times Literary Supplement"A writer at the peak of his form!" —Books in Canada
£20.36
Exile Editions The Obvious Child
Book SynopsisReinventing the folktale, the family romance, and the detective narrative all at once, the 10 stories in this collection explore the emotional and spiritual development of characters searching for meaning in life. From an insurance adjustor who has worn the same suit for 20 years to a woman mourning her thrice-dead husband, they all struggle to find themselves in these darkly comical, absurd, yet touchingly poignant short stories.Trade ReviewMatt Shaw's thoughtful stories will make the meanest reader sing; he is a fine young writer sure to make a name for himself with this solid and well-crafted first book." —Leon Rooke, author, A Good Baby
£16.96
Exile Editions A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine
Book SynopsisBursting with comedy and peculiarity, this collection of short stories explores the world of those living their Generation-X lives on the fringes of society. From a loner who uses mosh pits as a confessional to a cross-dresser prowling the aisles of the local supermarket, this work follows these characters as they navigate the universe in refreshing and unexpected ways.Trade ReviewFiction from just the other side of normal." —Hour, Montreal"Paterson's unique blend of tenderness, humour and horror is engaging." —Montreal Gazette"Delivers wonderfully embracing ups-and-downs and twists and turns with each story. Paterson truly has mastered the thoughtful art of taking the reader on a marvelous ride from start to finish." —Austin Clarke, Giller Prize winner
£15.26
Exile Editions The Things We Fear Most: Stories
Book SynopsisPenned by the multitalented Gloria Vanderbilt herself, this collection features stories that are touching, surprising, and told in a beautifully calibrated prose. The tales seize upon brief moments that are resonant with the random static of everyday disaster, illustrating characters who merely step into a room to find that everything in their lives has been inexplicably reversed. Engaging and enigmatic, this anthology relates powerful narratives of passionate love as well as compelling defeat.
£17.95
Exile Editions There Is No Other
Book SynopsisFrom the streets of modern Israel to the barrooms of Brooklyn to a suburban New England synagogue, the characters in these 10 stories search for love and acceptance in a world scarred by loss and loneliness. In “The Madonna of Temple Beth Elohim,” an Iraq war veteran sees a vision of the Virgin Mary on the eve of the Jewish high holidays. In “My Darling Sweetheart Baby,” a working-class drunk waits on his stoop for his disability check and the courage to proclaim his love to a local prostitute. And in the title story “There Is No Other,” a rage-filled Jewish boy, tormented by his African lineage, arrives at a school Purim party dressed as the prophet Mohammed. Magical, erotic, spiritually penetrating and terrifyingly realistic, these provocative tales continue the storytelling tradition of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Nathan Englander.Trade ReviewPapernick’s penetrating, clear-sighted stories ring true." —New York Times Book Review"It is Papernick’s sense of the surreal, his dark humor and his consciousness of the deep roots of Jewish and Muslim culture that distinguish this collection." —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)"An utterly original writer—one who doesn't rely on gimmicks, but rather on amazingly real characters and consistently page-turning plots." —Dara Horn, author, In the Image
£16.16
Exile Editions CVC: Book One: Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction
Book SynopsisTen writers from across Canada are featured in this volume that presents the first year of the Vanderbilt/Exile Short Fiction Award in a curated short-story collection. Contemporary storytellers honored with the prize in 2011 include Frank Wescott as he tells of a poet in love; Silvia Moreno-Garcia offering a new take on Mexican folklore; and Ken Strange with a story of conflict between head and heart in a neuroscience lab. The anthology also showcases talented short fiction by Gregory Betts, Hugh Graham, Kristi-Ly Green, Leigh Nash, Richard Van Camp, Rishma Dunlop, and Zoe Stikeman.
£16.96
Exile Editions Easy Living
Book SynopsisCataclysmic and arresting, this collection of stories is told in a style as quick and efficient as a switchblade, lending a fresh interpretation to ordinary life in all its guises. The featured tales are at turns mordant, shocking, and entertaining, containing a new tonality and strong atmospheric tones. The unique characters are illustrated as existing on the edge of estrangement, while others have toppled over, finding themselves in situations that skew to the dark side. Underscoring a writing style both tactile and surprising, this anthology depicts an intriguing tension through hardscrabble subjects and lively voices.Trade Review“If you love language and the truths that only a wild imagination can get at, you’ll love [this book].” —David Doucette, author, North of Smokey and Strong in the Broken Places“Some of the most haunting short fiction that Canada has ever produced.” —Mark D. Dunn, author, Ghost Music“Raw, powerful prose.” —Globe and Mail
£16.11
Exile Editions CVC: Book Two: Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction
Book SynopsisCelebrating the diversity of Canadian short fiction, 12 writers are featured in this volume of the short list and winners of the 2012 Vanderbilt/Exile Short Fiction Award. The curated short-story collection includes writing by contemporary storytellers Christine Miscione, exploring self-mutilation as the art of living; Leon Rooke and his maze of contradictory and unresolved questions; and Seán Virgo with a surreal tale of a wintertime house and harpsichords. Also showcased in the anthology are short fictions by Amy Stuart, Daniel Perry, Darlene Madott, Jacqueline Windh, Kelly Watt, Kris Bertin, Linda Rogers, Martha Bátiz, and Phil Della.
£16.96
Exile Editions Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow: Acts of
Book SynopsisSubversive, edgy, and wildly entertaining, this short story collection is a unique encounter with fiction in Leon Rooke’s characteristic style as he peels back the skin of social convention and embraces the chaos of life with characters and themes as unpredictable as an assassin who murders the words in your memory; Egi Balducchi who is either a recording angel or a mad old man with a wheelbarrow; Eli's daughter, Frannie, who may just be a gentle two-bit hooker, or the Virgin herself; and is that really God, shrugging off insults from Isaac Babel and Guy de Maupassant? Then there is Lap the Dog who escapes gunshot and poison, and heads cross-country to find the human survivors; a glimpse into the life of Joyce Carol Oates; the philosopher Heidegger in a fight with Hannah Arendt; the Indian Chief who is denied his professorship at Yale when he turns up for the ceremony with a black princess on his arm; and more... Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow is an evocative short story collection that is wild with laughter, confronting pathos, rage and humour in ways that only Rooke’s writing could approach.Trade Review“Rooke eschews the dreary wet wool blanket of conventional realism, salting his stories with magic, myth, vituperation, and improbability. Often, out of the darkest and most moribund situations, he wrestles a startling and uncanny beauty, an affirmation of life, a stunning reversal that does not bespeak any faith or philosophy but a joy in the exuberant play of language.” —Globe and Mail“It seems there’s hardly a register, a dialect, a mood, a setting, a protagonist, or a conceit that [Leon Rooke] won’t try on at least once. . . . A Rooke story is something to be ‘experienced’ rather than ‘understood.’” —Quill & Quire
£16.16
Exile Editions The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan, Volume
Book SynopsisEighty-five stories by one of Canada’s greatest writers are collected in this four-volume anthology. Several pieces of Morley Callaghan’s short fiction are collected here for the first time, while some which have been out of print for decades are now made available. Each volume contains a section providing the year of publication for each story, a question-and-answer section, and comprehensive editorial notes. As a whole, this series is essential reading for understanding the growth and importance of Canadian literature.Trade Review“Attractively produced in four volumes. . . . The project is nothing if not ambitious.” —www.booksincanada.com“A pleasing anthology for the general reader [and] an important publication. Having most of Callaghan’s early short works in one place is, for general readers, a very good thing.” —Canadian Literature journal
£17.05
Exile Editions The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan, Volume
Book SynopsisEighty-five stories by one of Canada’s greatest writers are collected in this four-volume anthology. Several pieces of Morley Callaghan’s short fiction are collected here for the first time, while some which have been out of print for decades are now made available. Each volume contains a section providing the year of publication for each story, a question-and-answer section, and comprehensive editorial notes. As a whole, this series is essential reading for understanding the growth and importance of Canadian literature.Trade Review“Attractively produced in four volumes. . . . The project is nothing if not ambitious.” —www.booksincanada.com“A pleasing anthology for the general reader [and] an important publication. Having most of Callaghan’s early short works in one place is, for general readers, a very good thing.” —Canadian Literature journal
£16.16
Exile Editions The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan, Volume
Book SynopsisEighty-five stories by one of Canada’s greatest writers are collected in this four-volume anthology. Several pieces of Morley Callaghan’s short fiction are collected here for the first time, while some which have been out of print for decades are now made available. Each volume contains a section providing the year of publication for each story, a question-and-answer section, and comprehensive editorial notes. As a whole, this series is essential reading for understanding the growth and importance of Canadian literature.Trade Review“Attractively produced in four volumes. . . . The project is nothing if not ambitious.” —www.booksincanada.com“A pleasing anthology for the general reader [and] an important publication. Having most of Callaghan’s early short works in one place is, for general readers, a very good thing.” —Canadian Literature journal
£16.16
Exile Editions The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan, Volume
Book SynopsisEighty-five stories by one of Canada’s greatest writers are collected in this four-volume anthology. Several pieces of Morley Callaghan’s short fiction are collected here for the first time, while some which have been out of print for decades are now made available. Each volume contains a section providing the year of publication for each story, a question-and-answer section, and comprehensive editorial notes. As a whole, this series is essential reading for understanding the growth and importance of Canadian literature.Trade Review“Attractively produced in four volumes. . . . The project is nothing if not ambitious.” —www.booksincanada.com“A pleasing anthology for the general reader [and] an important publication. Having most of Callaghan’s early short works in one place is, for general readers, a very good thing.” —Canadian Literature journal
£16.16
Exile Editions Auxiliary Skins: A Collection of Stories
Book SynopsisExisting somewhere in that chasm between bodily function and souled-ness, Christine Miscione's debut collection illumines all that is perilous, beautiful, and raw about being human and brings a new voice to contemporary literature. From the surgically gutted and the racially transformed to the story of self-excision that won the Vanderbilt/Exile Award for short fiction, this anthology is chock-full of razor blades masquerading as lemon tarts and everything in between. The writing and its use of imagery and language is innovative and calls into question the definition of a short story by challenging previous notions of the convention in terms of length, style, and plot. Inventive, assured, and accessible, the stories pair emotional depth with great technical skills and peel back layers to reveal the strange, the wondrous, and the unexpected. This provocative collection reimagines ideas of the body, the world, interiority, and relationships with the self and with others through a satiric approach, indelibly marked by wit, humor, irony, playfulness, irreverent analysis, and comic existentialism.Trade ReviewDeeply felt prose . . . a spare control that turns the reader's imagination loose, stories in which serious moments of childlike whimsy seem sardonically ages, stories in which the death of anything is a revelation of the life that is in everything." —M. T. Kelly, Governor General Award–winning author, A Dream Like Mine Stoddart"The results of the mad experiments in Christine Miscione's laboratory are sometimes twisted and grotesque, occasionally beautiful, often frustrating, and challenging and audacious. A few are even heartbreaking. But they are always magnificent mutants. Canadian literature would be enriched by more such laboratories!" —Stuart Ross, award-winning author, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog"I greatly admire the pared-down writing of "Skin, Just." It hits gut bone. A haunting story, truly amazing. Not a word amiss. I kept thinking about it long after my reading. And still do." —Gloria Vanderbilt, sponsor, Vanderbilt/Exile Short Fiction Competition
£13.46
Exile Editions They Never Told Me: And Other Stories
Book SynopsisIn this collection, award-winning author Austin Clarke has caught, in his characters, a sweet longing for youth and an anxiety-stricken rage at old age; an immigrant’s longing for a placid, lost home and his lust for a new high-speed motorcar life; and an intellectual’s sense of empowerment by black history even as he watches what little he knows about such history engulf him. These are intense and private lives made public by the force of their individual voices, voices that may be rambunctious and fractious but that are, nonetheless, elegant in their intent and humor and their acceptance that is never acquiescence. The volume also includes a prose portrait of Austin Clarke by acclaimed author Barry Callaghan.Trade Review“Uncommonly talented, Clarke sees deeply, and transmits his visions and perceptions so skillfully that reading him is an adventure.” —Publisher’s Weekly“Clarke has a matchless ear for dialogue. . . . He succeeds in making his pages brilliant.” —Boston Globe“He has forcefully demonstrated that distance can sharpen a writer’s focus and deepen perceptions.” —Globe and Mail“Clarke the novelist is very much in charge. He never falls into the trap of making his characters vehicles for mouthing this or that political ideology. They are no more or less than the human beings that his literary alchemy brings to life.” —Toronto Star
£16.16
Exile Editions That Savage Water: Stories
Book SynopsisThis collection contains a series of stories about travels abroad from a queer perspective, each crafted with a distinct spirit and intent and with prose that elicits a cross-pollinating of personal and emotional insight—a special achievement that enables two hemispheres to join through the epicenter of the 2004 Asian tsunami.Author Matthew R. Loney's use of language is rich in description, full of lucid and lively textures, smells, and sensations as a way to transport readers to places they might not travel themselves. Each person and place becomes a thread in a revelatory tapestry, each transition of setting a steppingstone for discovery and adventure. With striking vividness, the author takes readers from familiar departure lounges to foreign cities steeped in history, from enticing turquoise beaches for which everyone longs to desolate mountain ranges well off the beaten track, from consecrating baths in the sacred Ganges to fringe indulgences in Cambodian brothels—and back home, to a northern Canadian cabin where the father of a tsunami victim reels in the quiet aftershocks of grief as the rubble of his memories drag him toward further destruction.That Savage Water is an exceptional debut that explores the mechanisms of connectivity and the intrinsic entanglements that link people, their diverse cultures, and how they take the country they call home with them as they make their way through places they may, on their way, easily call their homes away from home. The message: anonymity while traveling in foreign landscapes can both free and isolate people through the friends they make, the risks they take, the foods and places they love and hate, and at times the depravities they face as they pass through those alluring settings called "abroad.
£16.16
Exile Editions CVC: Book Four
Book SynopsisThe best of today's Canadian short fiction is showcased in this fourth annual volume of the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology series, which features the 12 stories short-listed—among them winners Jason Timermanis and Hugh Graham—for the 2014 $15,000 Vanderbilt/Exile Short Fiction Competition.The book contains contemporary writing that reflects a diversity in emerging and established Canadian writers, including Gregory Betts, K'ari Fisher, Matthew R. Loney, Helen Marshall, George McWhirter, Susan P. Redmayne, Linda Rogers, Leon Rooke, Madelaine Sonik, Erin Soros. Following the stories are biographies of each contributor.
£16.16