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
Counterpoint Deceit and Other Possibilities: Stories
Book Synopsis[A] searing debut. —i>O, The Oprah MagazineIn her powerful collection, first published in 2016 and now featuring new stories, Vanessa Hua gives voice to immigrant families navigating a shifting America. Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters span both worlds but belong to none, illustrating the conflict between self and society, tradition and change. This all-new edition of Deceit and Other Possibilities marks the emergence of a remarkable writer.
£12.34
Counterpoint When Trying to Return Home: Stories
Book SynopsisA New York Times Book Review Editors'' ChoiceA dazzling debut collection spanning a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and beyond—and an evocative meditation on belonging, the meaning of home, and how we secure freedom on our own termsProfoundly moving and powerful, the stories in When Trying to Return Home dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A man, his wife, and his mistress each confront the borders separating love and hate, obligation and longing, on the eve of a flight to San Juan. A college student grapples with the space between chivalry and machismo in a tense encounter involving a nun. And in 1930s Louisiana, a woman attempting to find a place to call her own chances upon an old friend at a bar and must reckon with her troubled past.Forming a web of desires and consequences that span generations, McCauley’s Black American and Afro–Puerto Rican characters remind us that these voices have always been here, occupying the very center of American life—even if we haven’t always been willing to listen.
£24.30
Counterpoint When Trying to Return Home: Stories
Book Synopsis
£14.41
Soho Press Inc Getting It in the Head: Stories
Book SynopsisThe acclaimed debut from the author of Booker-listed Solar Bones is a dark, uncanny collection of stunning breadth and audacity.In this gothic, virtuoso debut collection, Mike McCormack dispenses nightmares both stylish and macabre. “A Is for Ax” offers an alphabetized account of the killing of a parent, while the title story tracks a chilling sibling rivalry. Others tell of a quiz on the road to Calvary, a door-to-door saleswoman trafficking in strange and menacing feats, and a self-mutilating artist pushing himself to the limit. These sly and dangerous stories, balanced on a knife’s edge between life and death, showcase a young writer’s mastery of wicked formal play.
£14.40
Soho Press Inc The Traveller and Other Stories
Book SynopsisA darkly glittering collection of Northern Irish noir by Stuart Neville, Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author Since his debut novel, the modern classic The Ghosts of Belfast, was published a decade ago, Stuart Neville has written nine other critically acclaimed novels and achieved international recognition as one of crime fiction’s great living writers.Now for the first time Neville offers readers a collection of his short fiction—twelve chilling stories that traverse and blend the genres of noir, horror, and speculative fiction, and which bring the history and lore of Neville’s native Northern Ireland to life. The Traveller concludes with the long-awaited eponymous novella, the companion piece to The Ghosts of Belfast and Collusion. Complete with a foreword from Irish crime fiction legend John Connolly, this volume is the perfect indulgence for fans of ghost stories and noir, and is a must-have for devotees of Neville’s prizewinning Belfast novels.
£15.26
Soho Press Inc Dolphin Junction: Stories
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£15.26
Soho Press Inc Reader, I Buried Them & Other Stories
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£15.26
Algonquin Books I Meant It Once: Stories
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£15.29
Seven Stories Press,U.S. The Ukraine
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£16.11
Graywolf Press,U.S. Suicide Woods: Stories
Book SynopsisBenjamin Percy is a versatile and propulsive storyteller whose genre-busting novels and story collections have ranged from literary to thriller to postapocalyptic. In his essay collection, Thrill Me, he laid bare for readers how and why he channels disparate influences in his work. Now, in his first story collection since the acclaimed Refresh, Refresh, Percy brings his page-turning skills to bear in Suicide Woods, a potent brew of horror, crime, and weird happenings in the woods. A boy in his uncle’s care falls through the ice on a pond and emerges in a frozen, uncanny state. A group of people in therapy for suicidal ideation undergoes a drastic session in the woods with fatal consequences. A body found on a train and a blood-soaked carpet in an empty house are clues to a puzzling crime in a small town. And in a pulse-quickening novella, thrill seekers on a mapping expedition into the “Bermuda Triangle” of remote Alaska are stranded on a sinister island that seems to want them dead. In story after story, which have appeared in magazines including the Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion Magazine, McSweeney’s, and Ploughshares, Percy delivers haunting and chilling narratives that will have readers hanging on every word. A master class in suspense and horror, Suicide Woods is a dark, inventive collection packed to the gills with eerie, can’t-miss tales.
£11.39
Graywolf Press The Gnome Stories: Stories
Book SynopsisAn unsettling, wildly imaginative collection of storiesThe Gnome Stories focuses on characters who are loners in the truest sense; who are in the process of recovering from mental, physical, or emotional trauma; and who find solace-or at least a sense of purpose-in peculiar jobs and pursuits.A man whose wife has left him is robbed, so he decides to start doing his own breaking and entering, into his neighbors' homes. When another man's girlfriend is cryogenically frozen by her family after a car accident, he becomes a maintenance worker at the cryogenic facility, eavesdropping on visitors as they whisper secrets to their frozen loved ones. A woman serves as an assistant to the Starvationist, whose methods to help clients lose large amounts of weight are unorthodox, sadistic-and utterly failproof. Another woman and her robot assistant have been hired to tinker with the troubling memories inside a celebrity's brain.With The Gnome Stories, Ander Monson presents eleven unforgettable stories about oddly American situations: as surreal as an urban legend and at the same time perfectly mundane.
£14.40
Graywolf Press Wild Swims: Stories
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£13.50
Graywolf Press,U.S. Let Me Think: Stories
Book SynopsisLet Me Think is a meticulous selection of short stories by one of the preeminent chroniclers of the American absurd. Through J. Robert Lennon's mordant yet sympathetic eye, the quotidian realities of marriage, family, and work are rendered powerfully strange in this rich and innovative collection. These stories, most no more than a few pages, are at once experimental and compulsively readable, the work of an expert craftsman who can sketch whole lives in a mere handful of lines, or reveal, over pages, the boundless complexity of a passing thought. Here you'll find a heist gone wrong, a case of mistaken identity, a hostile encounter with a neighborhood eccentric, a glass eye, a talking owl, and a six-fingered hand. Whatever the subject, Lennon disarms the reader with humor before pivoting to pathos, pain, and disappointment-most notably in an extraordinary sequence of darting, painfully funny fictions about a disintegrating marriage that captures the myriad ways intimacy can fail us, and the ways that we can fail it. Like Lennon's earlier story collection Pieces for the Left Hand, Let Me Think holds a mirror up to our long-held grudges and secret desires, our petty resentments and moments of redeeming grace, and confirms him as a virtuoso of the form.
£14.40
Graywolf Press Sleeping Alone: Stories
Book SynopsisIn this collection of rich and textured stories about crossing borders, both real and imagined, Sleeping Alone asks one of the fundamental questions of our times: What is the toll of feeling foreign in one?s land, to others, or even to oneself? A cast of misfits, young and old, single and coupled, even entire family units, confront startling changes wrought by difficult circumstances or harrowing choices. These stories span the world, moving from Maine to Sri Lanka, from Dublin to Philadelphia, paying exquisite attention to the dance between the intimate details of our lives and our public selves. Whether Ru Freeman, author of the novel On Sal Mal Lane, is capturing secrets kept by siblings in Sri Lanka, or the life of itinerants in New York City, she renders the nuances of her characters? lives with real sensitivity, and imbues them with surprising dignity and grace.
£14.40
Graywolf Press,U.S. Sinking Bell: Stories
Book SynopsisAn ex-con hired to fix up a school bus for a couple living off the grid in the desert finds himself in the middle of their tattered relationship. An electrician's plan to take his young nephew on a hike in the mountains, as a break from the motel room where they live, goes awry thanks to an untrustworthy new coworker. A night custodian makes the mistake of revealing too much about his work at a medical research facility to a girl who shares his passion for death metal. A relapsing addict struggles to square his desire for a white woman he meets in a writing class with family expectations and traditions. Set in and around Flagstaff, the stories in Sinking Bell depict violent collisions of love, cultures, and racism. In his gritty and searching fiction debut, Bojan Louis draws empathetic portraits of day laborers, metalheads, motel managers, aspiring writers and musicians, construction workers, people passing through with the hope of something better somewhere else. His characters strain to temper predatory or self-destructive impulses; they raise families, choose families, and abandon families; they endeavor to end cycles of abuse and remake themselves anew.
£14.40
Graywolf Press The Consequences: Stories
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates PrizeFinalist for the 2023 Aspen Words Literary PrizeFinalist for the 2023 Balcones Prize for FictionLonglisted for the 2022 Story PrizeShimmering stories set in California's Central Valley, the first book in a decade from a virtuoso story writer.Her immediate concern was money. So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz's dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California's Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal.These exquisite stories are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns that surround Fresno. With an unflinching hand, Muñoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables but are regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by the migra, as well as the quotidian struggles and immense challenges faced by their families. The messy and sometimes violent realities navigated by his charactersstraight and gay, immigrant and American-born, young and oldare tempered by moments of surprising, tender care: Two young women meet on a bus to Los Angeles to retrieve husbands who must find their way back from the border after being deported; a gay couple plans a housewarming party that reveals buried class tensions; a teenage mother slips out to a carnival where she encounters the father of her child; the foreman of a crew of fruit pickers finds a dead body and is subsequentlyperhaps literallyhaunted.In The Consequences, obligation can shape, support, and sometimes derail us. It's a magnificent new book from a gifted writer at the height of his powers.
£14.40
Graywolf Press Ten Planets: Stories
Book SynopsisA collection of fanciful, philosophical science fictions by ?one of Mexico?s finest novelists? (Vulture).The characters that populate Yuri Herrera?s surprising new story collection inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. Drawing on science fiction, noir, and the philosophical parables of Jorge Luis Borges?s Fictions and Italo Calvino?s Cosmicomics, these very short stories are an inspired extension of this significant writer?s work.In Ten Planets, objects can be sentient and might rebel against the unhappy human family to which they are attached. A detective of sorts finds clues to buried secrets by studying the noses of his clients, which he insists are covert maps. A meager bacterium in a human intestine gains consciousness when a psychotropic drug is ingested. Monsters and aliens abound, but in the fiction of Yuri Herrera, knowing who is the monster and who the alien is a tricky proposition.In Ten Planets, Herrera?s consistent themes?the mutability of borders, the wounds and legacy of colonial violence, and a deep love of storytelling in all its forms?are explored with evident brilliance and delight.
£13.50
Graywolf Press Company: Stories
Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE 2023 LOS ANGELES TIMES ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 WILLIAM SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITINGA richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family, named one of Publishers Weekly?s Best Books of 2023Shannon Sanders?s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.Each piece includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone?s home. In ?The Good, Good Men,? two brothers reunite to oust a ?deadbeat? boyfriend from their mother?s house. In ?The Everest Society,? the brothers? sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In ?Birds of Paradise,? their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost?s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister?s daughter comes calling.These are stories about intimacy, societal and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.
£21.60
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial (USA) LLC Sparring Partners (Adversarios)
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£16.11
Regal House Publishing LLC McMullen Circle
Book SynopsisThe twelve linked stories in McMullen Circle explore the intertwined lives of faculty families at the McMullen Boarding School in Tonola Falls, Georgia in 1969–70. The school community is isolated and idyllic, yet issues of race and the Vietnam War still intrude. Does heroism require physical prowess, or is there valor in a cafeteria worker enduring a cluttered, needy life with her four young sons, or an elderly librarian caring for her disabled lesbian partner? What does it take for a young African American girl to find the courage to assert her right to attend the all-white private school? The stories in this collection ask what, and who, are the real heroes.Trade Review"Heather Newton is a beautiful writer and McMullen Circle is a beautiful book, written with compassion, humor and unflinching honesty. I love these stories, and as standalone pieces, each is a compelling in its own way, often breathtakingly so. And read as a whole, the stories transcend the individual characters, offering a complex, conflicted and empathetic portrait of this North Georgia boarding school and its community. The whole time I was reading McMullen Circle , I was reminded again and again of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio ." -- Tommy Hays, author of The Pleasure Was Mine"A reader immediately warms to the linked stories in this collection. At first, they feel familiar, and welcome us, before turning strange. Wryly funny, they surprise with their sudden melancholies. With a practiced hand, Heather Newton reveals the many lives of McMullen Circle , but in glimpses. Through parted curtains and snippets of backyard conversations, we are treated to all the mysteries of childhood and aging that, just like a circle, never resolve." -- LC Fiore, author of Coyote Loop" Heather Newton is a master at capturing the mood and longing of the late sixties, early seventies, and the isolation of a boarding school in the North Georgia mountains where the children run free and the headmaster's wife goes in search of a television. When the Cordelia Six are arrested for firebombing a nearby theater that wouldn't admit Black teenagers, the striations of race become wider and insistent. In this linked collection, the stories often turn on what is overheard or understood only by some or even on a simple gesture, and Newton's carefully crafted sentences place discovery and feeling squarely in the heart of the reader. McMullen Circle is forged out of our past, but this is a collection for now." -- Cynthia Newberry Martin, author of Tidal Flats" In McMullen Circle , Heather Newton's riveting novel in short story form, compelling and believably flawed characters inhabit Tonola Falls, Georgia, a small town on the cusp of integration. In a dozen connected stories, Newton weaves a tapestry of rich irony with fierce emotion and genuine bewilderment. Ordinary people, animated with astounding power, confront their weaknesses and principles in a baffling, rapidly changing world." -- Anna Jean Mayhew, author of The Dry Grass of August and Tomorrow's Bread
£14.36
Regal House Publishing LLC No Diving Allowed
Book SynopsisFrom F. Scott Fitzgerald to John Cheever, the swimming pool has long held a unique place in the mythos of the American idyll, by turns status symbol and respite. The fourteen stories that comprise NO DIVING ALLOWED fearlessly plunge the depths of the human condition as award-winning author Louise Marburg freights her narratives with the often unfathomable pressure of what lies beneath. In “Identical,” sibling rivalry between brothers exposes lingering resentments of men who never made peace with boyhood animosities; “Let Me Stay With You” follows a man whose innocent attention to a child is gravely misunderstood. The trials of a fractured family come to the fore in the trenchant, unapologetic “Minor Thefts.” Siblings, friends, parents, couples, children: the characters in these stories ask how much any of us can bear before we break. Marburg’s writing is agile, witty, and crisply spare. These are tales of regret and mercy, of bonds forged and frayed, and most of all our individual capacity to love even that which damns us. As readers of these pages will learn, the difference between swimming and drowning is often nothing more than the will to live.Trade Review"In her riveting and memorable story collection, No Diving Allowed , Louise Marburg explores forbidden lines and boundaries imposed by class, gender, families and friendships. Some characters step forward with wit and resolve while others do so with threat and devastation. Linked by the presence of swimming pools both clear and murky, these compelling stories are deeply refreshing." Jill McCorkle, author of Hieroglyphics" How fitting the stories in Louise Marburg's dazzling collection, No Diving Allowed , feature swimming pools, because few writers can wade so far into the turbulent waters of family life. From suburban Connecticut to the plains of Africa, Marburg offers shimmering, iridescent tales of marriage, parenting, friendship and adolescent discovery that capture the very essence of the human spirit. Her pools are never still, but always run deep. John Cheever built a reputation upon one breath-stopping swimming story; Louise Marburg serves up fourteen. No Diving Allowed offers a penetrating exploration of our emotional tides. Readers will be very glad to have taken the plunge." Jacob M. Appel, author of Millard Salter's Last Day"In her latest collection, No Diving Allowed , Louise Marburg's masterful prose shimmers and delights. Startlingly perceptive, these stories plumb the depths of uncomfortable, half-understood emotions, exposing her characters' unique vulnerabilities and exploring their inspiring resiliency." Chris Cander, author of The Weight of a Piano" No Diving Allowed defies all clichés. Marburg's superbly startling charactersferocious and ordinary, ill-intentioned and innocentsee no choice but to compete, and each story has surprises about who wins. These are keenly original, remarkable stories." Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness"Each of the stories in No Diving Allowed is so fully rendered, so vividly alive, so utterly interesting and, above all, so fearless. Here is a writer who is not afraid to put her characters in desperate situations and see what they will do. If necessary, she'll fan the flames. What a dazzling collection Louise Marburg has written." Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field"Marburg's stories are engaging, even if bittersweet, and give readers much to think about. Her style is similar to Vonnegut's, and her subjects remind me of those in 'The House on Mango Street.' There is a lot of life in just 145 pages of No Diving Allowed ." Austin American-Statesman
£14.36
Catapult Prepare Her: Stories
Book SynopsisA collection of "elegant, original, and moving" stories "with the lyrical brilliance and bite of Sylvia Plath" set in a not-so bucolic Vermont, a land of antique stores, small towns, fading farms, and young women trying to figure out marriage, motherhood, sex and their own power (Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women and Birds of a Lesser Paradise).Prepare Her tells the stories of young women at the brink of discovering their own power. The crossroads in their lives are not always the obvious kind--divorce, motherhood, coming of age--but sometimes much more private and dramatic. Kitty discovers that her ex-boyfriend has committed a murder; Renee navigates a friendship with Arla, a Jehovah''s Witness; Emi realizes that her boyfriend is fetishizing her mental illness; Petra acts recklessly when faced with a client with a gun; and Rachel must grapple with the reality of raising a daughter in a world that she, herself, is still terrified of.Tempered by its rural and often haunting Vermont setting, this book explores the complexities of gender and power imbalances in a way that transforms normal life into something mysterious, uncharted, and sometimes bewildering. Through this lens, we can see the many subtle, yet staggering injustices endured by the women at the center of these stories, as well as identify what, or who might be responsible.
£14.41
Catapult Rainbow Rainbow: Stories
Book Synopsis
£20.80
Catapult Heartbroke
Book SynopsisWinner of the California Book AwardFrom the acclaimed author of Godshot and “a pitch-perfect ventriloquist of extraordinary talent and ferocity” (T Kira Madden) comes a defining book of Californian stories where everyone is seeking or sabotaging loveUnited by the stark and sprawling landscapes of California’s Central Valley, the characters of Heartbroke boil with reckless desire. A woman steals a baby from a shelter in an attempt to recoup her own lost motherhood. A phone-sex operator sees divine opportunity when a lavender-eyed cowboy walks into her life. A mother and a son selling dream catchers along a highway that leads to a toxic beach manifest two young documentary filmmakers into their realm. And two teenage girls play a dangerous online game with destiny.Heartbroke brims over with each character’s attempt to salvage grace where they can find it. Told in bright, snapping prose that reveals a world of loss and love underneath, Chelsea Bieker brilliantly illuminates a golden yet gothic world of longing and abandonment under an unrelenting California sun.
£20.80
Catapult Rainbow Rainbow: Stories
Book Synopsis
£14.41
Catapult Waiting for the Long Night Moon
£21.60
Astra Publishing House Jerusalem Beach: Stories
Book Synopsis*WINNER OF THE 2023 SAMI ROHR PRIZE FOR JEWISH LITERATURE, FICTION*"This vigorous, inventive work will surely fire up readers' neurons." — Starred Review, Publisher's Weekly For fans of Etgar Keret, a debut collection that fuses the humor of everyday life in Israel with technology's challenges and the latest discoveries about the human brain.At once compassionate, philosophical, and humorous, Jerusalem Beach is a foray into the human condition in all its contradictions. Through a series of snapshots of contemporary life in Israel, Gefen reveals a world that’s a step from the familiar.A man’s grandfather joins an army platoon of geriatrics looking for purpose in old age. A scheming tech start-up exposes the dire consequences of ambition in trying to share human memories. An elderly couple searches for a beach that doesn’t exist. And, a boy mourns his brother’s death in an attempt to catch time like flies in his fist.Entirely heartfelt and infused with pathos, Jerusalem Beach is an exploration of both technology and the brain. Whether ruminating on the stakes of familial love or pitching the reader headlong into the absurdity of success and failure, Gefen leaves the reader intrigued throughout.Trade ReviewSad and funny and full of wisdom and truth. -- Amos Oz, author of A Tale of Love and Darkness The stories in Iddo Gefen's Jerusalem Beach are a series of original and, many times truly inspiring, attempts to seek and find humanity and tenderness at the least predictable places. -- Etgar Keret, author of Fly Already "Jerusalem Beach accomplishes the impossible--at once playful and wrenching, surprising and organic, these stories are instant classics, if classics could somehow come from the future. Gefen's is a once-in-a-generation voice." -- Shelly Oria, author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 "Iddo Gefen is the voice of his generation. But he's also a voice that's somewhat wiser than his generation; one that observes from the sidelines, or rather, from the perspective of an eighty-year-old grandfather...[Jerusalem Beach] is a fresh, imaginative and bold debut." -- Eshkol Nevo, author of Three Floors Up "Ironic, stirring, funny and exhilarating, Jerusalem Beach is a brilliant debut, and Gefen may be the best Israeli short story writer since Etgar Keret." -- Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, author of Waking Lions "Jerusalem Beach signals the confidence and the probing talent of a mature writer, confident in his craft, who knows how to control a complicated storyline with an unexpected, enjoyable twist, while creating distinct characters that speak in many unique voices." -- Arianne Melamed, Haaretz Gefen...flirts with the border between fact and fiction, that will likely be the future in a few years' time...showcasing these subjects in a new and creative light, full of compassion and humanity. -- Time Out Tel Aviv "Iddo Gefen is a brilliant writer, with his own language, fast and fluent...The irony that exists throughout the book and the humor seen from the surprising plot transitions do not obscure the seriousness of the questions about the 'human condition.'" -- Professor Ariel Hirschfeld, head juror of the National Library Scholarship The stories in Iddo Gefen's Jerusalem Beach are a series of original and, many times truly inspiring, attempts to seek and find humanity and tenderness at the least predictable places. -- Etgar Keret, author of Fly Already "Jerusalem Beach accomplishes the impossible--at once playful and wrenching, surprising and organic, these stories are instant classics, if classics could somehow come from the future. Gefen's is a once-in-a-generation voice." -- Shelly Oria, author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 "Ironic, stirring, funny and exhilarating, Jerusalem Beach is a brilliant debut, and Gefen may be the best Israeli short story writer since Etgar Keret." -- Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, author of Waking Lions Sad and funny and full of wisdom and truth. -- Amos Oz, author of A Tale of Love and Darkness "Jerusalem Beach signals the confidence and the probing talent of a mature writer, confident in his craft, who knows how to control a complicated storyline with an unexpected, enjoyable twist, while creating distinct characters that speak in many unique voices." -- Arianne Melamed, Haaretz "Iddo Gefen is the voice of his generation. But he's also a voice that's somewhat wiser than his generation; one that observes from the sidelines, or rather, from the perspective of an eighty-year-old grandfather...[Jerusalem Beach] is a fresh, imaginative and bold debut." -- Eshkol Nevo, author of Three Floors Up
£21.25
Astra Publishing House The People Who Report More Stress: Stories
Book Synopsis"Alejandro Varela is one of my favorite short story writers . . . An iconoclast of tenderness, a compass in the storm this life always is." —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel "The People Who Report More Stress dissects the minutiae of relationships to self, city, space, and sensibility so we don’t numbly succumb to the 'structured order of things.'"—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door The People Who Report More Stress is a collection of interconnected stories brimming with the anxieties of people who retreat into themselves while living in the margins, acutely aware of the stresses that modern life takes upon the body and the body politic. In “Midtown-West Side Story,” Álvaro, a restaurant worker struggling to support his family, begins selling high-end designer clothes to his co-workers, friends, neighbors, and the restaurant’s regulars in preparation for a move to the suburbs. “The Man in 512” tracks Manny, the childcare worker for a Swedish family, as he observes the comings and goings of an affluent co-op building, all the while teaching the children Spanish through Selena’s music catalog. “Comrades” follows a queer man with radical politics who just ended a long-term relationship and is now on the hunt for a life partner. With little tolerance for political moderates, his series of speed dates devolve into awkward confrontations that leave him wondering if his approach is the correct one. A collection of humorous, sexy, and highly neurotic tales about parenting, long-term relationships, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict from the author of The Town of Babylon, The People Who Report More Stress deftly and poignantly expresses the frustration of knowing the problems and solutions to our society’s inequities but being unable to do anything about them.Trade Review"Alejandro Varela’s The People Who Report More Stress: Stories is a master class in analyzing the unspoken...This collection delights in the layers of human interaction, and what might lie beneath them."—Gwen E. Kirby, The New York Times"Varela’s witty, observant prose lifts each of these stories, even if the premises are decidedly grounded in real world and contemporary concerns. There’s a wisdom and lightness to Varela’s work that nudges us toward the conclusion that our divisions, while there may be many, can be mended."—Leland Cheuk, The Boston Globe"The People Who Report More Stress blends humor and social commentary with the thing that drives the best fiction: an honest and vulnerable exploration of messy human relationships. Fans of Varela’s first novel, as well as newcomers to his work, will find a lot to love in this collection."—Laura Sackton, BookPage"Varela's stories are provocative and witty; while eliciting chuckles they also dispense uncomfortable truths that everyone thinks about but won't address out loud." —Andrienne Cruz, Booklist "A searing collection about gentrification, racism, and sexuality. [. . .] Varela provides invaluable insight on the ways stress impacts the characters’ lives, and how they persevere. Readers will be floored."—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)"The prose shines throughout, with razor-sharp specificity about human nature and an entrancing rhythm . . . the collection shows a writer of impressive imagination continuing to deepen his craft."—Kirkus Reviews"Alejandro Varela's book perfectly captures the stories of the frustration of people who see the inequities in society fully knowing that there isn't much they can do to sway the needle forward." —Mirtle Peña-Calderon, People en Español “Varela’s debut novel, The Town of Babylon, came out just last year and was a finalist for the National Book Award—so you know he’s got chops. His second book is “a collection of interconnected stories brimming with the anxieties of people who retreat into themselves while living in the margins, acutely aware of the stresses that modern life takes upon the body and the body politic.” I already love Varela’s sense of humor and way of approaching the world, and I’m sure I will love these too.” —ET, Literary Hub "No one writes fiction that is incisive, socially conscious, and funny as well as Varela, and I'm happy to read anything he publishes." —David Vogel, BuzzFeed "Varela has written a collection that is mordant, tender, and hilariously self-critical. These stories navigate the myriad creases between lust and longing, love and proprietorship, without resorting to sanctimony. This is an incredible feat of wry sincerity."—Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive"The stories in The People Who Report More Stress are sharply observant and tenderly irreverent. Varela beautifully captures the anxieties of both structural limitation and possibility itself, examining how people choose from among the many lives they might lead, and how frequently even as they move away from their origins, characters encounter familiar obstacles that demand they carry the weight of history. This is a smart and gorgeous collection."—Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections "Alejandro Varela is one of my favorite short story writers, and has been for years. Time after time, the mix of curiosity, humor and care in these stories reminds me of the parts of my life no one else writing currently describes. An iconoclast of tenderness, a compass in the storm this life always is."—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel"Alejandro Varela’s The People Who Report More Stress effortlessly walks the line between humor and grief to create a portrait of modern queer life that is at once absurd and deeply sincere. These stories capture the small, lonely moments of everyday life, the rejections and misunderstandings and longings that make up great fiction. Varela can do anything.”—Isle McElroy, author of The Atmospherians and People Collide"In The People Who Report More Stress, Alejandro Varela cracks the veneer of gay domesticity to reveal the intricacies of anxiety and lust, bewilderment and promise, shelter and placelessness in everyday urban life. In linked stories driven by frenzied interior monologue and roving analytical glee, Varela pivots from the rules of bathroom cruising to the legacies of colonialism in international relations, the hustle of selling bootleg designer clothes to the racial hierarchies of Brooklyn gentrification. Moving deftly between satire and hyperrealism, comic excess and mundane pathos, The People Who Report More Stress dissects the minutiae of relationships to self, city, space, and sensibility so we don’t numbly succumb to the 'structured order of things.'"—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door“Brilliant, layered, funny, and so insightful about the way communities, like hearts, are made and unmade. Alejandro Varela is a marvel.”—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
£20.00
Astra Publishing House Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep: Stories
Book SynopsisA collection of short stories moving through time and place, exploring the spaces where we haunt each other and ourselves through our choices, our institutions, and our dreams. Adam Soto, author of the debut novel This Weightless World, which Robin Sloan called “The social novel for the 21st century,” returns with Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep. In the title story, a one-armed Harlem Hellfighter goes in search of his specially altered military uniform while Influenza ravages Philadelphia. In “Sleepy Things,” a man is bound to the bedside of his comatose girlfriend who haunts his mother’s dreams. In “Wren & Riley,” a couple travels to Wyoming to visit a childhood friend who killed her abusive husband. And in “The Vegetable Church,” a pair of Syrian sisters, refugees of the civil war, find themselves at a crossroads in the home of their European hosts while their dead father whispers to them words of comfort and guidance. The stories in Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep, strange and unsettling, explore the quiet spaces where the living and the dead alike haunt one another through their choices, dreams, and institutions.Trade Review"The stories in Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep are meant to sit with the reader and digest slowly. Throughout the collection Soto draws the reader into the often overlooked transitional spaces of a character’s life, and while each story is full and complete, the reader will be left hungry for more as Soto leaves his endings open to the possibility of an unending expansive future." —Corrine Watson, West Trade Review"[Soto's] well-drawn characters with their nuanced battles with grief and hope shine brighter. Haunting and complex."—Kirkus Reviews"An imaginative and otherworldly collection . . . In these well-crafted stories, Soto evocatively shows how the characters are at turns mystified by inexplicable experiences or haunted by burdensome pasts . . . Readers will be enriched by the way this work thoroughly investigates the human heart."—Publishers Weekly"Adam Soto has talent to burn and then some. The stories in Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep are intense, beautifully dense, wonderfully detailed, funny, scary—all this. That rare thing, a thrilling book of stories."—Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others and Love and Shame and Love"Adam Soto is the metaphysical detective for our dissonant era, and every one of these stories is a new type of ghost he shines a light on, in this portable haunted house of a short story collection. An exhilarating ride, to be read throwback-style: chain-smoking under a pale moon, in black and white." —Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig and Valleyesque"Adam Soto's ghost stories are mostly not literal—but they are haunting. There are so many tricks and feints here that you'll be working through Soto's cleverness days later. In this collection of tightly wound but diversely approached stories, Adam Soto unravels the sloppy, conflicted lives of his characters with precision and polish. Each work—some short, others longer—all find a way to compact the breadth of a novel within constraints of the short story. Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep is less an anthology of stories, but an impressive and thrilling accumulation of small universes."—Kevin Nguyen, author of New Waves"Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep is weird in all the best ways possible. These stories show fragments of much larger universes, enticing you with what they give as well as with what they suggest. These tales are plucked from bizarre worlds, from the blood of shadow creatures, from the tears of angels. Let them haunt you.”—Gabino Iglesias, author of The Devil Takes You Home
£18.75
The New York Review of Books, Inc Machines in the Head: Selected Stories
Book Synopsis
£15.26
The New York Review of Books, Inc Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints
Book SynopsisStories about the occult, folk religions, superstition, and spiritual customs in Russia by one of the most essential twentieth-century writers of short fiction and essays.Though best known for her comic and satirical sketches of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Teffi was a writer of great range and human sympathy. The stories on otherworldly themes in this collection are some of her finest and most profound, displaying the acute psychological sensitivity beneath her characteristic wit and surface brilliance.Other Worlds presents stories from across the whole of Teffi’s long career, from her early days as a literary celebrity in Moscow to her post-Revolutionary years as an émigré in Paris. In the early story “A Quiet Backwater,” a laundress gives a long disquisition on the name days of the flora and fauna and on the Feast of the Holy Ghost, a day on which “no one dairnst disturb the earth.” The story “Wild Evening” is about the fear of the unknown; “The Kind That Walk,” a penetrating study of antisemitism and of xenophobia; and “Baba Yaga,” about the archetypal Russian witch and her longing for wildness and freedom. Teffi traces the persistent influence of the ancient Slavic gods in superstitions and customs, and the deep connection of the supernatural to everyday life in the provinces. In “Volya,” the autobiographical final story, the power and pain of Baba Yaga is Teffi’s own.
£15.26
University of Arkansas Press Double Toil and Trouble: A New Novel and Short
Book SynopsisDouble Toil and Trouble is the first new volume of fiction in more than a decade by beloved Arkansas writer Donald Harington (1935 - 2009). Featuring the long-lost suspense novel of the title and four previously unpublished or uncollected stories, this volume adds several new chapters to the saga of Stay More, the fictional Ozarks village that serves as the setting for more than a dozen other Harington novels. Edited by longtime Harington scholar Brian Walter, Double Toil and Trouble also includes an appendix featuring the author's spirited correspondence with the editor who originally inspired the title novel, providing an insider's look at the American literary scene and Harington's own early assessment of his work. Spanning several decades of the author's career, this volume gives readers a Harington who is at once familiar and fresh as he experiments with new formal possibilities, only to once again endear the vagaries of love, life, and folk language to us.Trade ReviewFor those of us who continue to treasure Donald Harington and his work, there’s something tremendously moving about receiving this late addition to the Stay More chronicles—a message in a bottle from 1973. In the novel (and four stories) you'll find here, he displays all the warmth, wit, goodness, and love of humanity that make his books so essential, as if he were reaching out from decades ago to remind us that the world is beautiful and we are of value to each other." —Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories
£999.99
Blackwater Press The Ballad of Cherrystoke: and other stories
Book SynopsisA young maid at an upscale resort hides her banjo-playing freight hopper brother. An unlikely romance bridges a quarter-century age gap and a 150-year-old murder. A man tries to turn his sheltered mother's backyard shed into a pricey vacation rental. A gig worker must shake off her darker identity to become a professional baby namer. This mesmeric debut collection of stories set in the Appallachian mountains weaves together the curious and the sublime, with Bianchi's lyrical style cutting straight to the heart of the matter. A debut from one of America's most exciting new talents.Trade ReviewPraise for The Ballad of Cherrystoke: NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favourite. SPD Bestseller. "Melanie McGee Bianchi writes with graciousness for the reader: it feels like she's invited you on her porch to tell you these stories because you need to hear them. She also shows graciousness for her characters, allowing them the full spectrum of humanity no matter what space they occupy in the world." --Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat; "Yuri in "Abdiel's Revenge" says: 'If there's a main idea in all those ballads, in all of Appalachia, to my mind, it comes down to this: bones in the river.' The Ballad of Cherrystoke is a collection about Appalachian people (not characters, not stereotypes) with secrets and trust issues, brain injuries, prison records, shitty jobs, broken hearts, urges and needs and fears - but Bianchi is observant and wise, kind but unflinching, an archaeologist; she listens, and excavates, and through rich and luxuriously meandering prose pulls those bones up onto the bank for us to touch, and taste, and feel. This is the best debut collection I've read in years. Melanie McGee Bianchi is sharp, and tender, and brilliant." --Meagan Lucas, author of the award-winning novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs and Editor-in-Chief of Reckon Review; "The narrators in this collection shrug off their wounds to observe and report their fascinating stories. With language as striking and surprising as it is beautiful, Bianchi adds a new and unique voice to Appalachian literature." --Heather Newton, author of McMullen Circle';"Brilliantly weaving together original narratives with elements of the real Appalachian mountains and their people, these stories reveal startling details that create immediate, visceral impressions of complex, haunting characters: their secrets, their fears, and their anguish... Like the mountains they inhabit, these characters are a mercurial parade of stunning beauty and terrible pain."--Elizabeth Baird Hardy, author of Milton, Spenser, and the Chronicles of Narnia: Literary Sources for the C.S. Lewis Novels; "The complex, the quirky, and the sublime are interwoven with humor, love, and above all, grace, in contributing to a tradition of powerful storytelling. The landscape is steeped in the voices of the people."--Tony Robles, author of Cool Don't Live Here No More - A Letter to San Francisco and Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike; "Bianchi has created worlds that seem simultaneously magical and rooted in the grit of rural reality - a vexing combination that dares the reader at every turn. Her rich characters grow within us in uncomfortable and compelling ways that force the next page turn."--Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, author of Even As We Breathe; "The characters in Melanie McGee Bianchi's debut collection, The Ballad of Cherrystoke - gritty, determined, shrewd - are modern balladeers, narrating remarkable stories set in the Appalachian South. Beautifully unusual, told in penetrating, straightforward prose, these stories reveal genuine, universal truths, affecting and unforgettable."--Susan Beckham Zurenda, award-winning author of Bells for Eli; "Through deep lyricism and a sharp eye for detail, Melanie McGee Bianchi' sstories peel back the quotidian moments of everyday life to demonstrate the complexity of what it means to live in a world crafted by both our desires and our choices - and what it means when those two elements don't always coincide. The Ballad of Cherrystoke is a powerful collection that uncovers the music of humanity that emerges each time a person interacts with another person in a complicated and changing world. It's an extraordinary and haunting debut."--Adam Clay, director, Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi; author of To Make Room for the Sea, Stranger, and A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World; editor of Mississippi Review, co-editor of Typo Magazine, and contributing editor for Kenyon ReviewTable of ContentsThe Ballad of Cherrystoke; Abdiel's Revenge; It's Called Overwintering; A Day on Saturn; Bad Tooth Brandon; Confederate Jasmine; Blight + Cotillion; The Miracle of Flight; Nicki the Namer; Killing Frost; Antique Power Association;
£14.58
Allen & Unwin Shooting the Fox
Book Synopsis'Why did Bluebeard kill his wives? Because that's what he did. It's a given. It's the plot. Until the lucky one, who is saved. The even more interesting question is: why did Mrs Bluebeard feel utterly unable to resist opening the door? Don't we all think, when it comes to these stories, that we'd have made it work? So much freedom, and one tiny forbidden thing. Not important, a token in fact. So easy to obey so small a prohibition. We think, if I had been Eve I wouldn't have picked the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, I wouldn't have given a piece to Adam. I and my progeny down the millennia would still be multiplying fruitfully in the Garden of Eden.'Life in all its richness is reflected in this superb new collection from one of Australia's most acclaimed short story writers. Love and loss, sex and death, and the great pleasures of food, wine and reading all populate its pages.Shooting the Fox is brimming with surprising characters - the virgin and the pornographer, the adulterer, the translator, the defecting diplomat - and the inconveniences of modernity. In the end, though, it is a collection of stories about happiness, its circuitous routes, its surprising outcomes, and the consequences when we fail in its pursuit.
£17.31
Vagrant Press A Bird on Every Tree
Book Synopsis
£17.95
Nimbus Publishing Limited A Dark House: & Other Stories
Book Synopsis
£17.95
Mosaic Press Cogwheels & Other Stories
Book SynopsisFrom the literary giant of Japan, who is often referred to as the "Godfather of the Japanese short story", and after whom the most coveted literary prize of Japan is named, the Akutagawa Prize, comes this collection of three of his greatest short stories. Akutagawa is probably best known for his story "Rashoomon" which was adapted for the screen by legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. While he died at the young age of 35, the author penned well over 150 short stories, including "Cogwheels" which he wrote just before his suicide in 1927. Accompanied by stunning woodcuts by renowned artists Naoko Matsubara, and expertly translated by Howard Norman, the three stories compiled here reflect the haunting, precise and brilliant style of Akutagawa and offer a superb entry point to his work. Haruki Murakami aptly described Akutagawa's writing when he remarked, "the flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawa's style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing... His choice of words is intuitive, natural - and beautiful."Trade Reviewthe flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawas style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing... His choice of words is intuitive, natural and beautiful. - Haruki Murakami
£13.49
Mosaic Press This Ones Trouble
Book SynopsisThis book offers a collection of some of the best hard-hitting crime stories from acclaimed writer Peter Sellers. Hailed as "one of the key figures in the Canadian mystery renaissance" in the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Peter Sellers' entertaining and off-beat crime fiction stories have appeared in every major mystery magazine including Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Hardboiled. In this book readers will discover characters that live in a world of shattered dreams and failed plans, where the banality of evil is found in everyday life. "A typical Sellers story there is usually one bad decision made, and on that hangs the plot -- as well as the perpetrator." -- Don Hutchison, acclaimed author of "Great Pulp Heroes". Included here are some of his best work, including stories "Avenging Miriam" which won the 2001 Ellery Queen Readers Award and the title story which was nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award in 1992.Trade Review"One of the key figures in the Canadian mystery renaissance of the 80s and 90s." Jon L Breen, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine"Peter Sellers is one of Canadas most entertaining short story writers"Peter Robinson, Arthur Ellis Award winning author of Dead Right; "Lively stories filled with satiric wit and clever twists." -- Don Hutchison, acclaimed author of "Night Frights"
£8.54
Mosaic Press Zebra Crossing
Book Synopsis
£18.00
Guernica Editions,Canada A Rogue's Decameron
Book SynopsisA Rogue's Decameron consists of ten stories - tales - that loosely follow the fabliaux style and are based within the spirit of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's The Decameron: extravagance, joy and ribald humour around sex, lust, vice, death and other ?hungers' of human beings. Using similar framing technique as these works - a prologue, a short description of each story and an epilogue, the stories explore themes such as social commentary and satire aimed at personal politics, societal mores and customs, hierarchies, and religious beliefs. All with Toronto as a backdrop and brought up to date for the sensibilities of a 21st century audience.
£16.16
Guernica Editions,Canada Notes of a Mediocre Man: Stories of India and
Book SynopsisTwo brothers come to school and do nothing but tell stories. A man goes to a singles dance. A retired man in India tries to collect his pension. A woman tells the story of her husband's death in partition India. An unnamed narrator offers his "notes" on modern-day America, the culture of success. Some of the stories are set in India, some in America. Some stories are fable-like, others more realistic. Some deal with sex, some are "intellectual" stories. But all stories deal, in one way or another, with small, "mediocre" people, people trying to fit into a world of bigness, applause, success.
£15.15
Guernica Editions,Canada Faithful and Other Stories
Book SynopsisA boy finds a vocation as a weaver of bread. A Russian woman, thought dead, e-mails greetings to her adolescent sister in a Canadian suburb. An investment banker vanishes and is found fifteen years later when his daughter discovers a painting of herself in a distant gallery. With wit and ache, Daniel Karasik's Faithful and Other Stories evokes a world of seekers, characters panning for meaning in environments by turns hostile, mystifying, and enchanted. This collection brings together stories honoured with the CBC Short Story Prize, The Malahat Review's Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for Fiction, and the Alta Lind Cook Prize.
£16.16
Guernica Editions,Canada A Feast of Brief Hopes
Book SynopsisThere are unseen forces in our lives that shape who we are and what we become. How we respond to those forces determines our futures. These stories examine how characters respond to the unexpected. Do we carry our memories of the beautiful moments of life with us into death? And, ultimately, what do we value in life that defines us--from a hat to the shadow of a figure in a window reminding us of what we have lost or need to hold onto.Trade ReviewPortraits of Canadian Writers: Bruce Meyer has given us readers a serious bit of enlightenment for our minds with his Portraits of Canadian Writers. The combination of writing and images engage any reader's complete psyche and give insight to some of Canada's greatest wordsmiths.--Steven Buechler, The Library of Pacific Tranquility
£16.16
Guernica Editions,Canada Eye
Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2019 Governor General's Literary AwardMyth, folklore, and magic permeate the stories in Marianne Micros' collection Eye. Set in ancient and modern Greece, and in contemporary Europe and North America, these tales tell of evil-eye curses, women healers, ghosts, a changeling, and people struggling to retain or gain power in a world of changing beliefs. Here you will find stories of a nymph transformed into a heifer, a young soldier who returns home to discover that his brother is a changeling, an ancient temple uncovered during the construction of a church, a betrayed woman lost in a labyrinth, a wise woman confronting changes to her position when modern technology comes to her village. Some stories show that people still seek refuge in myth and folk beliefs; the ways of the past are not gone. The paving of a village does not destroy the power of the evil eye or the ability to repel it. A temple in honour of the old gods comes again to the surface. An unfinished musical composition for piano magically completes itself whenever it is played.
£16.16
Guernica Editions,Canada How To Tell If Your Frog Is Dead
Book SynopsisA tour guide leads a Valentine's Day-themed ghost walk, visiting the sites of horrific, yet romantic, deaths. A homicide cop solves tough cases using tips from his plants. Scientists discover a new species of religiously observant gophers, and a young math whiz, on the hunt for her escaped boa constrictor, ponders the theory of multiple worlds. Replete with dark humour and cheeky interrogations of philosophy and metaphysics, the thirty-three stories in How to Tell if Your Frog is Dead expose the fundamental absurdity of the human condition.
£16.16
Guernica Editions,Canada Telescope
Book SynopsisTelescope is a story cycle about Lawrence Teitel, the protagonist of Living Room (Boheme Press, 2001). The collection deals with seeing distances: above all, the growing distancing of Lawrence's family as they cope with new challenges and Lawrence's own maturation, physical and spiritual. The cycle is made up of nine stories, each covering a different stage in Lawrence's development after his family has moved from their old neighbourhood in Montreal to a somewhat wealthier suburb, Ville St. Laurent.Trade Review"If The Simpsons were a novel (or closely connected stories) it would be called Telescope by Allan Weiss. Not because of raw comedy, but the fact that the world's history, its creativity, its politics and its humanity is brilliantly filtered through a typical family in an isolated suburb of a place called Montreal." -- Clark Blaise
£16.16
Guernica Editions,Canada The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness
Book SynopsisTo fill gaping holes in their lives, the protagonists in The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness embark on bizarre quests that ultimately lead them astray. Whether a child savant who sings the lyrics to hundreds of songs (and never talks), a woman who has to decide whether to turn in her arsonist brother, a failed writer whose fictional character suddenly comes to life, an unhappy insurance examiner who discovers a fallen angel and decides to cash in on his find, or a successful, middle-class man who pines for the poet he once was, nothing is sacred in this collection of stories. Myth and imagination hold equal weight, authenticity and fable go hand-in-hand, and the lines between reality and illusion blur. Characters find themselves trapped, or at least, incapable of restoring their humanity. It may be sobering to observe such forays into darkness but underlying their failures is a tacit suggestion that perhaps they could have won out with more imagination, more strength, or simply with some encouragement. And some do; amidst the carnage of those who fail and disappear emerge some who acquire new strength to reconnect with the world.
£16.16
Guernica Editions,Canada Shattered Fossils
Book SynopsisShattered Fossils, a collection of short stories, takes its title from themes of the irretrievable past, particularly within Ark of Gopherwood, in which the narrator describes his friend as someone who has pieced together elements of the historical past, to create a more complete picture of history. From the short story in which a character enters a "painted sidewalk," the collection moves into an exploration of the creation of memoir and memory. Some of the stories, but especially one about a 'bard,' set in Montreal, another set in Iceland and one set off the coast of England, contain ghosts. The last is told from a ghost's perspective. Her husband, a mathematician, has called her from the shadows. While she was alive, he insisted time was immutable. Now he is attempting to solve the equation that will bring her back.
£16.16
