Anthologies & Short Stories

Book SynopsisIn Kissing a Tree Surgeon, worlds traverse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in New Jersey. Southern women get kidnapped by North Koreans. A Dutch girl solicits money on OKCupid. A young woman meets Golda Meir on an Upper East Side bus in New York City. A character believes he's the biological son of Frank Sinatra. Zionist-Hasidic lesbians protest anti-Semitism at a women's Catholic college. A stalking moviegoer takes her dead grandmother to a Bertolucci film. A daughter meets her father's mistress at his grave. An employee is banned from calling her boss in the office. An adult woman visits the radio store in Lakewood, New Jersey, of the boy who didn't invite her to his bar mitzvah.Trade Review"Eleanor Levine's debut collection of stories is wild and exuberant, full of the stuff of real life filtered through a vision as unique as any I have ever encountered. I loved every story in this book, as wide-ranging in scope and subject as they are. The short story form is in the new and innovative hands of Eleanor Levine, which means that it's alive and well and ever-evolving. A remarkable book." -- Wayne Johnston, author of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Divine Ryans"Eleanor Levine's short stories start out odd, become strange, and flower into true weirdness. It's ordinary life shattered into fragments and reassembled as rueful surreal comedy, in which people die and are buried, but also show up for lunch, their indelible grumpy selves. It's like nothing else you are likely to read this year, or maybe any year." -- Katha Pollitt, poet, essayist, critic and columnist for The Nation magazine"Levine's unique voice catches you off guard and takes you on a wild journey you didn't know you needed. Ultimately, Kissing a Tree Surgeon is a collection of stories about belonging. And in a time where feeling like an outsider amidst a surrealist landscape is common, Levine reminds us to laugh about it." -- The Coachella ReviewThough one could approach this book as a novel-in-stories, some of the pieces stand out, like a stark, hypnopompic hallucination just before waking. -- Gertrude Magazine -- 2021

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Book SynopsisCelebrating life in America's fiftieth StateA father in Hawaii takes his troubled son fishing, unable to tell him the sad news he must share. A woman is lost at sea during a reef walk and sends her family into turmoil. An unlikely relationship develops between a Realtor and an Ultimate Fighting Champion. These are just some of the sad, funny and memorable characters found in the Made in Hawaii short story collection.

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Book SynopsisMagnetic Dogs is a collection of short stories that examines how displaced individuals – those who have been snatched out of their time and place – struggle to adapt and reinvent themselves in an entirely new context or re-establish themselves in their former situations. In stories that are factual fiction, Meyer examines the composition of Gabriel Fauré's haunting "Cantique de Jean Racine," the 1960s 'scoop' of Indigenous children from Manitoulin Island, the missing diaries of Lewis Carroll that save that author from the charges of child molestation that ruined his career as an academic, the true story of a shade of red and Seventh Century Chinese exploration of the North Atlantic, and the origins and ramifications of a haunting Aztec form of music, borrowed by J.S. Bach, the 'chaconne.' In these stories Meyer constantly questions the ways our perceptions of the past might have been different had small events transpired to make them so.

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Book SynopsisAfter a man inadvertently swallows an insect, he withdraws from the human race; another feels an ape growing inside him; and a son struggles to decipher the meaning of his father's death. Visceral, surprising, and surreal, these twelve stories from David Clerson move from the charged darkness of the woods to the urban underground, while characters set a course to see out the night.Scurrying insects and luminous jellyfish reveal a predatory, ever-present world of childhood fairy tales, lurking shadows, and unrelenting fevers. Individuals are swallowed up by cities and bogs in this study of nature and humanity in all their terrifying glory. Throughout, Clerson draws-and blurs- the lines between man and beast, and life and death, all beneath an impassive, ailing sky.

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Book SynopsisFirst published in 1987 and reissued for the first time, In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot restores an essential New Zealand writer to new generations of readers. In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot begins with Texidor's most fully achieved piece of work, These Dark Glasses. Distinguished by sophisticated writing and acute psychological insight, it is set on the south coast of France during the Spanish Civil War. The stories which follow range from Spain and England to New Zealand, where she writes unsentimentally and unerringly of the environment of the time. Goodbye Forever, the unfinished novel which concludes the volume, is Texidor's most sustained piece of writing on New Zealand. The central character, Lili, is a Viennese refugee who arrives amongst the writers of Auckland's North Shore. She is exotic and alone, and her slow collapse is plotted with minute observation.

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Book SynopsisPresenting thirty-five stories from seven collections published over more than forty years, Vincent O’Sullivan’s Selected Stories is a milestone in the career of one of New Zealand’s leading writers. `Vincent O’Sullivan’s short fictions go straight to the heart of human experience. They are by turn tender, deeply moving, unsparing and often witty, endowed with a sly humour that cuts through his characters’ foibles and pretensions. He is simply one of our very best storytellers, with total mastery of his craft.’—Fiona Kidman `These finely attuned, wry and deeply moving stories that have been gathered together here are executed with such compassion and grace that we might not even be aware at the time of our reading just how much they have taught us about what it is to be human and frail in this large world.’—Kirsty Gunn `Vincent O’Sullivan ranks with the best worldwide. His stories are as fine as any being written today.’—Kevin Ireland

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Book Synopsis‘The first time I read Freya’s work I thought . . . uh oh. And then I thought, you have got to be kidding me. And then I thought, God fucking dammit. And then I walked around the house shaking my head thinking . . . OK – alright. And then – finally – I thought, well well well – like a smug policeman. Listen – she’s just the best. I’m going to say this so seriously. She is, unfortunately, the absolute best. Trying to write a clever blurb for her feels like an insult to how right and true and deadly this collection is. God, she’s just so good. She’s the best. She kills me always, every time, and forever.’ —Hera Lindsay BirdTrade ReviewThe first time I read Freya’s work I thought . . . uh oh. And then I thought, you have got to be kidding me. And then I thought, God fucking dammit. And then I walked around the house shaking my head thinking . . . OK - alright. And then - finally - I thought, well well well - like a smug policeman. Listen - she’s just the best. I’m going to say this so seriously. She is, unfortunately, the absolute best. Trying to write a clever blurb for her feels like an insult to how right and true and deadly this collection is. God, she’s just so good. She’s the best. She kills me always, every time, and forever." — Hera Lindsay Bird

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Book SynopsisA science educator in domestic chaos fetishises Scandinavian furniture and champagne flutes. A group of white-collar deadbeats attend a swinger’s party in the era of drunk Muldoon. A pervasive smell seeps through the walls of a German housing block. A seabird performs at an open-mic night.Bug Week is a scalpel-clean examination of male entitlement, a dissection of death, an agar plate of mundanity. From 1960s Wellington to post-Communist Germany, Bug Week traverses the weird, the wry and the grotesque in a story collection of human taxonomy.

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Book Synopsis'When we read Tolstoy, it feels easy. This is life itself' Howard Jacobson 'No other writer wrote so often, or so imaginatively, about the actual moment of dying' Orlando Figes Tolstoy's stories contain many of the most acutely observed moments in his monumental body of work. This new selection of his shorter works, sensitively translated by the award-winning Boris Dralyuk, showcases the peerless economy with which Tolstoy could render the passions and conflicts of a life. These are works that take us from a self-interested judge's agonising deathbed to the bristling social world of horses in a stable yard, from the joyful vanity of youth to the painful doubts of sickness and old age. With unwavering precision, Tolstoy's eye brings clarity and richness to the simplest materials.Trade Review • "Gratifying and timely." --Times Literary Supplement • "When literature has a Tolstoy, it is easy and gratifying to be a writer. Even if you are aware that you have never accomplished anything, you don't feel so bad, because Tolstoy accomplishes enough for everyone"--Anton Chekhov • "The greatest of all novelists"--Virginia Woolf

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Book SynopsisIsaac Babel honed one of the most distinctive styles in all Russian literature. Brashly conversational one moment, dreamily lyrical the next, his stories exult in the richness of everyday speech and sensual pleasure only to be shaken by brutal jolts of violence. These stories take us from the underworld of Babel's native Odessa, city of gangsters and lowlives, of drunken brawls and bleeding sunsets, to the terror and absurdity of life as a soldier in the Polish-Soviet War. Selected and translated by the prize-winning Boris Dralyuk, this collection captures the irreverence, passion and coarse beauty of Babel's singular voice.Trade Review'Compact, irreverent, enigmatic, savage and tender... it is impossible to look at the world the same way after reading Babel... one of the enduring jewels of 20th-century Russian literature' - Financial Times'Fractured, jarring, beautiful, alive to humour... they have the ring of contemporaneity, and probably always will' - Guardian'Unforgettable stories, lyrical and earthy' - Irish Times'Marvelously subtle, tragic, and often comic' - James Wood'Elegiac, but not in the usual sense: Babel's is an ebullient elegy, filled with violence, sex, and life' - LA Review of BooksTable of ContentsTable of Contents Translator’s Preface Guy de Maupassant (Part I) Childhood and Youth The Story of My Dovecote First Love In the Basement The Awakening Di Grasso (Part II) Gangsters and “Old Odessans” The King How It Was Done in Odessa Lyubka the Cossack Father Justice in Quotes The End of the Almshouse (Part III) Red Cavalry Crossing the Zbrucz The Catholic Church in Novograd A Letter Pan Apolek The Italian Sun Gedali My First Goose The Rebbe The Tachanka Doctrine The Death of Dolgushov The Life Story of Pavlichenko, Matvei Rodionych Salt The Rebbe’s Son Argamak

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Book SynopsisThe stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms. Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the stories in this collection showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical.Trade Review"An accessible, exhilarating introduction to Schulz’s oeuvre." --The Washington Post “Stanley Bill’s translations come as an invigorating reminder of the uncanny verbal sorcery behind this unique voice and vision.... The results, hauntingly phrased, can be suitably weird—but never impenetrable... Bill catches the outrageous wit of Schulz’s nightmare tableaux,” --The Wall Street Journal

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Book Synopsis'One of the greatest Japanese writers... his work explores the destructive power of erotic obsessions' Guardian 'Outstanding... rich and mysterious' New York Times Book Review A new selection and translation of short stories by a hugely prominent classic Japanese writer, filled with eroticism and fantasy The rich and mysterious short stories of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki pulse with a restless eroticism. Visiting a kingdom ruled by a weak-willed duke, the sage Confucius finds himself drawn into a battle of wills. A naïve servant boy is compelled down a path of vice and sin by his master's daughter. A young prince finds himself enraptured by his newest possession: a beguiling, enchanting mermaid. These three stories, two of which are here translated for the first time by Bryan Karetnyk, capture the essence of Tanizaki's shorter writings. Drawing on tales from both Japanese and Chinese mythology, combined with poignant psychological realism, Tanizaki reveals and revels in the paper-thin line between the sublime and the depraved.Trade Review“In these stories we have that still-young man, randy and undisciplined, ranging everywhere for pleasure.” — The Washington Post “Undiscovered jewels.” — Guardian“Lyrical, dramatic and unforgettable…Highly recommended!” — Shiny New BooksPraise for Jinochiro Tanizaki: “Junichiro Tanizaki may well prove to be the outstanding Japanese novelist of this century” — New York Times Book Review “Japan's great modern novelist. Tanizaki createda lifelong series of ingenious variations on a dominant theme: the power of love to energize and destroy” — Chicago Tribune “Tanizaki writes with an unabashed sensuality” — John Updike

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Book Synopsis‘A wonderful writer’ Hilary MantelAll of life is laid bare in Prosperity Drive. A woman falls and remembers a moment decades earlier that changed the course of her life. A failed priest teaches children to swim at the YMCA. A teenage girl takes a spanner to the car of the young man who has driven her home. A honeymoon in Venice goes disastrously wrong. A man is reunited with his first love in an airport departure lounge. All of the characters begin their journeys on Prosperity Drive, appear and disappear, bump into each other in chance encounters, and join up again through love, marriage or memory in this mesmerising book.Trade ReviewShe is a true heir to Chekhov and the great writers… Her clear-eyed vision and her deep compassion, along with her lovely sense of the comic and her exceptional literary articulacy, make this an outstanding collection. -- Éilís Ní Dhuibhne * Irish Times *Mary Morrissy is a wonderful writer. These stories are entertaining and deft, so skilfully balanced and interwoven that when you begin to pick out the pattern it is a real moment of delight. -- Hilary MantelMorrissy bewitches the reader with an immaculate yet irreverent turn of phrase, her imagination slanted at a rare angle. -- Imogen Lycett-Green * Daily Mail *Story by story [Morrissy] stitches together a hundred tiny plots, moving backwards and forwards across 60 years, and outwards to Italy, America, Australia and Vietnam… Morrissy proves herself a steady observer of the bleakness of everyday life, as well as when bleakness becomes catastrophe. -- Hannah Rosefield * Observer *One of the best Irish books you’ll read this year. -- Sara Keating * Sunday Business Post *

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Book SynopsisWhen a young white child growing up in Tanzania discovers why her family’s African gardener so dislikes the chameleon she spots in a tree, she is plunged into a puzzled awareness of the complexities of race, colour and difference.As the ‘I’ of the stories grows into adulthood in Nigeria, she too becomes a chameleon of sorts, one thing when she is with her Nigerian friends, another with the white tribe when she can no longer resist the lure of the scarce luxuries to be had at the British embassy. When the ‘I’ makes the crossing from Nigeria to the Caribbean, she discovers that it is not only people who are chameleons. Osun, the Yoruba orisha has also made the journey, a little outwardly changed, but inwardly the same in Trinidadian and Cuban manifestations.In the earlier stories, the ‘I’ has a childhood innocence that, in the comment of the distinguished poet UA Fanthorpe, ‘sees all the better for not understanding’. With increasing awareness comes a sense of being an outsider in almost all situations, though in playing mas’ in the Trinidad carnival, there is a glimpse of the transcendence of belonging to the collective. Whether as the child trying to understand her parents, their Muslim servant’s sense of the sacred, or the ‘incomprehensible prohibitions’ of a colonial childhood, there is a constant tension between the sense of separateness and the desire for belonging. And though each of the stories is a first person narrative, what stands out in Bryce’s careful, elegant writing is a very concrete sense of the reality and autonomy of other voices, other views.

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Book SynopsisAn orphan child full of mischief, Jack lives with his crotchety widow aunt in eighteenth-century England. His naughtiness knows no limits, and when one day he goes a step too far, Aunt Constance decides that she’s had enough: from now on, his bachelor uncle can take care of him. Uncle Edmund is in no way prepared for a boy with boundless energy and an impish streak – and anyway, he’s off to the Himalayas to search for rare plants! But Aunt Constance is absolutely determined, and Jack’s uncle has no choice – he will have to take the boy with him. What follows is a terrific adventure that will see Jack and his uncle – the most unlikely of all expedition teams – sail to India, cross the jungle and reach their mountainous destination, before returning to London to present their findings to the Royal Society. Along the way, Jack will finally come to terms with the great loss that has blighted his childhood years and discover, quite unexpectedly, that he and his late father have much in common.

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Book SynopsisWhile he is now mostly associated with his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle was also celebrated for the many masterful tales he wrote outside of that cycle. In this collection, first published in 1922, he compiled various pieces of short fiction which fall into the categories of horror and detective fiction, two genres for which he has become a byword. These eclectic, captivating tales - dealing with topics such as mysterious jungles in the sky, seventeenth-century torture techniques, a bloodthirsty Brazilian cat and a train mysteriously disappearing between two stations - showcase Arthur Conan Doyle at his creative best.Trade ReviewStart a story by Conan Doyle and you cannot stop reading, whether you are ten or sixty. -- Michael DirdaTable of ContentsContains: The Horror of the Heights, The Leather Funnel, The New Catacomb, The Case of Lady Sannox, The Terror of Blue John Gap, The Brazilian Cat, The Lost Special, The Beetle-Hunter, The Man with the Watches, The Japanned Box, The Black Doctor, The Jew s Breastplate, The Nightmare Room.

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Book SynopsisWe Seldom Talk About the Past is John MacKenna’s first selected collection of short stories, from a career spanning over three decades. The stories selected come from four collections of short fiction, and represent a culmination of MacKenna’s work in a form of writing he has made uniquely his own. Often compared to John McGahern, and Raymond Carver, and deeply influenced by masters of the form like Chekov, MacKenna’s stories focus on the quotidian truths of our lives, of the momentousness of small moments, of sexual desire and its intimate entanglement with the domestic, of deeply felt absences and social mores, and always at the heart of his work, the sense of place, often the rural, and the acute receptiveness of our lives to the places we inhabit.Trade ReviewMacKenna has a way with the passive gut-punch. -- Eoghan O'Sullivan * Irish Examiner *Every single story in this anthology is a love song to the Irish landscape. MacKenna's outstanding prose is as close to the great McGahern as you'll get. -- Anne Cunningham * Meath Chronicle *"Placed together, these narratives tell a deeper story of what it means to be human...this is the art of the short story, and MacKenna is a master of his craft." -- Becky Long * The Irish Times *

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Book SynopsisThis Library of America volume, along with its companion, surveys a literary trajectory that from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of World War II marked Gertrude Stein as a fearless and uncompromising experimenter. She was also a master of anecdote and aphorism, many of whose phrases—from “rose is a rose is a rose” to “there is no there there” and “when this you see remember me”—have passed into the language.This first volume, containing works written between 1903 and 1932, takes Stein from her first, more traditional fictional works to the exuberant and astonishing experiments of the early Paris years. She was a devoted student of William James, with whom she studied psychology at Radcliffe in the 1890s, and took an early interest in memory and the function of repetition in human character. In her early works, she sought a new kind of realism exemplified here by Q.E.D. (written 1903, published posthumously), a novel about lesbian entanglements at college, and the modern classic Three Lives (1909), a set of novellas about the lives of three ordinary women, described in the simplest and most direct of prose.In her brilliant abstract “portraits” Stein uses an extraordinary array of verbal techniques to evoke those friends and collaborators—Matisse, Picasso, Apollinaire, Juan Gris, Satie, Mabel Dodge, Carl Van Vechten, Sherwood Anderson, Virgil Thomson—with whom she shared decades of revolutionary ferment in the arts. Her play Four Saints in Three Acts (1927), which became the basis for an opera by Virgil Thomson, is written for a freewheeling theater of the mind where everything becomes possible. In “Lifting Belly” and other works she joyously celebrates her lifelong relationship with Alice B. Toklas, one of the most famous domestic partnerships of that century. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein’s oblique and playful memoir, became an immediate bestseller and sealed Stein’s international celebrity.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Book SynopsisLibrary of America presents the first volume in a landmark two-volume collector's edition of the incomparable stories of an American masterBorn into an upper-class New York family, Edith Wharton broke with convention and became a professional writer, earning an enduring place as the grande dame of American letters. This Library of America collection (along with its companion volume, Collected Stories: 1911–1937) presents the finest of Wharton's achievement in short fiction, drawn from the more than eighty stories she published over the course of her career. Opening with her first published story—the charming "Mrs. Manstey's View," about a disruption in the life of an elderly apartment-dweller—this first of two volumes presents a writer, already at the height of her powers, beginning to explore the concerns of a lifetime. In "Souls Belated," two lovers attempt to escape the consequences of their adultery—a subject to which Wharton returns throughout her career. In "The Mission of Jane" (about a remarkable adopted child) and "The Pelican" (about an itinerant lecturer), she discovers her gift for social and cultural satire. Perhaps the finest of her ghost stories, "The Eyes," with its Jamesian sense of evil, is also included, along with two novella-length works, "The Touchstone" and "Sanctuary," revealing the dazzling range of Wharton's fictive imagination. Also included in this edition are a chronology of Wharton's life, explanatory notes, and an essay on the texts.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.Trade Review"Wharton's examinations of upper-class New York society were rendered in effortless prose so subtle that many readers missed the depth and breadth of her art. These two collections of short fiction belong on the shelves of anyone who loves literature." —Dallas Morning News"A splendid and satisfying publication, and a landmark in the history of Edith Wharton’s ever-shifting reputation." —New York Review of Books

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