Anthologies & Short Stories

Before he gave us the classic title On Writing, ('part biography, part collection of tips for the aspiring writer' - Guardian) Stephen King wrote a nonfiction masterpiece in Danse Macabre, 'One of the best books on American popular culture' (Philadelphia Inquirer)It was not long after Halloween when Stephen King received a telephone call from his editor. 'Why don't you do a book about the entire horror phenomenon as you see it? Books, movies, radio, TV, the whole thing.'The result is this unique combination of fantasy and autobiography, of classic horror writing honed to an unforgettable edge; ; an analysis of horror, terror and the supernatural in films, television and books by the bestselling master of the genre.DANSE MACABRE ranges across the whole spectrum of horror in popular culture from the seminal classics of Dracula and Frankenstein. It is a charming and fascinating book, replete with pertinent anecdote and observation, in which Stephen King describes his ideas on how horror works on many levels and how he brings it to bear on his own inimitable novels.

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"After existing orally for hundreds of years, Sunjata was written down in the 20th century. David Conrad, who recorded a new version of the epic, has now crafted a prose translation that preserves the oral flavor of live performance. The result is a captivating work of literature that will finally give the story of Sunjata its well-deserved place among the great epics of world literature." —Martin Puchner, Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University

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"After existing orally for hundreds of years, Sunjata was written down in the 20th century. David Conrad, who recorded a new version of the epic, has now crafted a prose translation that preserves the oral flavor of live performance. The result is a captivating work of literature that will finally give the story of Sunjata its well-deserved place among the great epics of world literature." —Martin Puchner, Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University

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Jane Austen's Emma (1816) tells the story of the coming of age of Emma Woodhouse, "handsome, clever, and rich," who "had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." Typical for the novel's time, Emma's transition to womanhood is accomplished through courtship—both of those around her and, ultimately, her own. As in other Austen works, education and courtship go hand in hand, and Emma's process of learning to relinquish the power of having her own way is also a process of falling in love. However, in Emma this classic plot is both complicated by and reflective of a collection of contemporary issues, assumptions, and anxieties that highlight just how "political" even the most conventional of courtship plots can be. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and an extensive collection of historical documents relating to the composition and reception of the novel, the social implications of England's shift from a rural agrarian to an urban industrial economy, the role of women in provincial society, and the contemporary preoccupation with health and the treatment of illness.

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This mesmerising, macabre collection contains Edgar Allan Poe's best-known poetry, including 'The Raven', 'Annabel Lee' and 'Lenore', and a selection of his very best stories, along with his finest tales from the last decade of his tragically short life. Many of these stories and poems explore the familiar Poe themes of murder, obsession and love, but this volume also contains many overlooked tales of the fantastic, black comedies, parodies and hoaxes, such as 'The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall', 'Mesmeric Revolution', 'Hop-Frog', and 'The Imp of the Perverse'.This beautiful Macmillan Collector's Library edition of Tales and Poems features an afterword by David Pinching.Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

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How do you encompass all the worlds of the imagination? Within fantasy’s scope lies every possible impossibility, from dragons to spirits, from magic to gods, and from the unliving to the undying. In Fearsome Journeys, master anthologist Jonathan Strahan sets out on a quest to find the very limits of the unlimited, collecting twelve brand new stories by some of the most popular and exciting names in epic fantasy from around the world.With original fiction from Scott Lynch, Saladin Ahmed, Trudi Canavan, K J Parker, Kate Elliott, Jeffrey Ford, Robert V S Redick, Ellen Klages, Glen Cook, Elizabeth Bear, Ellen Kushner, Ysabeau S. Wilce and Daniel Abraham, Fearsome Journeys explores the whole range of the fantastic.

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A Treasury of Virtues is a collection of sayings, sermons, and teachings attributed to 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 40/661), the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, the first Shia Imam and the fourth Sunni Caliph. An acknowledged master of Arabic eloquence and a sage of Islamic wisdom, 'Ali was renowned for his eloquence: his words were collected, quoted, and studied over the centuries, and extensively anthologized, excerpted, and interpreted. Of the many compilations of 'Ali’s words, A Treasury of Virtues, compiled by the Fatimid Shafi'i judge al-Quda'i, arguably possesses the broadest compass of genres and the largest variety of themes. Included are aphorisms, proverbs, sermons, speeches, homilies, prayers, letters, dialogues, and verse, all of which provide instruction on how to be a morally upstanding human being. The shorter compilation included here, One Hundred Proverbs, is attributed to the eminent writer al-Jahiz (d. 255/869). This volume presents the first English translation of both of these important collections. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

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This award-winning story collection summons all the laughter, darkness and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hillwalkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identity - and a stiff drink. These stories, filled with a grand sense of life's absurdity, form a remarkably surefooted collection that reads like a modern-day Dubliners.

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In the twenty years that followed America’s bicentennial, narrative writing was re-formed, reflecting new political and sexual realities. With the publication of this anthology, the New Narrative era bounds back to life, ripe with dramatic propulsion and infused with the twin strains of poetry and Continental theory. Arranged chronologically, the reader will discover classic texts of New Narrative from Bob Gluck to Kathy Acker, and rare materials including period interviews, reviews, essays, and talks combined to form a new map of late twentieth-century creative rebellion.

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New poetry from the world-renowned UEA Creative Writing MA: Poetry 2016 student cohort.

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During its three-thousand-year history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation and the spiritual core of a great world religion. For writers from antiquity to the present, however, the place holds an alternative significance as a realm of fantasy, aspiration and desire. Captivating and lethal at one and the same moment, its fatal gift of beauty both transfigures and betrays those in thrall to it. Rome Stories explores the city's fateful impact through the writing of classical historians, a Renaissance sculptor, 18th-century tourists, American, British and French novelists and the authors of modern Rome, each testing and unravelling the city's ageless paradoxes. Gibbon admires the Last of the Tribunes, Goethe decodes the mysteries of the Carnival and Stendhal's subversive aristocrats mingle revolution with a little cross-dressing amid their gilt mirrors and frescoed ceilings From Plutarch to Pasolini, from Hawthorne to Wharton, the city of Caesars and popes, of dreamers, chancers and hustlers confronts the questing imagination with its eternally unflinching gaze.

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How well do you know Gaius Valerius Catullus, Ancient Rome's most notorious scandal-monger, filthsmith and lovelorn wretch? Impress your friends by having his muckiest quotes and most stinging jibes to hand at all times! In this customisable handbook, you'll find him at his most sexy, tender, savage and scurrilous, translated in myriad ways by Sidekick Books' many talented scribes. Catullus is seven genres; emoji Catullus; Catullus in Scots; poems sculpted into sex positions - and pages for you, the reader, to fill in, in your own obsene fashion.

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Ranging from one-page fantasies to novella-length studies of everyday existence, The Walk reveals the irresistible genius of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Under-appreciated even in his own lifetime, Robert Walser has nonetheless been recognised by such writers as W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and J.M. Coetzee. Like Kafka and Sebald, Walser wrote about the solitude and unease of human existence. Honest, wry and idiosyncratic, his stories are snapshots of the lives great artists, poor young men, beautiful women and talking animals alike. Ranging from the realist to the allegorical, the short fiction collected in this volume demonstrates Walser's uncanny ability to capture both life's strangeness and its small joys.

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A brave, exciting and adult collection that entertains with wit, shocks with frankness, and engages both intellect and emotion. Richly varied, it ranges from extended stories to intense pieces of flash fiction.Stories may be set in realistic settings – but develop magical narrative twists that make us see all afresh. Others begin in fantasy – returnees from the dead, a man who finds discarded hymens – but are so skilfully realist we can only believe in their actuality.

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This substantial collection brings together short stories written over a span of forty years, including those first published in the highly-rated Song for Simone (1986) and A Way to Catch the Dust (1999) and more than a dozen new stories. The previously published pieces have been extensively revised. They range from stories set in Grenada at different periods from the 1970s onwards, to several set in the UK.These are stories that have a narrative drive, a meticulousness of construction, an exactness of image and a rigorous economy in the prose. They are inventive in their explorations of a variety of narrative voices – from children to adults, male and female, Caribbean and British – that establish a persona and capture the reader from the first sentence.

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A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense ; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans. In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington's short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.

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'Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?' Mae West’s racy wisecrack could have been aimed at this book, which is packed with 69 high-calibre, sharp-shooting poems. Pleased to See Me bulges with boldly playful and seriously sensual treatments of everything you ever wanted to know about sex but never thought to find in a poem. Pleased to See Me is a sassy and unashamedly saucy celebration of fleshly pleasures by some of our finest poets. ‘These are very sexy poems not just because they are about sex,’ says Astley, ‘but because their luscious language is handled with wit and sureness of touch. This is the first book to show how the way poets write about sex has changed dramatically. As in so much else, the boundaries have shifted. Sex in modern poetry – as in films, novels and music – is treated freely and frankly, with passion, tenderness and a great sense of fun. Expect surprises and reversals as well as creepiness and unease, coupled with in-your-face exuberance. We’re talking strong language and strong emotion here.’ Editor Neil Astley caught the zeitgeist in Staying Alive, his highly praised anthology of poems on every aspect of modern living. Now he turns to more intimate matters, bringing you a spicy selection of X-rated contemporary poems for reading in bed. Pleased to See Me covers and uncovers everything we like doing with our bodies, both women and men. These are poems to have fun with. Read them to your lover. Make this your personal pillow book.

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A seasonal anthology of Christmas-themed writings to savour during the highs and lows of Christmas Day. This delightful book offers a diverse array of classic and contemporary writers who have expressed their thoughts about Christmas over the centuries - with joy, nostalgia and dazzling wit. Includes selections from Dostoevsky, Truman Capote, A.A. Milne, Jerome K Jerome, and modern day diarists, this beautiful volume is as full of delight and nostalgia as Christmas itself.

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Richard Ford, who is among the finest of American novelists and short-story writers, edits and introduces this volume. First published by Granta Books in 1992, it became the definitive anthology of American short fiction written in the last half of the twentieth century - an 'exemplary choice' in the words of the Washington Post - with stories by writers such as Eudora Welty, John Cheever and Raymond Carver (and forty others) demonstrating how much memorable power can lie in the briefest narration. Along with The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, this book constitutes an important reflection and judgement of recent American writing - as well as the superb pleasure yielded by the stories themselves.

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Delores is losing parts of herself, her typing speed, her ability to say 'hi' to work colleagues, until she is no longer Delores at all, but bare-footed Queen Mapusa, child of Africa, proud mother of modern civilization. Etheline Elvira Ransom is lying in bed, with a pair of scissors under her behind, waiting to teach her bullying, errant man a lesson. Odetta is a 54-year-old wife and mother talking her way through the day of her secret abortion. The Burning Bush women are smoking cigars and weaving each other's wild blood-red hair into tight plaits, but the plaits won't hold: somewhere, the hair says, a Bush woman is dying.In these sometimes strange, funny, tragic and truthful stories, Cherie Jones weaves paths through the joys and suffering of women's lives. The writing occupies an in-between space between the magical and the realistic, exploring the tensions between the African folk wisdom Nanan passes on from the ancestors to her grand-daughter, and the colonised dictums that the mother in 'The Bride' offers her daughter about how a respectable woman lives. ('Remember how nappy you can look if you let yourself go.')The Burning Bush Women tells so many stories, so much life, in a rich variety of voices that stay with you long after closing the book. The talented short story writer can tell a lifetime in a few pages, and in this Cherie Jones ranks with the best.Cherie Jones lives and works in Barbados. She was the winner of the first prize in the 1999 Commonwealth Short Story Competition and a prize of £2,000.

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Presents a compilation of short stories from fourteen of best Basque writers. This title provides an insight into modern Basque society and literature.

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"So persuasive are Yoon's powers of invention that I went searching for his Solla Island somewhere off the mainland of South Korea—not realizing that it exists only in this breathtaking collection of eight interlinked stories...Yoon's writing results in a fully formed, deftly executed debut. The lost lives, while heartbreaking, prove illuminating in Yoon's made-up world, so convincing and real. To read is truly to believe."—San Francisco Chronicle “Paul Yoon writes stories the way Fabergé made eggs: with untold craftsmanship, artistry, and delicacy. Again and again another layer of intricacy is revealed, proving that something as small as a story can be as satisfying and moving as a Russian novel.”—Ann Patchett “These are lovely stories, rendered with a Chekhovian elegance. They span from post–World War II to the new millennium, with characters of different ethnicities, yet each story has a timelessness and relevance that's haunting and unforgettable. Yoon is a sparkling new writer to welcome and celebrate.”—Don Lee “These are splendid stories, at once lyrical and plain-spoken and full of unusual realities. Once the Shore is a kind of fantastic Korean gazetteer that tours us confidently through unpredictable incidents and often startling conversations—Paul Yoon’s writing is erotic, haunting, original and worldly.”—Howard Norman Spanning over half a century—from the years just before the Korean War to the present—the eight stories in this collection reveal an intricate and unforgettable portrait of a single island in the South Pacific. Novelistic in scope, daring in its varied environments, Once the Shore introduces a remarkable new voice in international fiction. Publishers Weekly starred review: "Yoon's collection of eight richly textured stories explore the themes of family, lost love, silence, alienation and the effects of the Japanese occupation and the Korean War on the poor communities of a small South Korean island. In the namesake story, a lonely young waiter connects with an American widow who has come to find the cave where her husband claimed to have carved their initials during his tour of duty in Korea. The narrator shifts between Jim coping with the loss of his big brother, a fisherman killed by a surfacing American submarine, and the sorrow of the widow. In "Among the Wreckage," aging parents Bey and Soni hope to recover the body of their son, Karo, killed in a U.S. military bombing test on what was thought to be a deserted island. The sad journey provides Bey an opportunity to examine his inability to show affection to his wife and only child. Yoon's stories are introspective and tender while also painting with bold strokes the details of the lives of the invisible."

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'The oldest is 70. The youngest, 26. In between, the best list of this kind I have ever seen.' Marlon JamesIn three issues, the literary anthology from leading editor and literary critic John Freeman has gained an international following and wide acclaim: 'fresh, provocative, engrossing' (BBC.com), 'impressively diverse' (O Magazine), 'bold, searching' (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Freeman's: The Future of New Writing departs from the series' progression of themes. This special fourth installment instead introduces a list - to be announced just before publication - of thirty poets, essayists, novelists and short story writers from around the world who are shaping the literary conversation right now and will continue to impact it in years to come.Drawing on recommendations from book editors, critics, translators and authors from across the globe, Freeman's: The Future of New Writing includes pieces from a select list of writers aged 25 to 70, from over a dozen countries and writing in almost as many languages. This will be a new kind of list, and an aesthetic manifesto for our times. Against a climate of nationalism and silo'd thinking, writers remain influenced by work from outside their region, genre and especially age group. Serious readers, this special issue celebrates, have always read this way too - and Freeman's: The Future of New Writing brings them an exciting view of where writing is going next.

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In this extraordinary collection of twenty tales, Richard Ford, a master short-story writer in his own right, has selected his personal favourites from among more than two hundred of Chekhov's tales and novellas. Included are the familiar masterpieces 'The Kiss', 'The Darling' and 'The Lady with the Dog' as well as several brilliant lesser-known tales such as 'A Blunder', 'Hush!' and 'Champagne'. These stories, written between 1886 and 1899, are drawn from Chekhov's most prolific years as a short-story writer. Introduced by Richard Ford's perceptive observations on 'Why We Like Chekhov', The Essential Tales of Chekhov is an indespensable anthology.

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Biblioasis is thrilled to continue this series of beautifully illustrated, collectible, classic Christmas ghost stories designed and illustrated by world-famous cartoonist Seth.In How Fear Departed the Long Gallery, for the Peverils, the appearance of a ghost is no more upsetting than the appearance of the mailman at an ordinary house. Except for the twin toddlers in the Long Gallery. No one would dare be caught in the Long Gallery after dark. But on this quiet and cloudy afternoon, Madge Peveril is feeling rather drowsy . . .E. F. Benson was the English writer of the Mapp and Lucia series.

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Famed as a wit and bon viveur, Oscar Wilde lived up to his reputation. This selection of plays, poems and prose writings, introduced by Terry Eagleton, includes "The Importance of Being Earnest", "Lady Windermere's Fan", "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "The Critic as an Artist", Apologia", "The Soul of a Man Under Socialism", "Letter to Robert Ross", "Requiescat" and "The Ballad of Reading Goal". Terry Eagleton is the author of "Criticism and Ideology", "Marxism and Literary Criticsm" and "Literary Theory: An Introduction".

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In celebration of the Glyndebourne Festival, Jeanette Winterson has brought together some of the best loved and most critically acclaimed authors writing today to pen stories inspired by opera. Includes an introduction by Jeanette Winterson, Alexander McCall Smith on Cosi Fan Tutte, Ali Smith on Fidelio, Andrew Motion on Peter Grimes, Andrew O'Hagan on Eugene Onegin, Anne Enright on La Boheme, Antonia Fraser on The Marriage of Figaro, Colm Toibin on Pearl Fishers, Jackie Kay on The Makropulos Affair, Joanna Trollope on L'Elisir d'Amore, Julie Myerson on Ariadne auf Naxos, Jeanette Winterson on La Fanciulla del West, Kate Atkinson on La Traviata, Kate Mosse on Pelleas et Melisande, Lynne Truss on The Turn of the Screw, Marina Warner on Dido and Aeneas, Paul Bailey on The Makropulos Affair, Posy Simmonds, 'Midsummer Night at Glyndebourne', Ruth Rendell on Theodora, Sebastian Barry on Natoma, Toby Litt on Don Giovanni.

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'Sometimes when you're reading Neal Stephenson, he doesn't just seem like one of the best novelists writing in English right now; he seems like the only one.' TimeOne of the most talented and creative authors working today, Neal Stephenson is renowned for his exceptional novels - works colossal in vision and mind-boggling in complexity. Exploring and blending a diversity of topics, including technology, economics, history, science, pop culture, and philosophy, his books are the product of a keen and adventurous intellect. Not surprisingly, Stephenson is regularly asked to contribute articles, lectures, and essays to numerous outlets, from major newspapers and cutting edge magazines to college symposia. This remarkable collection brings together previously published short writings, both fiction and nonfiction as well as a new essay (and an extremely short story) created specifically for this volume. Stephenson ponders a wealth of subjects, from movies and politics to David Foster Wallace and the Midwestern American College Town; video games to classics-based sci-fi; how geekdom has become cool and how science fiction has become mainstream (whether people admit it or not); the future of publishing and the origins of his novels. By turns amusing and profound, critical and celebratory, yet always entertaining, Some Remarks offers a fascinating look into the prismatic mind of this extraordinary writer.

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Discover some of the best in speculative short fiction from the Caribbean's up and coming voices. Edited by writer Karen Lord, New Worlds, Old Ways encompasses science fiction, fantasy and more. It is the third publication of Peekash Press, an imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, and as part of CaribLit project.Do not be misled by the ‘speculative’ in the title. Although there may be robots and fantastical creatures, these common symbols are tools to frame the familiar from fresh perspectives.Here you will find the recent past and ongoing present of government and society with curfews, crime and corruption; the universal themes of family with parents and children, growth and death, love and hate; the struggle to thrive when power is capricious and revenge too bittersweet. Here too is the passage of everything – old ways, places, peoples, and ourselves – leaving nothing behind but memories, histories, stories.This anthology speaks to the fragility of our Caribbean home, but reminds the reader that although home may be vulnerable, it is also beautifully resilient. The voice of our literature declares that in spite of disasters, this people and this place shall not be wholly destroyed.Read for delight, then read for depth, and you will not be disappointed.Edited by Karen Lord, with stories by Tammi-Browne Bannister, Summer Edward, Portia Subran, Brandon O’Brien, Kevin Jared Hosein, Richard B. Lynch, Elizabeth J. Jones, Damion Wilson, Brian Franklin, Ararimeh Aiyejina and H.K. Williams.

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Caribbean Erotic is a revealing, wide-ranging and in-depth exploration of the many facets of the erotic in contemporary Caribbean literature. It includes poetry, short fiction and critical essays; work that celebrates desire, work that depicts realistically the psychology of, for instance, a woman whose desperate wish is that her abusive husband still desires her, and work that explores the role of fantasy in the erotic. Infidelity, self-respect, rape, self-love, lust and child-birth are other themes which are interpreted in the collection with honesty and insight. As an anthology, Caribbean Erotic is intended both to arouse pleasure and generate thought about what is, despite the touristic stereotypes, still a conflicted area of Caribbean literature and culture."The beauty of Caribbean Erotic is that it lifts the veils that curtain the many rooms of Caribbean sexuality; its genius is its skilful guidance through the lusty, bawdy, worshipful and spiritual wealth, as we lose our senses to find our selves." Earl Lovelace

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The adventures of the man who created Aladdin The Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account of his travels as a young man from his hometown of Aleppo to the court of Versailles and back again, which forever linked him to one of the most popular pieces of world literature, the Thousand and One Nights. Diyāb, a Maronite Christian, served as a guide and interpreter for the French naturalist and antiquarian Paul Lucas. Between 1706 and 1716, Diyāb and Lucas traveled through Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, Tripolitania, Tunis, Italy, and France. In Paris, Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, who added to his wildly popular translation of the Thousand and One Nights several tales related by Diyāb, including “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” When Lucas failed to make good on his promise of a position for Diyāb at Louis XIV’s Royal Library, Diyāb returned to Aleppo. In his old age, he wrote this engaging account of his youthful adventures, from capture by pirates in the Mediterranean to quack medicine and near-death experiences. Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Travels introduces readers to the young Syrian responsible for some of the most beloved stories from the Thousand and One Nights. An English-only edition.

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Over the course of the last 12 years, Hanif Kureishi has written short fiction. The stories are, by turns, provocative, erotic, tender, funny and charming as they deal with the complexities of relationships as well as the joys of children.This collection contains his controversial story Weddings and Beheadings, a well as his prophetic My Son the Fanatic, which exposes the religious tensions within the muslim family unit. As with his novels and screenplays, Kureishi has his finger on the pulse of the political tensions in society and how they affect people's everyday lives.

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