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
The Library of America The Collected Breece D'J Pancake: Stories,
Book SynopsisA definitive edition of the haunted and haunting stories of the legendary West Virginia writer, with rare unfinished stories and fragments and revealing lettersBreece D'J Pancake published only a handful of stories before he took his own life in 1979, just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday. Those stories and a small number of others found among his papers after his death comprise the remarkable posthumous collection The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (1983), recognized at the time as an American Dubliners (Jayne Anne Phillips) and a collection by a young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's (Joyce Carol Oates). Kurt Vonnegut called him merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read. Today his diverse admirers include Margaret Atwood, Andre Dubus III, Tom Waits, and Lorde.The Collected Breece D'J Pancake brings together the original landmark book, several story drafts and fragments, and a selection of Pancake's letters to offer an unprecedented picture of his life and art. Among the unfinished stories are fragments from Pancake's two planned novels. The letters document his relationship with writers such as Peter Taylor, John Casey, James Alan McPherson, and Mary Lee Settle, and offer a picture of his collaborative relationship with his mother, who sent him newspaper clippings and helped him research his stories. Pancake's stories are the only stories written in just this way, Jayne Anne Phillips writes in her introduction, from inside the minds of protagonists coming of age in the mountains of an Appalachian world closed to others. At once beautiful and relentlessly bleak, the stories concern miners, truckers, farmers, waitresses, and others facing constricted economic and life prospects. In one way or another, his characters are stuck, hoping for a change in fortune they can neither relinquish nor quite bring themselves to believe in, the land and the past making equally strong claims on their darkening present.
£19.96
The Library of America Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected
Book SynopsisThe definitive edition of the complete works of the grand dame of American science fiction begins with this volume gathering two novels and her collected storiesAn original and eerily prophetic writer, Octavia E. Butler used the conventions of science fiction to explore the dangerous legacy of racism in America in harrowingly personal terms. She broke new ground with books that featured complex Black female protagonists—“I wrote myself in,” she would later recall—establishing herself as one of thepioneers of the Afrofuturist aesthetic. In 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, in recognition of her achievement in creating new aspirations for the genre and for American literature. This first volume in the Library of America edition of Butler’s collected works opens with her masterpiece, Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century. Its heroine, Dana, a Black woman, is pulled back and forth between the present and the pre–Civil War past, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save to preserve her own. In Fledgling, an amnesiac discovers that she is a vampire, with a difference: she is a new, experimental birth with brown skin, giving her the fearful ability to go out in sunlight. Rounding out the volume are eight short stories and five essays—including two never before collected, plus a newly researched chronology of Butler’s life and career and helpful explanatory notes prepared by scholar Gerry Canavan. Butler’s friend, the writer and editor Nisi Shawl, provides an introduction.
£28.00
The Library of America Jean Stafford: Complete Stories & Other Writings
Book SynopsisFor the first time, the complete stories of a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of the form, plus her fascinating portrait of the mother one of the world''s most infamous assassinsThis volume collects for the first time the complete stories of a Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the form, a writer acclaimed for her acute psychological insight, exacting eye for detail, and mordant sensibility. Set in New England, Colorado, New York, and Europe, Jean Stafford’s stories intimately examine the lives of women and men beset by restlessness, dislocation, and isolation. “The Interior Castle” takes us inside an accident victim’s physical and mental pain; “A Country Love Story” chillingly depicts marital estrangement and mental breakdown amidst the solitude of a Maine winter; “Bad Characters” is the exuberant story of a young girl led into mischief by an incorrigible friend; and “An Influx of Poets” is a haunting story of a marriage wrecked by literary ambition and egotism. The volume also includes A Mother in History, Stafford’s controversial journalistic profile of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, and three revealing literary essays.
£33.25
The Library of America O. Henry: 101 Stories (LOA #345)
Book SynopsisThe ultimate O. Henry: an annotated edition of classic tales by America''s master storytellerTexas troubadour, convicted embezzler, and adopted New Yorker William Sidney Porter?better known as O. Henry?was one of the world?s great storytellers. A master of cunning plots and a gifted humorist, he is best known today for his beloved tale ?The Gift of the Magi.? But O. Henry?s palette of moods and methods was as expansive as his exuberant imagination.This Library of America volume offers a fresh look at the full range of his literary genius. Here are 101 stories, including such favorites as ?The Ransom of Red Chief,? ?The Last of the Troubadours,? and ?The Cop and the Anthem,? alongside lesser-known and previously uncollected stories, including three early tales published here for the first time. With full annotation and a newly researched chronology of Porter?s life and career, this is a definitive edition for modern readers of a major American writer.
£26.25
The Library of America Ray Bradbury: The Illustrated Man, The October
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£26.40
The Library of America Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1970s
Book SynopsisThe late novels and stories of America’s greatest myth-maker and chronicler of the Jewish American experience“Is Malamud an American Master? Of course. He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations.” —Cynthia Ozick“[A] short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself.” —Flannery O’ConnorThe long-awaited third and final volume of Library of America’s edition of Bernard Malamud’s writings brings together three novels and thirteen stories of the 1970s and 80s that reaffirm his place in the American pantheon. The Tenants (1971) chronicles the growing tensions between two male writers—one Jewish, the other Black—who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house. Dubin’s Lives (1976) is a fascinating portrait of a middle-aged biographer who becomes involved with a woman half his age while researching a life of D.H. Lawrence—an affair that unsettles things in expected and unexpected ways. God’s Grace (1982) is a wildly inventive, darkly humorous postapocalyptic novel whose cast includes the lone human survivor of the Day of Devastation, a group of talking chimps, and other (speechless) primates—who try to establish a New Covenant with God. The stories in this volume confirm Malamud as a master storyteller, from the Kafkaesque unbridled fantasy of “Talking Horse” to the final “fictive biographies” of “In Kew Gardens,” about Virginia Woolf, and “Alma Redeemed,” about the Austrian composer Alma Mahler. Rounding out the volume are “Long Work, Short Life,” Malamud’s hard-to-find “casual memoir” about his writing life, and the previously unpublished “A Lost Bar-Mitzvah,” a poignant sketch of Malamud’s own childhood. This deluxe edition includes a chronology of Malamud''s life and career and detailed notes by Malamud biographer Philip Davis.
£38.25
The Library of America Charles Portis: Collected Works (LOA #369):
Book SynopsisThe ultimate Portis: for the first time in one collector''s volume, the complete fiction and collected nonfiction of the author of True GritSummer reading recommendation in THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, and THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL"Charles Portis is one of the great pure pleasures available in American literature." —Ron Rosenbaum"Like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, Charles Portis’s True Grit captures the naïve elegance of the American voice." —Jonathan Lethem"No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does." —Donna Tartt"His fiction is the funniest I know." —Roy Blount, Jr.Twice adapted as a film, first in a version starring John Wayne and then by the Coen Brothers, True Grit is a wonder of novelistic perfection, told in the unforgettable voice of 14-year-old Mattie Ross as she sets out to avenge her murdered father in a quest that brings her out of her native Arkansas and into the wilds of the Choctaw Nation of the 1870s. One of the great literary Westerns, it is also a novel that has invited comparison with The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Portis''s deadpan debut novel Norwood (1966) is, like True Grit, the story of a quest, though here the stakes are far lower: an auto mechanic from Texas embarks on a madcap journey to New York City to try and recover $70 owed to him from an Army buddy. A book that according to Roy Blount Jr. “no one should die without having read,” The Dog of the South (1979) is yet a third saga of pursuit, this time all the way to Central America. Ray Midge is on the road looking for the man who has run off with his car (and of somewhat less interest to him, his wife.)Masters of Atlantis (1985) conjures the fictional cult of Gnomonism and takes an uproarious plunge into the dark heart of conspiratorial thinking and schismatic in-fighting.Gringos (1991), set in Mexico, follows an expatriate ex-Marine in his search to find a UFO hunter gone missing in the Yucatan, amid a supporting cast of archaeologists, drug-addled hippie millenarians, and the son of the “bravest dog in all Mexico.”A generous gathering of the nonfiction reveals Portis''s skills as a reporter, above all in his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement; his appreciation of Arkansas history and landscape, as in “The Forgotten River”; and his poignancy as a family memoirist, on display in his recollection “Combinations of Jacksons.”
£33.75
The Library of America Where The Light Falls: Selected Stories
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£15.29
Little, Brown & Company Holidays On Ice
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£15.18
Athena Star Press Nameless
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£7.05
Waking Lion Press Selected Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Large-Print Edition
£15.09
Waking Lion Press Dubliners, Large-Print Edition
Book SynopsisThis masterful collection of fifteen tales are among the most studied stories in English literature, offering tightly focused observations of the lives of Dublin''s poorer classes. At least one of the stories, The Dead, is considered a short-story masterpiece. Together, they provide an excellent introduction to the work of one of the world''s most influential novelists. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.
£14.00
Waking Lion Press The Death of Ivan Ilych
£9.89
Waking Lion Press The Complete Father Brown volume 1
£16.18
Waking Lion Press The Innocence of Father Brown, Large-Print Edition
£12.91
Waking Lion Press Hindu Tales from the Sanskrit, Large-Print Edition
£11.83
University of Alaska Press The City Beneath the Snow: Stories
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£13.25
University of Alaska Press Sin Eaters: Stories
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£17.95
Bold Strokes Books Breathless
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£13.46
Bella Books Twelve o'Clock Tales
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£14.02
Bella Books The Dirty Diner: Gay Erotica on the Menu
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£14.02
Bold Strokes Books Amor and More: Love Everafter
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£14.02
£11.35
Aegypan Reginald by Saki Fiction Classic Literary Short
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£17.45
£12.30
£18.00
Book Jungle The Categories - Aristotle
£10.95
Book Jungle The Party and Other Stories
£14.95
Book Jungle Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains
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£10.76
Tark Classic Fiction The Politeness of Princes & Other School Stories - From the Manor Wodehouse Collection, a Selection from the Early Works of P. G. Wodehouse
£12.84
Tark Classic Fiction What Men Live By & Other Tales: Stories by Tolstoy
£12.84
Tark Classic Fiction The Kreutzer Sonata & Other Stories - Tales by Tolstoy
£9.93
Tark Classic Fiction A House of Pomegranates
£8.01
Tark Classic Fiction A Desperate Character and Other Stories
£8.00
Serenity Publishers, LLC Three Lives
£9.93
Serenity Publishers, LLC The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent
£11.87
Serenity Publishers, LLC The Mysterious Stranger & Other Stories
£8.97
Serenity Publishers, LLC Danger! and Other Stories
£9.46
Serenity Publishers, LLC Some Short Christmas Stories (Large Print Edition)
£8.97
SMK Books The Rider on the White Horse
£12.84
University Press of Mississippi New Orleans Sketches
Book SynopsisIn 1925 William Faulkner began his professional writing career in earnest while living in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He had published a volume of poetry (The Marble Faun), had written a few book reviews, and had contributed sketches to the University of Mississippi student newspaper. He had served a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Corps and while working in a New Haven bookstore had become acquainted with the wife of the writer Sherwood Anderson.In his first six months in New Orleans, where the Andersons were living, Faulkner made his initial foray into serious fiction writing. Here in one volume are the pieces he wrote while in the French Quarter. These were published locally in the Times-Picayune and in the Double Dealer.The pieces in New Orleans Sketches broadcast seeds that would take root in later works. In their themes and motifs these sketches and stories foreshadow the intense personal vision and style that would characterize Faulkner's mature fiction. As his sketches take on parallels with Christian liturgy and as they portray such characters as an idiot boy similar to Benjy Compson, they reveal evidence of his early literary sophistication.In praise of New Orleans Sketches, Alfred Kazin wrote in the New York Times Book Review that ""the interesting thing for us now, who can see in this book the outline of the writer Faulkner was to become, is that before he had published his first novel he had already determined certain main themes in his work.""In his trailblazing introduction, Carvel Collins often called ""Faulkner's best-informed critic,"" illuminates the period when the sketches were written as the time that Faulkner was making the transition from poet to novelist.""For the reader of Faulkner,"" Paul Engle wrote in the Chicago Tribune, ""the book is indispensable. Its brilliant introduction . . . is full both of helpful information . . . and of fine insights."" ""We gain something more than a glimpse of the mind of a young genius asserting his power against a partially indifferent environment,"" states the Book Exchange (London). ""The long introduction . . . must rank as a major literary contribution to our knowledge of an outstanding writer: perhaps the greatest of our times.""
£19.96
Livingston Press at the University of West Al Deep Water Dark Horizon
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£17.09
Book Jungle A Simple Soul
£10.95
Kent State University Press The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical
Book SynopsisThough it highlights just one year of writing, this third volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury represents a crucial moment at the midpoint of his first full decade as a professional writer. The original versions of the 1940s stories recovered for The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, presented in the order in which they were written and first sent of to find life in the magazine market, suggest that Bradbury’s masks didn’t always appeal to his editors. The Volume 3 stories were all written between March 1944 and March 1945, and the surviving letters of this period reveal the private con ict raging between Brad- bury’s efforts to define a distinct style and creative vision at home in Los Angeles and the tyranny of genre requirements imposed by the distant pulp publishing world in New York. Most of the twenty-two stories composed during this pivotal year in his development re ect the impact of these creative pres- sures. is period also produced important markers in his maturing creativity with “The Miracles of Jamie,” “Invisible Boy,” and “Ylla,” which were among the rst wave of Bradbury tales to reach the mainstream markets. The early versions of Bradbury’s stories recovered for Volume 3, some emerging from his surviving typescripts and several that restore lost text preserved only in the rare Canadian serial versions, provide an unprecedented snapshot of his writing and his inspirations. Un- derlying this year of creativity was the expanding world of readings in modern and contemporary literature that would prove to be a crucial factor in his development as a master storyteller. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury is edited in compliance with the highest scholarly standards by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies and bears the Modern Language Association’s seal of approval for scholarly editions. Each volume includes a general introduction, biographical timeline, summary of unpublished stories, historical commentaries for each story, textual apparatus, and a chronological catalog.
£60.75
Fantagraphics The Octopus Rises
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£19.54
Prime Books The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth
Book Synopsis Kyle Murchison Booth is the unlikeliest of characters to gain a cult following, yet he has. Eccentric, socially awkward Booth is an introverted museum archivist, descended from a most unusual family, who frequently finds himself in the midst of the most unsettling supernatural experiences and strange necromantic mysteries. A gentleman and a scholar, the unwilling hero persevered through The Bone Key, a series of interconnected short stories, to win readers' hearts (and possibly their souls). This new edition, with a "puzzle" cover and a new introduction by one of Booth's "successors" at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum, will delight current fans and allow even more to discover its dark charms.
£13.29
Prime Books Somewhere Beneath Those Waves
Book SynopsisThis is the first non-themed collection of critically acclaimed author Sarah Monette's best short fiction. To paraphrase Hugo-award winner Elizabeth Bear's introduction: "Monette's prose is lapidary, her ideas are fantastical and chilling. She has studied the craft of fantastic fiction from the pens of masters and mistresses of the genre. She is a poet of the awkward and the uncertain, exalter of the outcast, the outre, and the downright weird. There is nothing else quite like Sarah Monette's fiction".
£10.99
Prime Books Kabu Kabu
Book SynopsisKabu kabu—unregistered illegal Nigerian taxis—generally get you where you need to go. Nnedi Okorafor’s Kabu Kabu, however, takes the reader to exciting, fantastic, magical, occasionally dangerous, and always imaginative locations you didn’t know you needed. This debut short story collection by an award-winning author includes notable previously published material, a new novella co-written with New York Times-bestselling author Alan Dean Foster, six additional original stories, and a brief foreword by Whoopi Goldberg.Trade Review“It is a brave and generous book.” – Strange Horizons“Okorafor shows the good and the bad, both exploitation and hope, strength and evil of the people. And she adds a healthy dose of magic to the mix.” – SFF Book Reviews“Kobu Kobu takes us on rides of the heart and mind.” – Whoopi Goldberg“One of the strongest qualities of African literature is that it gives you the feeling of intimacy as if the griot or teller is speaking quietly to you as one of a selected circle of listeners. Orkorafor conjures up that feeling. Two of my favorite stories here, “Biafra” and “Icon” deal with the topic of genocide and the subject of oil, told from inside out. They are matter-of-fact, sometimes brutal and raw, and do not dodge the reality of tribal conflict or greed. Finally, Okorafor doesn’t turn her back on any of the current hot button issues. She tackles the controversial topics of greed, gender, sexuality, politics, nationalism, technology, the depletion of the earth’s resources, fear, blood ties, conformity, and conflict. On the heels of the acclaimed Who Fears Death, Okorafor has done herself proud and should acquire many readers with this sterling effort.” – African American Literature Book Club“It’s a collection that I’m glad to see published, and one that contributes to the field in a real and exciting way.” – Tor.com
£13.77
