Short stories

Book SynopsisThese eight short stories and novella travel from Panama''s dusty city streets to its humid beaches to create an affecting portrait of a country in transition. They illustrate family bonds and generational conflicts, youthful infatuation and genuine passion. Tender, ambitious, bold, and unflinching, they herald the arrival of a fresh, exciting, and lavishly talented new voice in American literature.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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

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