Search results for ""And Other Stories""

To all outside appearances, Edna Pontellier is a respectable married woman, but one lazy summer vacation and an apparently harmless infatuation will push Edna beyond this quiet, settled life, placing her directly at odds with society's expectations of what a woman should be.

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Born in Transylvania in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Miklos Banffy lived to witness both the zenith of that Empire and its fall. The short stories in this collection, from the tale of the idle young man dawdling pleasantly in Venice to the Romanian villager meditating revenge on his tormentor, draw on the author's experiences of life, love, sacrifice, betrayal and courage, and reveal, as a recurring leitmotif, an indomitable will to survive. The translator, Thomas Sneddon, lives in Budapest where he teaches translation at the Peter Pazmany University.

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In many of his stories Ezerioo was an initiator in the portrayal of the "fine neurosis". He was one of the first writers of Latvian prose to dispute the single - dimensional (e.g., good/evil) portrayal of a human being. The people in Ezerioo' prose are individuals with their own unique characteristics, often ambivalent, and subject to change in time and situations. As is common in modern literature, Ezerioo often blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, frequently making his reader laugh about the serious while aching when reading the humorous. Ezerioo' best work was created in the genre of the short story. Among his literary models were Boccaccio, Maupassant and Poe. During his active literary working life, which lasted the short space of approximately 5 to 6 years of a short life, Ezerioo seemingly grasped an encyclopaedia of possibilities and subject matter, as well as the versatility of storytelling, not avoiding either classical subjects or the repetition of characters so traditional in short stories.

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Thirteen stories are linked by the daily life of a husband and wife and their three children

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'Brilliant' SUNDAY TIMES'Compelling and unnerving' SPECTATOR**A NEW STATESMAN Book of the Year 2023**This first collection of stories by Lawrence Osborne perfectly showcases his talent for tension, atmosphere - and characters out of their depthA naïve young linguist sent to the forests of Irian Jaya is manipulated into betraying her mission by a ruthless and disturbed pastor. A deaf girl hired as a maid by a wealthy New York couple turns the tables on her obliviously abusive employers and answers blackmail with blackmail. A psychiatrist treating a girl in rural England becomes ensnared in a love affair that threatens to destroy her career; while a young couple on holiday in Oman accidentally witness a killing, which leads to their being hunted as well. An entomologist at a remote hotel in the Andamans survives a tsunami and uses a dead body to further her study of ants.Collected here for the first time, Lawrence Osborne's stories, like his novels - 'elaborate and intricately plotted dances macabres' (The Times) - feel like nightmares set against calmly and meticulously observed backgrounds. With their nods to Daphne du Maurier and Roald Dahl, these nine long-form stories explore characters lost in the shadowed borders between the mundane, the fantastical and the violence of the natural world.

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Jack Kamen''s stories for The Vault of Horror, Tales From the Crypt, and The Haunt of Fear favoured unnerving creepiness over gruesome shock. With his penchant for deft delineations of scheming women, jealous husbands, murderous love triangles, and not-so-innocent children, Kamen''s pen laid down a precise, sure line that brought each story''s shock ending into sharp relief. This volume features 27 Kamen favorites, drawn at the peak of powers, including: ''Kamen''s Kalamity,'' our title story, featuring the ''true'' origin story of the artist himself! When the pressures of drawing his stories, dealing with his editors, and pleasing his wife and kids become too much, comic book artist Jack Kamen loses it, and that night, when the moon is full... ''How Green Was My Alley,'' the cautionary tale of a travelling salesman who spends every other week at home with his wife. And every other other week at his other home with his other wife! In a grisly finale, echoing the EC shocker ''Foul Play,

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An extraordinary collection from the architect of the Polity universe, Neal Asher's The Gabble - And Other Short Stories reveals a universe of unbridled imagination, and each one is a delight in itself.Much of Neal Asher’s fiction is set in the galactic civilization he calls the Polity, an alliance of human-populated worlds. And in this collection of thirteen marvellously inventive and action-packed short stories, Asher is on top form. You can expect conflicted humans, fiendishly clever plot twists, extraordinary technologies and so much more. The discerning reader can also savour tales of alien poisons, the walking dead, the Sea of Death, and the putrefactor symbiont. No one does weird, wonderful and downright gruesome aliens better than Neal Asher, so prepare to visit his favourites. Sample the lifestyles of creatures such as the gabbleduck and the hooder, as Asher takes you on a wild ride into his vividly-imagined futures.

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Norman Schwenk's animal stories are a long way from Disneyland. They focus on the strange, complicated links people forge with animals, and how they illuminate the even more mysterious links people have with other people.

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Each story in Sara Maitland’s collection enacts a daring kind of alchemy, fusing together raw elements of scientific theory with ancient myth, folkloric archetype and contemporary storytelling. All the more remarkable is that each of these stories sprang from a conversation with a scientist and grew directly out of cutting-edge research.

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Primarily known as a dramatist, Chekhov also wrote short stories. This selection of his work includes "The Swedish Match", "Easter Eve", "Mire", "On the Road", "Verotchka", "Volodya", "The Kiss", "Sleepy" and "The Steppe".

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These eleven masterful stories - the first collection from acclaimed author Jennifer Egan - deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan's characters, models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls, are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience. They set out from locations as exotic as China and Bora Bora, as cosmopolitan as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois to seek their own transformations. Elegant and poignant, the stories in Emerald City are seamless evocations of self-discovery.

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Mysterious fossils found deep under London's streets create a whole new 'heritage' industry - but what does selling London's history mean for the city? In these remarkable stories Moorcock explores the parts of London most of us will never see, and creates a patchwork of tales which build up to a portrait of the whole city.Contains the stories: Lost London A Winter AdmiralThe Third Jungle Book London Blood A Portrait in IvoryDoves in the Circle A Twist in the Lines The Clapham Antichrist Cake London Bone Stories London Flesh The Cairene Purse Furniture Through the Shaving Mirror

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This new selection of stories featuring Inspector Maigret - three of which are published in English for the first time - takes the detective from a mysterious death in a Cannes hotel to a love triangle in the Loire countryside and a bitter rivalry within a Parisian family.Written during the Second World War, just a few years after Simenon had published what was intended to be his last novel featuring Inspector Maigret, these tales of human frailty and deceit distil the atmosphere, themes and psychological intensity that make Simenon's famous detective series so compelling. Translated by Ros Schwartz'Not just the world's bestselling detective series, but an imperishable literary legend . . . he exposes secrets and crimes not by forensic wizardry, but by the melded powers of therapist, philosopher and confessor' Boyd Tonkin, Times

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Raw, lyrical and blazing with intensity, these short stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man.'He saw the dark bird glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold'Ranging from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlour, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War, they all display the musically layered voices, soaring language and sheer ebullience that made Ellison a giant of twentieth-century American writing. Written early in Ellison's career, several of these fourteen stories were unpublished in his lifetime, including 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' which features in this collection for the first time. 'Approach the simple elegance of Chekhov' Washington Post

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This collection brings together six of Turgenev's best-known `long' short stories, in which he turns his skills of psychological observation and black comedy to subjects as diverse as the tyranny of serfdom, love, and revenge on the Russian steppes. These stories all display the elegance and clarity of Turgenev's finest writing. Richard Freeborn was until recently Professor of Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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This volume includes "Daisy Miller", "Pandora", "The Patagonia", and "Four Meetings". ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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'See!...The woods are alive! Already the Great Ones are there, and the dance will soon begin! The salve is here! Anoint yourself and come!' One of the greatest writers of the strange and weird, Algernon Blackwood evolved from a teller of ghost stories to a pioneering master of such emergent fictional modes as cosmic horror and nature Gothic. In tales whose settings range from the eerie North Woods of Canada to the mysterious sands of the Egyptian desert, Blackwood blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman, living and dead, beckoning the reader into strange borderlands where alien forces lurk, waiting for the chance to break through into our world. This new selection of Blackwood's shorter fiction constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of his work to date. Included here are such undisputed classics as 'The Wendigo', 'The Willows', and 'Ancient Sorceries', as well as two superbly unsettling novellas, 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' and 'A Descent into Egypt', and ten other stories short and long, drawn from collections spanning Blackwood's long writing career. Aaron Worth's introduction and notes situate these tales in the context of Blackwood's own upbringing in an evangelical Victorian household, as well as in relation to such topics as late-imperial British history and the emergence of modern ecological thought. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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A vitally alive and ever-surprising collection of stories from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet 'Bold and sensitive. Smith's prose is a joy' IndependentIndividually lucid and luminous, these tales resonate subtly together. In examining the distances and connections between ourselves and others, expertly inching us closer to the bone, Ali Smith's storytelling has never seemed so necessary, so moving or so joyous.*****'Captures quiet epiphanies of the extraordinary in the mundane' Sunday Times 'These stories fizz with life' The Times Literary Supplement

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In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four years that followed were among the most significant in his life, and deeply influenced the stories collected here. Begun in 1852 but unfinished for a decade, The Cossacks describes the experiences of Olenin, a young cultured Russian who comes to despise civilization after spending time with the wild Cossack people. Sevastopol Sketches, based on Tolstoy's own experiences of the siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55, is a compelling consideration of the nature of war, while Hadji Murat, written towards the end of his life, returns to the Caucasus of Tolstoy's youth to explore the life of a great leader torn apart by a conflict of loyalties. Written at the end of the nineteenth century, it is amongst the last and greatest of Tolstoy's shorter works.

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With their penetrating psychological insight and their emphasis on human dignity, respect and forgiveness, Dostoyevsky's early short stories contain the seeds of the themes that came to his major novels. Poor Folk, the author's first great literary triumph, is the story of a tragic relationship between an impoverished copy clerk and a young seamstress, told through their passionate letters to each other. In The Landlady Dostoyevsky portrays a dreamer hero who is captivated by a curious couple and becomes their lodger. Mr Prokharchin, inspired by a true story, is a sly comedy centring on an eccentric miser, and Polzunkov is a powerful character sketch which, in common with the other tales in this volume, questions the very nature of existence.

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The breathtaking short story collection from the Costa-shortlisted Irish writerThree gunshots on the Irish border define the course of a young man's life; a writer clings fast to a star-crossed affair with a woman who has never been fully in his reach; a fisherman accustomed to hard labour rolls up his sleeves to dig a grave for his child; a pair of newly-weds embark on their first adventure, living wild on the deserted Beginish Island. Spanning a century and two continents - from the muddy fields of Ireland to a hotel room in Paris, a dingy bar in Segovia to an aeroplane bound for Taipei - these densely layered tales reveal the quiet heroism and gentle dignity of ordinary life. Ranging from the elegiac to the brutally confrontational, Billy O'Callaghan's stories explore the resilience of the human heart and its ability to keep beating even in the wake of grief, trauma and lost love.'The best fiction I have read this year... Taut, subtle and moving, and brought off beautifully' John Banville, Best Books of 2020, Irish Times

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In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.

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The stories collected here illuminate two recent phenomena in China. The first migration—the "up to the mountains, down to the villages" movement of the late 1960s to 1970s, where approximately twelve to fourteen million educated urban youth left the cities to work on farms, and the large voluntary migration since the 1990s of tens of millions of peasants into the cities.

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With this new collection the acclaimed novelist Christopher Burns proves his mastery of the short story form. His intelligent but conflicted characters face their decisive moments across wide ranges of time and place, each action reshaping their futures and redefining their pasts. Interplaying with these choices are locations that underpin and define each story, such as a repository of unstable nitrate film, a desert outcrop where a daughter vanished, a winter barn in which a silent refugee works without explanation, and a Parisian suicide that echoes down far more than a century.In these stories, landscape itself can be a determinant, as essential to the narrative as the characters that walk into a draining reservoir, a Neolithic cave, or a remote Greek church. For these are driven people haunted or determined, alert or unaware, lovers or doubters, saviours or perpetrators.Several of these stories have previously appeared in publications as diverse as Les Temps Modernes, Granta Short

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Longlisted for the Edge Hill PrizeLike Fado consists of thirteen individual stories that culminate in the extended novella-like story, ‘Whitethorn’. Each story takes us into the lived experience and psychological dilemmas of its characters, dissolving certitude in favour of richly ambivalent and suggestive endings as storylines merge and diverge, enriching each other through their narrative resonance. The natural world is brought to life in vivid detail in locations that range from the North-West of England to Europe and Africa, whilst the interior lives of characters form the dramatic locus of each piece, rendered in language that is precise, lyrical and evocative.

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McCorkle, author of the New York Times bestselling Life After Life and the widely acclaimed Hieroglyphics ("One of our wryest, warmest, wisest storytellers" -Rebecca Makkai), brings us a breath-taking collection of stories that offers an intimate look at the moments when a person's life changes forever.Old Crimes delves into the lives of characters who hold their secrets and misdeeds close, even as the past continues to reverberate over time and across generations. And despite the characters' yearnings for connection, they can't seem to tell the whole truth. In "Low Tones," a woman uses her hearing impairment as a way to guard herself from her husband's commentary. In "Lineman," a telephone lineman strains to connect to his family even as he feels pushed aside in a digital world. In "Confessional," a young couple buys a confessional booth for fun, only to discover the cost of honesty.Profoundly moving and unforgettable, for fans of Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, and Lily King, the stories in Old Crimes reveal why McCorkle has long been considered a master of the form, probing lives full of great intensity, longing and affection, and deep regret."Jill McCorkle has had an extraordinary ear for the music of ordinary life since the beginning of her career, able to work with the voices we know so well to write these stories about what they will not tell us, what they would rather not tell us, what they hope to tell us, what too often goes unsaid. And this collection is a new wonder." -Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

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In the fields of whispering sugar cane, the rugged Atlantic coast of crashing breakers and the womb-like gullies of Barbados, the characters in these stories find a landscape which mirrors their inner lives. Set at crucial points in Caribbean history, from slavery to the present; from Nanny, who cannot bear another day's captivity when rumours of slavery's abolition reach the island, to Hilda, returning home after many years in Britain, these are strong and moving portrayals of women attempting to define themselves in situations where power is determined by race and gender.Nanny knows that "neither she nor others could really call their lives their own", but it is not only under slavery that June Henfrey's women confront this fact. In doing so, their lives enlarge our sense of history."In her memorable story, 'The Gully', Quashebah, a slave who is raped and made pregnant by her overseer, flees and seeks sustenance for her secret dreams of freedom in a limestone cave, where she finds both welcome and protection. A particularly deep-rooted story is 'Freedom Come', telling of Nanny, one of the enthusiasts and mobilisers of Bussa's slave rebellion in Barbados in 1816. Henfrey's portrait, convincing and assured, is of an 'old African who had never yielded to the fact of her enslavement. All her characters are of this mettle, whether born of slavery, colonialism or migration, and June Henfrey's stories have left us the words and spirit of a writer and woman whose life and creative impulse was ever to seek freedom and betterment for her people on two sides of an ocean."Chris SearleJune Henfrey was born and grew up in Barbados. She later worked in community education in Liverpool. She wrote the stories in Coming Home during the two years before she died in 1992.

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