Search results for ""And Other Stories""

In 2017, inspired in part by Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, the acclaimed English novelist John Lanchester published a ghost story in The New Yorker. "Signal," an eerie story of contemporary life and the perils of technology, was a sensation among readers—and since then Lanchester has written several more. Reality and Other Stories gathers the best of these, taking readers to an uncanny world familiar to fans of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. Household gizmos with a mind of their own. Mysterious cell-phone calls from unknown numbers. Reality TV shows and the creeping suspicion that none of this is real… Reality and Other Stories is a book of disquiet that captures the severe disconnection and distraction of our time.

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A boy finds a vocation as a weaver of bread. A Russian woman, thought dead, e-mails greetings to her adolescent sister in a Canadian suburb. An investment banker vanishes and is found fifteen years later when his daughter discovers a painting of herself in a distant gallery. With wit and ache, Daniel Karasik's Faithful and Other Stories evokes a world of seekers, characters panning for meaning in environments by turns hostile, mystifying, and enchanted. This collection brings together stories honoured with the CBC Short Story Prize, The Malahat Review's Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for Fiction, and the Alta Lind Cook Prize.

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Shortlisted for the 2021 Swansea University Dylan Thomas PrizeShortlisted for a 2021 James Tait Black AwardShortlisted for the PEN/Robert W Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection 2021'Sardonic, monstrous, tender' Sunday Times'Startling . . . profound' Daily MailIn Alligator and Other Stories, Dima Alzayat captures luminously how it feels to be ‘other’: as a Syrian, as an Arab, as an immigrant, as a woman. Each one of the nine stories collected here is a snapshot of those moments when unusual circumstances suddenly distinguish us from our neighbours, when our difference is thrown into relief.Here are ‘dangerous’ women transgressing, missing children in 1970s New York, a family who were once Syrian but have now lost their name, and a young woman about to discover the hollowness of the American dream. At its centre lies ‘Alligator’: a remarkable compilation of real and invented sources, which rescues from history the story of a Syrian American couple who were murdered at the hands of the state.Alzayat explores experiences that are startling and real, delivering an emotional punch that lingers long after reading.

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In awarding him the Nobel Prize in 2008, the Swedish Academy hailed J. M. G. Le Clézio as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation.” The outlying humanity that Le Clézio explores in this collection of stories finds its expression in the understanding of children. The world of Mondo and Other Stories is that of a natural world pushed to the margins by complacent, indifferent modernity. Haunting and beautiful, these stories speak to a universal longing for a life beyond the confines and trappings of modern existence. In each tale it is a child who can see and appreciate these places filled with wonder and knowledge. Mondo is a little boy whose connection to the beauty in everything unites a seaside town. Little Cross perturbs the order of things with her question: “What is blue? Daniel flees his stifling school and absent parents for the sea. All these children, like the wise billy goat in the collection’s final story, understand “so many things, not the things you find in books that men like to talk about but silent, strong things, things full of beauty and mystery.” And in the end, so do we.

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Rose Tremain's fiction often finds itself drawn into the "wide skies and watery byways of East Anglia". The short stories gathered in Wildtrack, selected from her collections published over three decades, convey the sense of isolation, darkness and secrecy the region fosters: a sense that has long fired Tremain's imagination.At first sight, these four stories might seem to have little in common apart from their East Anglian settings. But some of the protagonists also share a feeling of anxiety that there is something wrong or missing in their lives which they must confront. The title story, Wildtrack, and Peerless both tackle the question of how we find meaning in a secular life, while in A Shooting Season, the main character believes she has found a safe haven, free from intervention of any kind – but then The Past makes an appearance.

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In these three sea stories, based on his own experience, Conrad invests his portraits of mundane steamers and their crews with epic qualities of fortitude and courage in the face of overwhelming natural odds. At the same time, he probes the psychological condition of men together and under pressure with the greatest delicacy, raising the adventure story to the level of high art. The supreme poet of the sailor's life, Conrad here establishes his reputation as a master storyteller.

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Irrevocably tied to the Carolinas, these stories tell tales of the woebegone, their obsessions with decay, and the haunting ache of the region itself—the land of the dwindling pines, the isolation inherent in the mountains and foothills, and the loneliness of boomtowns. Predominantly working-class women challenge the status quo by rejecting any lingering expectations or romantic notions of Southern femininity. Small businesses are failing. Factories are closing. Money is tight. The threat of violence lingers for women and girls. Through their collective grief, heartache, and unsettling circumstances, many of these characters become feral and hell-bent on survival. Gilstrap’s prose teems with wildness and lyricism, showing the Southern gothic tradition of storytelling is alive and feverishly unwell in the twenty-first century.

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Transporting us to all corners of the globe, the tales in Louis de Bernières’ worldly and entertaining collection Labels and Other Stories feature a cast of unlikely and unforgettable heroes who can be found collecting luxury tinned cat-food labels, posting fish to the President, falling in love with dolphin deities and dining with Brazilian street thieves. And in ‘Gunter Weber's Confession’, we return once more to the Greek island of Captain Corelli's Mandolin and its much-loved characters.Full of wit, charm and warmth, Labels and Other Stories shows the imaginative range and unique storytelling power of one of our msot treasured writers.

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In 2017, inspired in part by Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, the acclaimed English novelist John Lanchester published a ghost story in The New Yorker. "Signal," an eerie story of contemporary life and the perils of technology, was a sensation among readers—and since then Lanchester has written several more. Reality and Other Stories gathers the best of these, taking readers to an uncanny world familiar to fans of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. Household gizmos with a mind of their own. Mysterious cell-phone calls from unknown numbers. Reality TV shows and the creeping suspicion that none of this is real… Reality and Other Stories is a book of disquiet that captures the severe disconnection and distraction of our time.

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Alison Moore’s debut collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, gathered together stories written prior to the publication of her first novel.‘The tales collected in The Pre-War House… pick at psychological scabs in a register both wistful and brutal.’ —Anthony Cummins, The Times Literary Supplement‘Moore’s writing is surprising and exact and culminates in the title story, the novella which brings the collection to a powerful crescendo’ —The Arkansas International‘just as uncompromising and unsettling as The Lighthouse… Moore’s distinctive voice commands exceptional power’ —Dinah Birch, The GuardianEastmouth and Other Stories is her second collection, featuring stories published in the subsequent decade, including stories that have appeared in Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror and Best New Horror, as well as new, unpublished work.

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'Sharp, humorous, satirical . . . a mind-bending collection.' TLSHousehold gizmos with a mind of their own.Constant cold calls from unknown numbers.And the creeping suspicion that none of this is real.Reality, and Other Stories is a gathering of deliciously chilling entertainments - stories to be read as the evenings draw in and the days are haunted by all the ghastly schlock, uncanny technologies and absurd horrors of modern life.

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Yi T’aejun was one of twentieth-century Korea’s true masters of the short story—and a man who in 1946 stunned his contemporaries by moving to the Soviet-occupied northern zone of his country. In South Korea, where he is known today as “one who went north,” Yi’s work was banned until 1988. His momentous decision did not lead him to a safe haven, however: though initially welcomed into the literary establishment, North Korea sent him into internal exile in the 1950s, and little is known of his fate.Dust and Other Stories offers a selection of Yi’s stories across time and place, showcasing a superb stylist caught up in the midst of his era’s most urgent ideological and aesthetic divides. This collection unites his earlier modernist masterpieces from the colonial era with his little-known work penned during North Korea’s founding years, offering a rare glimpse into the making—and crossing—of the border between south and north. During the turbulent final years of Japanese rule, Yi’s elegant yet subdued stories championed both his native tongue and the belief in the capacity of art. In the heavily politicized environment of the North, his later works maintain a faith in the art of storytelling and a concern for the disappearance of customs in the throes of modernization. Throughout both eras, Yi focused on ordinary people: old men struggling to understand a changing world, lovers meeting up among ancient ruins, a lively widow targeted by a literacy campaign, a bourgeois couple trying to sustain themselves during the war by breeding rabbits, and more. Magnificently translated by Janet Poole, Yi’s work bears witness to global turmoil with a melancholic sense of enduring beauty.

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When 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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Wandeka Gayle's mostly young black women protagonists win our hearts as risk-taking, adventurous explorers of the white world, away from home, which at some point has been Jamaica. They include Roxanne who starts work in a care home in London, who strikes up a rapport with a depressed old man who used to be a writer; Ayo who heads to college in Louisiana, and fights off the internalised voice of her godly, tambourine-beating aunt to begin an affair with an engaging, slightly older white man; there's Sophia who comes to work in Georgia, who struggles to know whether her inability to engage more deeply with other people is really about racism or, rather, a more personally embedded reluctance. What characterises these women is a readiness to encounter, an attempt to get to grips with the oddities and strangeness of the white world, and like Ayo to engage with it, whilst being pretty sure that Forrest "could never understand her world". They take risks and are sometimes forced to pay for their courage. Other characters have to confront situations of their own making, like Angela returning from the USA for her mother's funeral, trying to find some point of contact with the now almost

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Jun’ichirō Tanizaki is one of the most eminent Japanese writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his investigations of family dynamics, eroticism, and cultural identity. Most acclaimed for his postwar novels such as The Makioka Sisters and The Key, Tanizaki made his literary debut in 1910. This book presents three powerful stories of family life from the first decade of Tanizaki’s career that foreshadow the themes the great writer would go on to explore.“Longing” recounts the fantastic journey of a precocious young boy through an eerie nighttime landscape. Replete with striking natural images and uncanny human encounters, it ends with a striking revelation. “Sorrows of a Heretic” follows a university student and aspiring novelist who lives in degrading poverty in a Tokyo tenement. Ambitious and tormented, the young man rebels against his family against a backdrop of sickness and death. “The Story of an Unhappy Mother” describes a vivacious but self-centered woman’s drastic transformation after a freak accident involving her son and daughter-in-law. Written in different genres, the three stories are united by a focus on mothers and sons and a concern for Japan’s traditional culture in the face of Westernization. The longtime Tanizaki translators Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy masterfully bring these important works to an Anglophone audience.

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These are tales from the post-industrial scablands – stories of austerity, poverty, masochism and migration. The people here are sick, lonely, lost, half-living in the aftermath of upheaval or trauma. A teacher obsessively canes himself. A neurologist forgets where home is. A starving woman sells hugs in an abandoned kiosk. Yet sometimes, even in the twilit scablands, there’s also beauty, music, laughter. Sometimes a town square is filled with bubbles. Sometimes sisters dream they can fly. Sometimes an old man plays Bach to an empty street, two ailing actors see animal shapes in clouds, a cancer survivor searches for a winning lottery ticket in her rundown flat. And sometimes Gustav Mahler lives just round the corner, hoarding rare records in a Stoke terrace.

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These sharp, ironic and compelling stories are perfect hard gems of observation about the truths of everyday life: kindness and friendship balance precariously with obsession and desire.

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'One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century' Elias CanettiWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRWELLOne morning, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His family is understandably perturbed and he finds himself an outsider in his own home. In 'Metamorphosis' and the other famous stories included here, Kafka explores the confusing nature of human experience with sly wit and compelling originality.

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In a bucolic idyll, a terrorist agonizes over the act of violence he is about to commit. On a remote island in the South Pacific, the investigation of a case of mass suicide reveals further mysteries. In a far-flung colony, a cynical trio sends an unwitting man into the wilderness in search of a chimera. Mixing romance and high adventure, intrigue and the fantastic, these magnificent tales by one of Russia’s most enduringly popular writers deftly probe the depths of human nature and desire.Fandango and Other Stories presents a selection of essential short fiction by Alexander Grin, Russia’s counterpart to Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alexandre Dumas. By turns a sailor, a dockworker, a vagrant, a gold prospector, a lumberjack, a soldier, a deserter, an agitator, an exile, a prisoner, and a runaway, Grin wrote seven novels and over three hundred short stories that transport the reader to a realm of pure art and imagination. His ingenious plots explore conflicts of the individual and society in a romantic world populated by a cast of eccentric, cosmopolitan characters. Fandango and Other Stories includes works drawn from across the entirety of Grin’s varied career to encompass the range and sophistication of his writing. Bryan Karetnyk’s elegant translations bring Grin’s distinctive voice to a new generation of readers.

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Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, nine stories of cosmic horror from the heir apparent to Lovecraft’s throne.Laird Barron has emerged as one of the strongest voices in modern horror and dark fantasy fiction, building on the eldritch tradition pioneered by writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.He returns with his second collection, Occultation. Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation’s nine tales of terror (two published here for the first time) were nominated for just as many Shirley Jackson awards, winning for the novella “Mysterium Tremendum” and the collection as a whole. Featuring an introduction by Michael Shea, Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron’s fans have come to expect. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

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Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ryunosuke Akutagawa created disturbing stories out of Japan's cultural upheaval. Whether his fictions are set centuries past or close to the present, Akutagawa was a modernist, writing in polished, superbly nuanced prose subtly exposing human needs and flaws. "In a Grove," which was the basis for Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon, tells the chilling story of the killing of a samurai through the testimony of witnesses, including the spirit of the murdered man. The fable-like "Yam Gruel" is an account of desire and humiliation, but one in which the reader's sympathy is thoroughly unsettled. And in "The Martyr," a beloved orphan raised by Jesuit priests is exiled when he refuses to admit that he made a local girl pregnant. He regains their love and respect only at the price of his life. All six tales in the collection show Akutagawa as a master storyteller and an exciting voice of modern Japanese literature.

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Winner of the 2015 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, selected by Sharon Dilworth.

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'As good as any modern fiction you will read this year' Sunday Times, Best new short story collections A wife compulsively digs in her garden. Two brothers, long estranged, reunite for a terse, heady summer. A woman flies to Krakow to see her adult son. At dusk, a teenage girl pushes her dying mother out into the sea. A small boy sits on his own in the cinema, entranced by the cowboys who light up the screen. With these short stories, Tim Pears illuminates a series of blazing moments in quiet lives – the tragic, strange, funny and beautiful fragments that make and unmake us – and shines a light into the gulfs that lie between us and those who should know us best.

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A dazzling collection of early stories and later fragments which throw an entirely new light on Jane Austen. In particular, they reveal a precociously brilliant genius with a talent for broad comedy and even farce. Most of the pieces in this collection are very funny indeed, and several - including the novella LADY SUSAN and the unfinished novel SANDITION are also neglected masterpieces. Other material includes the celebrated HISTORY OF ENGLAND, poems, prayers, the Plan of a Novel, etc. The volume is arranged in two parts, with the mature stories in Part 1 edited for easy reading, and the juvenilia collected by Austen herself presented exactly as she wrote them in Part 2. It includes everything she wrote apart from letters and the six famous novels, and is the final volume in the complete Everyman edition of her works now available in seven uniform volumes.

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This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka’s works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka’s eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

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In these four stories, written between 1900 and 1902, Joseph Conrad bid gradual farewell to his adventurous life at sea and began to confront the more daunting complexities of life on land in the twentieth century. In 'Typhoon' Conrad reveals, in the steadfast courage of an undemonstrative captain and the imaginative readiness of his young first mate, the differences between instinct and intelligence in a partnership vital to human survival. 'Falk', the companion sea-story, contrasts, as Conrad once put it, 'common sentimentalism with the frank standpoint of a more or less primitive man', a man with a conscience, however, about the girl he desires. In one of the 'land-stories' Conrad explores the utter isolation of an East European emigrant in England; in the other, the plight of a woman ironically trapped by the unwitting alliance of two retired widowers - each blind in his own way.

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