In a thrilling interconnected narrative, You're in the Wrong Place presents characters reaching for transcendence from a place they cannot escape. Charles Baxter stated that "Joseph Harris has a particular feeling for the Detroit suburbs and the slightly stunted lives of the young people there....You're in the Wrong Place isn't uniformly downbeat-there are all sorts of rays of hope that gleam toward the end". The book, composed of twelve stories, begins in the fall of 2008 with the shuttering of Dynamic Fabricating-a fictional industrial shop located in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale. Over the next seven years, the shop's former employees - as well as their friends and families-struggle to find money, purpose, and levity in a landscape suddenly devoid of work, faith, and love. In "Would You Rather", a young couple brought together by Dynamic Fabricating shares a blissful weekend in Northern Michigan, unaware of the catastrophe that awaits them upon their return home. In "Acolytes", a devout Catholic clings to her faith as her brothers descend into cultish soccer violence. In "Memorial", an ex-Dynamic worker scrapes money together for a tribute to his best friend, lost to the war in Afghanistan. In "Was It Good for You?" a cam girl deconstructs materialism with her ageng great aunt, a luxury sales associate, and an anxious, faceless client. And in the title story, simmering tensions come to a boil on a hot summer day for a hardscrabble landscaping crew, hired by the local bank to maintain the lawns of foreclosures In turns elegiac and harrowing, You're in the Wrong Place blends lyric intensity with philosophical eroticism to create a singular, powerful vision of contemporary American life. Readers of contemporary fiction grounded in place need to take up this collection.

Poetry is by its nature very personal and often reveals more about the poet than any other medium can. Unlike prose, it is not so closely bound to the rules of language and grammar and can take wings and fly where the muse takes it. My poetry is largely of an autobiographical nature which includes events, people, places in fact anything that has impinged upon my life. My short stories on the other hand can be read as straightforward fiction although mostly they have a basis in fact. As for any wise sayings - some are mine - others come from my father and other wise people. Jokes, however, are few and depend largely on your sense of humour.

Come take a walk through Roy's mind. A collection of short stories and poems - some funny, some sad, some true, and some not so true. But you decide. Read some ghost stories and funny ghost stories or quickly change your mood, flick through a page or two and read about Leprechauns or even the shadow people or try to free the lost souls from Blackthorn Cottage if you dare. There's a bit of something for every one when you venture in to Roy's thoughts

This little collection of poems, stories, outbursts and musings is put forward as an homage to Jerome K. Jerome. His book, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, published in 1886, is like mine, a series of humorous articles on various subjects.

This vivid and haunting short-story collection flows smoothly together to create a masterful portrait of contemporary Sri Lanka; a country of teeming natural beauty, with a society in turmoil. A married couple, living in London, find their marriage strained by fighting in their far-off homeland. A man mourns his brother's death. A woman regrets the lover she left behind. Between exile and loss, Gunesekera's characters struggle for the elusive and divided place that they call home. Re-printed by Granta in a beautiful new edition.

The private lives of strangers can be fascinating, as these tales reveal. In them, the strangers are all passengers on the No 13 bus leaving Oxford Station at 1.15pm on a summer's day, arriving some 40 minutes later at the John Radcliffe Hospital. During their journey more passengers get on and others get off and they rarely interact. But behind each inscrutable facade are the joys and fears of complex private worlds and private thoughts. This is a book to dip into. It will, of course, help pass the time on a bus journey or even in hospital but it is intended to give pleasure to anyone who enjoys reading about other people and lives which may be exciting, sad or just plain different. All proceeds from the book's sale are being donated to the Hidden Heroes Fund of the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Charitable Funds which supports staff recognition, development and training across all the Trust's hospitals.

These twenty four short stories are ideal for advent reading or whenever you can fit them into the busy month of December. These festive snapshots into other people's lives aim to enliven and entertain. A handful of the stories are set in the recent past, because Christmas is a great time for nostalgia. There are stories about anticipation, hope and that tingling feeling you get when waiting for something pleasant to happen. There is a cast of characters of all ages and not all of them are human. There are themes of time and counting, dark and light, change and renewal. The book is two dozen slices of Christmas, waiting to bring cheer at the dark time of the year.

This book is an anthology of the recent work of the Poynton Creative Writers' Guild. It contains poetry, short stories, memoirs, and factual articles with titles such as 'Moon Musings', 'Anger' and 'The Smallest Room'.

A collection of macabre mysteries, including the superlative story Witness for the Prosecution... Twelve unexplained phenomena with no apparent earthly explanation... A dog-shaped gunpowder mark; an omen from 'the other side'; a haunted house; a chilling seance; a case of split personalities; a recurring nightmare; an eerie wireless message; an elderly lady's hold over a young man; a disembodied cry of 'murder'; a young man's sudden amnesia; a levitation experience; a mysterious SOS. To discover the answers, delve into the supernatural storytelling of Agatha Christie.

An NPR Best Book of 2021 NYPL 10 Best Books for Adults, 2021 A story collection, in the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, spanning worlds and dimensions, using strange and speculative elements to tackle issues ranging from class differences to immigration to first-generation experiences to xenophobia What does it mean to be other? What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart? These questions murmur in the heart of each of Brenda Peynado's strange and singular stories. Threaded with magic, transcending time and place, these stories explore what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically. In one story, suburban families perform oblations to cattlelike angels who live on their roofs, believing that their "thoughts and prayers" will protect them from the world's violence. In another, inhabitants of an unnamed dictatorship slowly lose their own agency as pieces of their bodies go missing and, with them, the essential rights that those appendages serve. "The Great Escape" tells of an old woman who hides away in her apartment, reliving the past among beautiful objects she's hoarded, refusing all visitors, until she disappears completely. In the title story, children begin to levitate, flying away from their parents and their home country, leading them to eat rocks in order to stay grounded. With elements of science fiction and fantasy, fabulism and magical realism, Brenda Peynado uses her stories to reflect our flawed world, and the incredible, terrifying, and marvelous nature of humanity.

A woman granted a superpower discovers it's more trouble than it's worth. A neighbourhood forum becomes the setting for a bizarre ghost story. A children's entertainer wrestles with problems that are nothing to joke about. A harassed dad attempts to meet the challenge of the primary school cake competition. By turns tender and satirical, witty and bizarre, the stories in this debut collection cast a fresh eye on first-world problems. Funny and humane, they zoom in on the absurdities and poignancies in work, family, love and loss in our frenetic modern lives.

Nine spine-tingling stories from the creator of Sherlock Holmes Mournful cries in an ice-bound sea, a potion that allows the user to commune with ghosts, an Egyptian priest who cannot die, and a mesmerist of unrivaled power. Brace yourself for these and other chilling encounters in The Parasite and Other Tales of Terror. Even before he created Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle terrified and delighted readers with tales of suspense, haunted by mysterious forces that defy rational explanation. These stories capture the unique draw of the uncanny and the curiosity that compels us all to ask, "Could it be true?" Presented by the Horror Writers Association, and introduced by award-winning author Daniel Stashower, this collection illuminates Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's talent for the macabre and the supernatural. The Parasite and the other stories in this collection showcase Conan Doyle at his most inventive, sure to entertain both new readers and his most dedicated fans.

A cat with attitude, green-fingered garden gnomes, a Roman helmet and two fiercely protective ghosts feature in this delightful anthology. Each tale has been written to accompany a cup of tea and a biscuit, whilst pleasantly disorientating the reader and challenging what they believe to be 'real' for a few moments. When finished, the book will be lovingly replaced on the coffee table leaving the reader smiling to themselves and wondering, 'could that actually happen?'

Beginning with a story of an ex sex-worker drifting through a rural town in South America, and ending with a young woman's sinister wedding night, Nash writes across the complications of working class women, rendering their desires with visceral prose and psychologically dissecting the fundamental root that threads her work: craving and the conflicts within.

Knowing beforehand, events past and present without having any prior knowledge can, at times be a disadvantage in some respects and a blessing to be able to see beyond the five physical senses in some others. Not forgetting future events which haven't manifested into the material world can also be predicted by a good medium/clairvoyant - some people have the gift of knowing - intuition and an awareness appears to be a built-in mechanism. Some say it is passed on from a previous life, providing you believe in reincarnation, a third of the world's population believe in this phenomenon - mostly in the Middle- and Far-eastern countries. In some instances you don't have to be with a person to know about their past, present and future events. This doesn't alter my physical condition. I still have heart failure, renal failure and Parkinson's Disease. I appear to be ticking over on medication.

Full Circle is a collection of unusual and intriguing short stories with a twist in the tale. They place ordinary people into unintended circumstances outside their usual comfort zone with unexpected consequences. Humour, greed and sadness are the driving human characteristics that run through the thread of each story.