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Books > Fiction > Special features > Short stories
Welcome to New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller Brandon
Sanderson's first collection of short fiction. These wonderful
works, originally published individually, have been collected for
the first time and convey the true expanse of the Cosmere. Telling
the exciting tales of adventure Sanderson fans have come to expect,
Arcanum Unbounded include the Hugo Award-winning novella 'The
Emperor's Soul', an excerpt from the graphic novel 'White Sand',
and the never-before-published Stormlight Archive novella
'Edgedancer'. The collection will include nine works in all:
'Edgedancer' (Stormlight Archive) 'The Hope of Elantris' (Elantris)
'The Eleventh Metal' (Mistborn) 'The Emperor's Soul' (Elantris)
'Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania' (excerpt; Mistborn) 'White
Sand' (excerpt; Taldain) 'Shadows for Silence in the Forests of
Hell' (Threnody) 'Sixth of Dusk' (First of the Sun) 'Mistborn:
Secret History' (Mistborn) This superb collection also includes
essays and illustrations which offer an insight into the numerous
worlds in which the stories are set.
In How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives
and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution
of marriage. Not best-served by established conventions and
conventional mores, these people-young, old, gay, straight,
midwestern, coastal-are finding their own paths in learning who
they are and how they want to love and be loved, even when those
paths must be blazed through the unknown. Concerning husbands and
wives, lovers and leavers, Nissen's stories explore our search for
connection and all the ways we undercut it, unwittingly and
intentionally, when we do find it. How do we hold ourselves
together-to function, work, and survive-while endlessly yearning to
be undone, unraveled, and laid bare, however untenable and
excruciating? How Other People Make Love contains nine stories.
"Win's Girl" features a single woman who works at an Iowa
slaughterhouse and uses the insurance money from a car accident to
update the electric system in her dead parents' old house, only to
be unwittingly embroiled with a shady electrician who ultimately
forces her to stand up for herself. In "Home Is Where the Heart
Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass," a young woman flees after
cheating on her husband and winds up at a Nebraska roadside motel
populated by participants in a regional dog show who help her
decide what to do next. In "Unity Brought Them Together," a young
man heads to his favorite New York coffee shop intending to finish
the Christmas cards his vacationing fiancee insists on sending, but
winds up meeting another displaced young midwestern man there and
going home with him instead. All these stories explore the
question, "how do we love?" as well as the answers we find,
discard, follow, banish, and cling to in all our humanness and
desperation. How Other People Make Love asserts that there aren't
right and wrong ways to love; there are only our very complicated
and contradictory human hearts, minds, bodies, and desires-all
searching for something, whether we know what that is or not. These
are stories for anyone who has ever loved or been loved.
Talk of the Town by award-winning writer Fred Khumalo
comprises short stories he wrote over many years. In this
vibrant collection Khumalo explores identity and belonging
through tales about African foreign nationals in South Africa,
xenophobia, South Africans abroad, exiled comrades during
apartheid, and past and current township life. At times hilarious
and at times gut-wrenching, this is a collection that will move
you.
What the Wind Saw is a collection of 25 short stories of the
people, real and imagined, from a small tract of ancient land in
the heart of Hertfordshire. The wind has always blown over these
villages, fields, rivers, its towns and its city. It always will.
We have the same worries, fears, hopes and dreams today as we have
always had. We are connected to each other by our shared
experiences, by the places that we live and by the paths that we
tread. These are stories of friendship, power, love, grief and
ambition inspired by the landscape and what is in it - John
Bunyan's Cottage, Shaw's Corner, the annual Ayot St Lawrence art
show, the Devil's Dyke, St Albans market, a walk in the woods, a
walk across the fields.
'Vivid, memorable and beautifully crafted' - Sarah Moss, author of
Summerwater 'A brilliant collection, from a remarkable talent' -
Joseph O'Connor, author of Shadowplay Hearts and Bones is a book
about relationships. It explores what love does to us, and how we
survive it. A young woman learns to wield her power, leaving
casualties in her wake, while a man from a small town finds solace
in a strange new hobby. A watchful child feels a breaking point
approach as her mother struggles to keep her life on track, and
another daughter steps onto a stage while her family in the
audience hope that she is strong enough now to take on the world.
First-time lovers make mistakes, brothers and sisters try to
forgive one another, and parents struggle and fail and struggle
again. Teenage souls are swayed by euphoric faith in a higher power
and then by devotion to desire, trapped between different notions
of what might be true. Quiet revolutions happen in living rooms, on
river banks, in packed pubs and empty churches, and years later we
wonder why we ever did the things we did. Set between Ireland and
London in the first two decades of this millennium, the stories in
Hearts and Bones, Niamh Mulvey's debut collection, look at the
changes that have torn through these times and ask who we are now
that we've brought the old gods down. Witty, sharply observed and
deeply moving, these ten stories announce an extraordinary new
Irish literary talent. 'Astute, surprising and wholly entertaining'
- Irish Independent 'Showcases Mulvey's strenths as a writer: the
strangeness, the originality, the perfect pacing . . . highly
accomplished' - Irish Times 'Honest, daringly fresh and stunningly
written, these stories cut right to the very essence of what it
means to be young' - Jan Carson, author of The Raptures
During embalming an arm jerks and strikes a mortician, leaving him
unmoored. A pastor’s wife encounters a young congregant in her kitchen
wearing her apron and preparing breakfast. A man’s attempt to make
sense of why a tornado picked him up leads to a showdown with a cult
leader. A daydreaming, gawky kid is appointed guardian of a watermelon
that the ocean could snatch away. Love comes slowly, like water heating
over a low fi re or extra sugar being stirred into tea. In another
story, the love of a father cannot save his musician son. A young woman
living in a recognisable future contemplates the end of memory as her
body transforms into the silver promise of a carapace. Another young
woman feels she should be smiling but nothing stirs in her when her
father wakes from death aft er 15 minutes. Battling portentous pre-dawn
heat and still air, a bystander abandons removing caterpillars from a
Ficus because the idea of touching them makes her squeamish. Elsewhere
in the suburbs, in a fi xerupper from hell, crickets screech and
squeal, their ringing like that of a demented alarm clock.
When Water Wants To presents the fi nalists of the DALRO Can Themba
short story award. Celebrating the legacy of master storyteller Can
Themba, this collection provokes, inspires, challenges and entertains
with bold storytelling and keen social commentary. The stories range
from the deeply personal to the wildly allegorical, playing with genre
conventions and inhabiting a multitude of perspectives and unruly
voices. These exciting new authors confi rm the pre-eminence of the
short story, and its oral antecedents, by delving into the national
psyche in the conversations they have, the connections they make, and
the themes, concerns and water-soaked imagery they share.
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Salt Slow
(Paperback)
Julia Armfield
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R399
R371
Discovery Miles 3 710
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In the latest of our celebrated series, you find yourself
surfacing, dazed in the waiting room. You read snatches of lines
over the shoulders of raincoats. In the carriage you have glimpses
and visions. At your destination you can hear space, see thunder,
taste realization. You are running towards something, someone in
the trees who holds out to you an understanding hand. Welcome to
the wonderful and sometimes frightening world of Unthology 5.
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The King in Yellow
(Paperback)
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R389
Discovery Miles 3 890
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The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by American writer
Robert W. Chambers, first published in 1895. The book is named
after a play with the same title which recurs as a motif through
some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly
esteemed weird stories, and the book has been described by critics
as a classic in the field of the supernatural. There are ten
stories, the first four of which ("The Repairer of Reputations",
"The Mask", "In the Court of the Dragon", and "The Yellow Sign")
mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair
or madness in those who read it. "The Yellow Sign" inspired a film
of the same name released in 2001.
For generations of Oxfords residents, students and visitors,
Boswells has been part of the city's charm. It was therefore an
obvious subject for Oxford Inc, a group of writers who compile
stories around a common theme. All sorts of people pass through the
department store; they may look just like the rest of us but,
underneath the surface, the authors reveal private lives with
twists, joy and despair, all of which make for an entertaining
read. There are stores here to make you laugh, some will make you
cry, and others will make you think; together they present a
collection which is a varied and delightful as Boswells, the famous
old store which links them all. Boswells are donating a percentage
of the profit from every copy they sell to their Charity of the
Year.
Scardio The Seahorse is a non-fiction childrena s book, telling the
story of a beautiful racehorse from Indonesia who left his home to
become a champion, but unfortunately, over the years fell on hard
times. The true story, through its wonderful illustrations tells of
Scardioa s fall from grace, but, also how he was then rescued by a
local boy. a Scardio the Seahorsea is often referred to as a a 21st
century version of Black Beautya for younger children wanting a
very happy ending.
The second collection of short stories by the author, a retired
social worker, covers a wide range of human eperience from the sad
to the life-affirming, and we meet some odd, some might say
dysfunctional characters along the way.
It's never too late to change as the characters in this poignant
collection of stories demonstrate. These stories introduce us to a
wide range of people young and old as they face up to change and
challenge in their lives. Wheather it's learning to ride a bike for
the first time in middle age, facing up to demons from the past,
dealing with loss and bereavement, or embarking on a life-changing
journey, their humanity shines through. They will make you laugh
and make you cry but above all they stand as testimony to the
resilience of the human spirit. Christine is an English writer
married and living in Gloucestershire, her favourite form is the
short story and in most of her work we meet characters young and
old, male and female who in one way or another are struggling
against challenges. She follows their journeys as they deal with
their difficulties with grit, determination and sometimes humour.
Things happen in Beaumont Street, but what? To Whom? What really
goes on behind the elegant facades of the Ashmolean Museum and the
Randolph Hotel? You'd be surprised. Could that really happen in the
Playhouse? In this book, it does. A group of Oxford writers have
let their imaginations roam through the past, present and even the
future to produce a collection of short stories, all based in
Beaumont Street. The result is an entertaining read, just as
enjoyable to those who know Oxford well as it will be to its many
visitors. But be warned: once you have read this book you'll never
see Beaumont Street the same way again. All profits from the
publications of this book are being donated to the Ashmolean Museum
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