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Books > Fiction > Special features > Short stories
A TIME 'New Books You Should Read' A People magazine 'Book of the
Week' A New York Times Editors' Choice With a foreword by Elizabeth
Strout 'Electric: with wit, with rage, with grief, with the kind of
prose that makes you both laugh and thrill to the darker, spikier
emotions just barely visible under the bright surface. What a
wonderful collection of stories' Lauren Groff Another day! And then
another and another and another. It seemed as if it would all go on
forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful way. But of course
it wouldn't; everyone knows that. In this collection, Hilma
Wolitzer invites us inside the private world of domestic bliss,
seen mostly through the lens of Paulie and Howard's gloriously
ordinary marriage. From hasty weddings to meddlesome neighbours,
ex-wives who just won't leave, to sleepless nights spent worrying
about unanswered chainmail, Wolitzer captures the tensions,
contradictions and unexpected detours of daily life with wit,
candour and an acutely observant eye. Including stories first
published in magazines in the 1960s and 1970s - alongside new
writing from Wolitzer, now in her nineties - Today a Woman Went Mad
in the Supermarket reintroduces a beloved writer to be embraced by
a new generation of readers. 'A fascinating time capsule of
womanhood, marriage and motherhood over the last century ... A
fabulous book' Emma Straub 'Immensely gratifying, poignant, funny
... Breathtaking' Elizabeth Strout, from the foreword
The first ever story collection from the inimitable Lionel Shriver
'Genius' Stylist 'Phenomenal' Observer 'Brilliant' The Times In her
first ever story collection, Lionel Shriver illuminates one of the
modern age's most enduring obsessions: property. A woman creates a
deeply personal wedding present for her best friend; a
thirty-something son refuses to leave home; a middle-aged man
subjugated by service to his elderly father discovers that the last
place you should finally assert yourself is airport security. This
landmark publication explores the idea of "property" in both senses
of the word: real estate, and stuff. Immensely readable, it
showcases the biting insight that has made Lionel Shriver one of
the most acclaimed authors of our time.
From the title story's fantastical inter-dimensional assassins to
the steampunk dystopia of "Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard"
burrowing through the ruins of a civilisation destroyed by a
plague, from Black Mirror-esque tales of blockchain cryptography
("Byzantine Empathy") and Internet trolling ("Thoughts and
Prayers") to a three-story hard-SF arc about artificial
intelligence and the singularity ("The Gods Will Not Be Chained",
"The Gods Will Not Be Slain" and "The Gods Have Not Died In Vain"),
here are 17 interlinking visions that explore what it is to be
human, and what it is like to abandon or transcend that. This
collection confirms Ken Liu, author of the astonishing and
multi-award winning The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, as one
of speculative fiction's greatest short story writers. Contents
include: Ghost Days, Maxwell's Demon,The Reborn, Thoughts and
Prayers, Byzantine Empathy, The Gods Will Not Be Chained, Staying
Behind, Real Artists, The Gods Will Not Be Slain, Altogether
Elsewhere Vast Herds of Reindeer, The Gods Have Not Died in Vain,
Memories of My Mother, Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit -
Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts, Grey Rabbit, Crimson
Mare, Coal Leopard, A Chase Beyond the Storms (an excerpt from The
Veiled Throne, Book 3 of the Dandelion Dynasty), The Hidden Girl,
Seven Birthdays, The Message, Cutting.
Through a mixture of original stories and traditional tales,
Adventures in Nature offers an abundance of ways for families to
connect with the earth. As our ancestors did before us, the book
follows the seasons contained in the 'Wheel Of The Year', with each
entry focusing on a story that brings us closer to the natural
world, accompanied by simple craft projects, activities and mindful
moments. In our busy, modern lives we have become increasingly
disconnected from the world around us, and stories are an age-old
way of re-establishing that link, nurturing a love for the
environment and embedding awareness and respect for the planet
within our culture. This book allows you to discover your very own
adventures in nature through story.
'Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage … and seduces with precise spare prose, creating unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer but an absolutely essential one’ New York Times Book Review Told in a series of vibrant vignettes, The House on Mango Street is the story of Esperanza Cordera, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. For Esperanza, Mango Street is a desolate landscape of concrete and run-down tenements where she discovers the hard realities of life - the fetters of class and gender, the spectre of racial enmity and the mysteries of sexuality. Capturing her thoughts and emotions in poems and stories, Esperanza is able to rise above hopelessness and create for herself 'a house all of my own quiet as snow, a space for myself to go' in the midst of her oppressive surroundings.
An enthralling collection of new and classic tales of the fearsome
Djinn, from bestselling, award-winning and breakthrough
international writers. Imagine a world filled with fierce, fiery
beings, hiding in our shadows, in our dreams, under our skins.
Eavesdropping and exploring; tormenting us, saving our souls. They
are monsters, saviours, victims, childhood friends. And they are
everywhere. On street corners, behind the wheel of a taxi, in the
chorus, between the pages of books. Every language has a word for
them. Every culture knows their traditions. Every religion, every
history has them hiding in their dark places. There is no part of
the world that does not know them. They are the Djinn. With stories
from Neil Gaiman, Nnedi Okorafor, Amal El-Mohtar, Catherine Faris
King, Claire North, E.J. Swift, Hermes (trans. Robin Moger), Jamal
Mahjoub, James Smythe, J.Y. Yang, Kamila Shamsie, Kirsty Logan,
K.J. Parker, Kuzhali Manickavel, Maria Dahvana Headley, Monica
Byrne, Saad Hossain, Sami Shah, Sophia Al-Maria and Usman Malik.
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Collected Stories
(Paperback)
Saul Bellow; Edited by Janis Bellow; Preface by Janis Bellow; Introduction by James Wood
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R614
R512
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A collection of treasured stories by the unchallenged master of
American fiction
Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as
one of America's greatest writers. For more than sixty years he
stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his
exhilarating perceptions of life. Here, collected in one volume and
chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as "What Kind of
Day Did You Have?," "Leaving the Yellow House," and a previously
uncollected piece, "By the St. Lawrence." With his larger-than-life
characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a
sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. This is
a collection to treasure for longtime Saul Bellow fans and an
excellent introduction for new readers.
MK and Colleen get reacquainted while working at different stores
in a bankrupt mall. Way back, the women went to Catholic school
together and collaborated on racy letters to a soldier in Vietnam
who thought they were much older than seventh graders - a ruse that
typifies later shenanigans, usually brought on by red-headed
Colleen, a self-proclaimed 'Celtic Warrior'. After ditching
Colleen's car to collect the insurance, they drive from one
unexpected event to the next in Big Blue, MK's Buick clunker with a
St. Christopher statue glued to the dash. The glow-in-the-dark icon
guides them past the farm debris, mine ruins, and fracking waste of
the northern brow of Appalachia. Yet their world is not a dystopia.
Rather, MK and Colleen show why, amid all the desperation, there is
still a community of hope, filled with people looking for their
neighbours and with survivors who offer joy, laughter and good
will.
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Mariko/Mariquita
(Pamphlet)
Natsuki Ikezawa; Translated by Alfred Birnbaum
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R209
R169
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Combining place and fiction in an imaginative interpretation of ten
sites in the city of London, CJ Lim and Ed Liu take well-known
institutions, epochs and lifestyles in the British capital and
renders them fantastic in a string of architectural short stories.
The medium is an intersection of paper assemblages with short
stories. The stories have been exhibited at the Royal Academy of
Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum but are collected for the
first time in a single volume, laid out as they were designed to be
seen as one phantasmogoric city vision. Painstakingly constructed,
the stories assemble a sequence of improbable marriages between
architecture and story, encompassing a retelling of the Three
Little Pigs at Smithfield, a dating agency at Battersea, and a
ringed transport system manifesting as a celestial river over the
great metropolis. Drawing on a wealth of literary symbolism from
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland to Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and
imbued with humour and irony, the book builds on London's rich mix
of extravagance and fictive tradition. Enthralling, inspirational
and entertaining, this cabinet of curiosity and wonder depicts a
vision of the city that is immoral, anarchic, and unscientific, and
at the same time, glorious, ravishing and a pleasure to behold.
Seven stories connected by a fifteenth-century map of the world.
Once upon a time, maps used to exhibit the boundaries of the known
world. They soothed our fears, and simultaneously ignited our
imagination, uncharted territory beckoning us from afar. Barbara
Sadurskas The Map -- belligerent and refreshing in tone,
narratively picaresque and nostalgic, structurally non-linear and
precisely framed -- does not attempt to cover hackneyed ground. It
goes much further. In entertaining, it instructs. In instructing,
it terrifies. It illuminates the fact that man knows as little
about himself as the first cartographers knew about the world.
Malika Moustadraf is a cult feminist icon in contemporary Moroccan
literature, celebrated for her uncompromising depiction of life on
the margins. Something Strange, Like Hunger presents Moustadraf's
collected short fiction: haunting, visceral stories by a master of
the genre. Here, we tune into Casablanca's unheard: a sex worker
struggling to keep warm on the streets; a housewife flirting with
strangers online; a kidney patient, priced-out of treatment, facing
the harsh reality of his condition; and a mother scheming to ensure
her daughter passes a virginity test. Something Strange, Like
Hunger is a sharp provocation to patriarchal power, and a
celebration of the life and genius of one of Morocco's preeminent
writers.
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Roar
(Paperback)
Cecelia Ahern
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R425
R354
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Brief Lives
(Hardcover)
Christopher Meredith
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R312
R257
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One of Stevenson's most famous and enduringly popular works, the
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde describes the mysterious
relationship between a respectable and affable doctor and his
brutal associate. Set in the grimy streets of Victorian London,
this tale of murder, split personality and obscure science, with
its chilling final revelation, became an instant horror classic
when it was first published in 1886, and has enthralled and
terrified generations of readers ever since. This volume also
contains seven other Gothic stories by Stevenson - such as `The
Body Snatchers', `Markheim' and `Olalla' - showcasing the author's
mastery of the horror genre and his interest in both the
otherworldly and the strange ways the human brain can distort
reality.
Before schooling was widely available, for most people the
classroom was at the fireside, the field and the country lane,
where the bards told their tales. Many such folk tales exist to
convey life-lessons in an entertaining way. These stories are not
the pontifications of ancient philosophers: they are the gleanings
of countless storytellers, everyday men and women with hard-won
life experiences and pockets full of folklore. The tales reflect
the times and places of their origin, but have been handed down
from generation to generation, evolving to meet changing times.
Some are amusing; some are thought-provoking; all have been
polished and honed for so long that their message slips, almost
imperceptibly, into the mind. Fools and Wise Men retells these
stories for new generations - repaying our debts to the bards of
old.
The Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing's first novel is a taut and
tragic portrayal of a crumbling marriage, set in South Africa
during the years of Arpartheid. Set in Rhodesia, 'The Grass is
Singing' tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and
his wife, Mary, a town girl who hates the bush and viciously abuses
the black South Africans who work on their farm. But after many
years, trapped by poverty, sapped by the heat of their tiny house,
the lonely and frightened Mary turns to Moses, the black cook, for
kindness and understanding. A masterpiece of realism, 'The Grass is
Singing' is a superb evocation of Africa's majestic beauty, an
intense psychological portrait of lives in confusion and, most of
all, a fearless exploration of the ideology of white supremacy.
A hilarious collection inspired by a former Saturday Night Live
writer's real experiences in Hollywood, chronicling the absurdity
of fame and the humanity of failure in a world dominated by social
media influencers and reality TV stars. Simon Rich is "one of the
funniest writers in America" (Daily Beast) -- a humorist who draws
comparisons to Douglas Adams (New York Times Book Review), James
Thurber, and P.G. Wodehouse (The Guardian). With Hits and Misses,
he's back with a hilarious new collection of stories about dreaming
big and falling flat, about ordinary people desperate for stardom
and the stars who are bored by having it all. Inspired by Rich's
real experiences in Hollywood, Hits and Misses chronicles all the
absurdity of fame and success alongside the heartbreaking humanity
of failure. From a bitter tell-all by the horse Paul Revere rode to
greatness to a gushing magazine profile of everyone's favorite
World War II dictator, these stories roam across time and space to
skewer our obsession with making it big -- from the days of ancient
Babylon to the age of TMZ.
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Kong's Garden
(Pamphlet)
Hwang Jung-Eun; Translated by Jeon Seung-Hee
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R208
R169
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