A girl texted by the hottest boy in school. A suicide note written on a bookmark. What do they all have in common?Little Book of Tiny Tales is a flash fiction anthology of 56 tales in varying genres, from comedy and drama to sci-fi and horror. Each micro-story is told in fewer than 100 words. Like a box of assorted chocolates, these pieces are for those ready to experience their stories in bite-size pleasures.From the author of The House Plant and Petrified Women, comes the Little Book of Tiny Tales.How short can a story be and still leave an impact? You’re about to find out.

    During World War II, a young soldier searches the houses and barns of the families with whom he grew up. An astronaut wonders whether she can adapt to life back on earth.In her second collection of short fiction, 100neHundred, Laura Besley explores a kaleidoscope of emotions through 100 stories of exactly 100 words.In these one-hundred stories – each one-hundred words long – Besley captures her characters’ universes in vivid detail, their predicaments unspooling and oozing off the page. Besley guides us through these worlds filled with relationships that flounder and flourish, mysterious moments of surrealism, and hard realities of contemporary life. Brimming with tenderness and triumph, heartbreak and wonderment, 100neHundred is a masterful collection of micro stories that read macro.Santino Prinzi, Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day in the UK Consulting Editor at New Flash Fiction ReviewIn 100neHundred, Laura Besley gives us a wide variety of micros. Often moving, sometimes surreal, at other times funny, I very much enjoyed this collection. Many of these tiny flashes stayed with me long after I had finished reading. Diane Simmons, author of Finding a Way & An Inheritance

    Prepare to be transported to realms of folklore and legend, where magic and wonder linger around every corner, and fantastic possibilities are limited only by imagination.

    

    Grief, tenderness, and longing soak the pages, admitting the reader into the intimate places of the heart: An awkward child envisions herself as a darkling beetle; an unemployed business analyst prefers water-walking over “rebranding” himself; and in the squatters’ district, a biogenetically-altered couple visits an attic to observe a large cocoon. From the ruins of a dystopian city to the inner self-created landscapes of a coma victim, this unique story collection places characters at the core of their vulnerabilities. With a masterfully crafted tone and a register that ranges from contemplative to comic, the immersive stories in this collection brim with humanity. Expect your planet to tilt a little to the strange.

    Perfect to pair with your morning coffee or binge-read while curled up with a favorite blanket on a snowy afternoon!From a stately mansion to a rough barn, from a cheerful fireside to a lonely mountain road, from a chaotic church pageant to the grim aftermath of war, no heart is without its burden. But no trouble is too deep to be touched by the light of love and the warmth of Christmas.

    Through twelve short stories that span the private loneliness of Pakistani bedrooms to the banality of the modern American kitchen, Lovebirds shows love cracking and shattering and exploding. Capturing families on the precipice of unraveling as they reckon with the unspeakable realities of any given Wednesday, Hananah Zaheer surveys the complex fringes of desire, asking What are we willing to lose for one another? Let this book set you on fire. Then revisit and rebuild. It will feel good, like practice.Advanced Praise:“The stories in Hananah Zaheer’s Lovebirds are full of hard edges and delicate centers, with a compressed form that brilliantly echoes the physical, mental, and spiritual cages that trap its characters. From Pakistan, to America, to an apocalyptic, coal-choked Anywhere, these stories show the cost of being unstuck, depicting with great compassion women’s complicated relationships with violence. Written with unflinching detail and tension, Lovebirds was a book I had to set down at times in order to catch my breath, only to pick it right back up because I already missed reading it.”—Simon Han, author of Nights When Nothing Happened“When I think of the term ‘lovebirds,’ it invokes a sickly-sweet kind of sentimentality—but the stories in this collection are anything but that. There is a wise darkness in Hananah Zaheer’s writing, a sweeping away of innocence, a slow wake to violence or regret. Reading these stories, you feel like Zaheer can masterfully flit into the minds of all of us—lovers, dreamers, mothers, husbands, survivors, killers—and expose the frantically beating heart in our underbelly.”—Tara Laskowski, author of One Night Gone

    There is love that is vulgar, love that knows no reason; there is love that cradles the act of living, love that springs through the cracks; love that is slaughtered. These tales take place from Italy to Ghana to Greece and London and Tokyo, in grainy cities and muted hotel rooms; there is a Mafia murder, an ambulance rescue worker and a woman whose husband falls off a mountain. There is unchaste attraction and slippery, nuanced love; police violence and porn, and fishing too.Praise for Love Stories for Hectic PeopleLike a raconteur in a lamplit Venetian bar, McNamara understands the charm and architecture of a tale. These structurally compressed fictions still cover significant ground as one consequence topples like a domino into the next, and conflicts modulate between forms. Yet, unlike a bar-room raconteur, McNamara rarely offers us easy resolutions. Her characters wrestle through their cosmopolitan situations, while lust, violence, and repulsion simmer in the midst of romance, sensuality, and intimacy. Love Stories for Hectic People is that rare thing – a book that gets better with each re-reading. McNamara has produced, in these stylish modern fables, a sophisticated study of relationships. She holds up an ornate mirror flecked with shadows.—Michael Loveday, Three Men on the EdgeCatherine McNamara is one of the best writers I’ve read in all the time I’ve been in publishing. She can do more in two hundred words than most writers can do in two hundred pages. By turns real, funny, dark, magic, ugly, and beautiful. This collection rocks.—Christopher James, Jellyfish ReviewSeductive love, evaporating love and sometimes ‘increasingly superb’ love: it’s all in these pages. Sharp, witty and deeply real, these small stories reveal moments of connections, and sometimes dissolution. One can’t help but be captivated by these many and varied truths, as examined by Catherine McNamara – and the conclusion, despite the darkness, that ‘Love Is an Infinite Victory’.—Michelle Elvy, the everrumbleSometimes quiet and reflective, sometimes sensual and visceral, these thirty-three short pieces are assured meditations on the foibles and complexities of love – the making and unmaking of it. This collection drifts across continents and cultures, slowly unbuttoning aspects of relationships between an eclectic cast of characters, and the places they find themselves.—K.M. Elkes, All That Is Between Us

    In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence.Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page—honest, cutting, and wise.PRAISESomewhere between sinister and gleeful the characters in Grant Faulkner’s story collection All the Comfort Sin Can Provide blow open pleasure—guilty pleasure, unapologetic pleasure, accidental pleasure, repressed pleasure. Really, at the heart of all identity is the reach for pleasure, and then what actually comes, all those moments of slippage where we do the wrong thing, take a ridiculous risk, double down on failure, land in a forsaken place, slip the mainstream of things enough to change and become. These characters exude beauty from their flaws. These stories are lit.–Lidia YuknavitchFull of bad behavior and a ferocious desire for escape, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide is a catalog of longing. Faulkner’s arresting characters broadcast their worst decisions from grimy motel rooms, greasy kitchens, and sprawling American highways, each of them hellbent on the promise of something better.”–Kimberly King ParsonsAll the Comfort Sin Can Provide delivers on the promise of Grant Faulkner’s daring debut with a follow-up collection of stories that excavates possibility, salvation, and the deceptive comforts one finds in so many pleasures.–Adam Johnson