In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as "a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways." With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.

    These are stories of ordinary people whom you have met - at work, during the daily commute, in your friend circles, or on social media. However, the stories have a twist or an element of thrill to them. They rip open the sheath of mundane lives and present you with raw, poignant, and profound vignettes of urban life. These stories attempt to capture the dramatic flipside of the banal existence of everyday people. As the editor defines them… The stories are the perfect mix of sensationalism out of the mundane, exhibitionism of what has been undercover, and the simple refinement of human thought perspectives. The words sway and dance, tantalizingly just out of reach, trying to entice the reader into that false lull of security until a twist comes that makes them wonder, ‘What did I just read?’

    A chronicle of the final seven days of a town that is about to be razed to the ground by an invading army. The lonely voyage of an elephant from Kerala to a princess’s palace in Morocco. A fabled cook who flavours his food with precious stones. A coterie of international diplomats trapped in near-Earth orbit. These, and the other stories can be found in this collection.

    “The stories in this volume,” writes Louis Begley in his new Introduction, “show the wide range of [O’Hara’s] interests and an ability to treat with a virtuoso’s ease characters and situations from any place on America’s geographic and social spectrum.”Stories included:The decision -- Everything satisfactory -- The moccasins -- Doctor and Mrs. Parsons -- Pardner -- A phase of life -- Walter T. Carriman -- Now we know -- Too young -- Summer's day -- The king of the desert -- Bread alone -- Graven image -- The next-to-last dance of the season -- Where's the game? -- Mrs. Whitman -- Price's always open -- The cold house -- Are we leaving tomorrow? -- No mistakes -- The ideal man -- Do you like it here? -- The doctors son -- Hotel kid -- The public career of Mr. Seymour Harrisburg -- In the morning sun -- War aims -- Secret meeting -- Other women's households -- Over the river and through the wood -- I could have had a yacht -- A respectable place.

    Two sisters share a husband when one fails to produce a child for the longest time. An American diplomat's urgent inquires about the Malaysian treasury’s facilities are hilariously misunderstood. A daring civil servant proposes to a lady in his Ceylonese hometown mere minutes after meeting her, breaking a thousand years of marriage protocol.M. Shanmughalingam's debut collection paints, with gentle wit and humour, the concerns and intrigues of the Jaffna Tamil community in Malaya. Satirical yet deeply empathetic, these fifteen stories explore what happens when we hold on to—and choose to leave behind—our traditions and identities in a changing world.

    However, as the characters in the stories prove, misunderstanding and confusion are inherent in everyday life.

    Andre Dubus treats his characters--a bereaved father stalking his son's killer; a woman crying alone by her television late at night; a devout teenager writing in the coils of faith and sexuality; a father's story of limitless love for his daughter--with respect and compassion. He turns fiction into an act of witness.

    His stories have been called “beautifully crafted” (The New York Times), “unforgettable” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “diverse and expansive” (The Washington Post). His 1989 collection, Nebraska, was widely praised, and he has published stories in literary magazines nationwide—The Atlantic, Esquire, Harper’s, Tin House, The Paris Review, and many others. In this new volume, comprising twelve new stories and seven pieces selected from Nebraska, the subjects of Hansen’s scrutiny range from Oscar Wilde to murder to dementia to romance, and display Hansen at his storytelling best: the craftsman described as “part Hemingway and part García Márquez . . . an all-American magic realist in other words, a fabulist in the native grain.” Readers will thrill to Hansen’s masterful attention to the smallest and most telling details, even as he plunges straight into the deepest recesses of desire, love, fury, and loss. Magisterial in its scope and surprising in its variety, She Loves Me Not shows an author at the height of his powers and confirms Hansen’s place as a major American writer.

    

    Why does Mr Kipling bake such exceedingly good cakes? Is Jeremy Beadle really the devil incarnate? What happens when advertising turns you into a monomaniac? This title allows you to find out the answers.

    He has been praised as "one of America’s preeminent novelists, our prime conductor of electric sentences" (William Giraldi). Above all, Allan Gurganus is a seriously funny writer, an expert at evoking humor, especially in our troubled times.Now he offers nine classic tales—never before between covers. They attest to his mastery of the short story and the growing depth of his genius. Offering characters antic and tragic, Gurganus charts the human condition—masked and unmasked—as we live it now. “Once upon a time” collides with the everyday. We meet a mortician whose dedication to his departed clients exceeds all legal limits. We encounter a seaside couple fighting to save their family dog from Maine’s fierce undertow. A virginal seventy-eight-year-old grammar school librarian has her sole erotic experience with a polyamorous snake farmer. A vicious tornado sends twin boys aloft, leaving only one of them alive. And, in an eerily prescient story, cholera strikes a rural village in 1849 and citizens come to blame their doomed young doctor who saved hundreds.These meticulously crafted parables recall William Faulkner’s scope and Flannery O’Connor’s corrosive wit. Imbuing each story with charged drama, Gurganus, a sublime ventriloquist, again proves himself among our funniest writers and our wisest.

     Farzana is one of the prostitutes at Begum's kotha and Ramakant Bannerjee, the writer, loves her deeply. He's promised to marry her once he has enough money. He's currently writing his most ambitious novel, the story of Kaneez. As the story of Kaneez unfolds, so does the intriguing life of Farzana. What fate does she meet? Read on to find out.

    The stories include tales of strippers, of their husbands and lovers and the helpless, ill-placed desire that is shot out of their customers, of a rape by a man of another man at a peep show in Times Square, the victim wordlessly accepting what happens to him while watching a woman dance behind glass, of fucking a woman wearing a fur coat and feeling unexplainable rage at her disregard of animal life. The story ends with the character running away into the night with the coat, "as if an animal rescued." In "Invisible Fish," a night clerk in a mall pet store tortures the animals at night until the whole place stinks of fear and rage. Dumbfounded, the store owners blugeon to death a chimpanzee, the only animal in the store that can imagine capable of such atrocities.

    A daughter disappears in the middle of the night. What happens in the aftermath of this tragedy—after the search is abandoned, after the TV crews move on to cover the latest horrific incident—is the story of Coyote. There is a marriage and a detective. There is a storm, a talk show host, and a roasted boar. People are murdered and things are hidden. Coyotes skulk in the woods, a man stands by the fence, and a tale emerges within this familiar landscape of the violent unknown."Like a modern-day Poe, [Winnette] has fashioned a narrator whose pull on the reader’s sympathy gradually fades as she recounts the aftermath of her daughter’s mysterious disappearance….Winnette’s deeply affecting story is hard to put down and even harder to forget.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Coyote has a strong and inviting voice and that voice wraps around a dark story, a contemporary story, and one that has its own velocity and fragmentation built in. I found myself swept along in it and impacted by its delicate/bleak movement.”—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, and Willful Creatures"While there’s a contemporary urgency to Winnette’s novel, it’s the small details (and how they’re revealed) that give this story its considerable sting."—Kirkus Reviews

    It's nearly identical to her mother's nearby-in the Copper Waters subdivision, they all are-but she likes it here, eating boiled eggs and watching TV, feeling out her freedom as heavy rains fall. And then a nearby dike fails. And the girl may be the only one left in Copper Waters.Eliza Robertson can handle the shocking turn, but she also has a knack for the slow surprise, the realization that settles around you like snow. Her stories are deftly constructed and their perspectives-often those of the loners and onlookers, distanced by their gifts of observation-are unexpected. In "We Walked on Water," winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, a brother and sister train together for a race that will ultimately separate them forever. In "L'Étranger," shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize, a girl abroad in Marseille reconsiders her unendearing roommate after an intimate confrontation. Robertson was raised on rugged Vancouver Island. She's traveled broadly since, and her stories travel, too, but the climate of her collection is influenced by her home. These carefully cultivated forms still flare with wildness, and each is still spacious enough for a reader to get lost in wonder.