He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself.

    “Stone Mattress,” from her collection of the same name is witty, grotesque, and utterly hilarious—an exemplar of Atwood’s tremendous capacity for capturing our darkest impulses on the page.Verna, aging widow, boards a cruise ship bound for the Arctic in search of her next husband. The last four had suffered regrettable tragedies and left Verna wickedly wealthy in their wake. But, instead of finding another wealthy suitor, Verna finds unwitting Bob, the first man to have ever wronged her. Single, reasonably near his grave, ordinary, and attracted to her like all the others—Bob is all-too-easy prey for Verna’s merciless revenge. An ebook short.

    In this, his second work of fiction about Vietnam, O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again clearly demonstrated. Neither a novel nor a short story collection, it is an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later.

    Confined in an upstairs room to recuperate by her well-meaning but dictatorial and oblivious husband, the yellow wallpaper in the room becomes the focal point of her growing insanity.

    Romance was not dead in him, and the fire which is built up of clean adventure and the association of strong men and a mighty country had not died out of his veins. He could still see the picturesque, feel the thrill of the unusual, and - at times - warm memories crowded upon him so closely that yesterday seemed today, and Alaska was young again, thrilling the world with her wild call to those who had courage to come and fight for her treasures, and live - or die. Tonight, with the softly musical throb of his ship under his feet, and the yellow moon climbing up from behind the ramparts of the Alaskan mountains, something of loneliness seized upon him, and he said simply:

    Something is creeping up the stairs, something is standing outside the door. Something is sobbing, sobbing in the dark; something is sighing across the floor... "The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link is one of 27 short horror stories in Nightfire's audio anthology.Come Join Us by the Fire S2 is the second installment of Nightfire's audio-only horror anthology, featuring a wide collection of short stories from emerging voices in the horror genre as well as longtime fan favorites. The collection showcases the breadth of talent writing in the horror genre today, with contributions from a wide range of genre luminaries including Laird Barron, Indrapramit Das, Shaun Hamill, Daniel M. Lavery, Matthew Lyons, T. Kingfisher, Seanan McGuire, Nibedita Sen, and Nightfire’s own Cassandra Khaw and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.The full Table of Contents is as follows:Cassandra Khaw- "Some Breakable Things"Sarah Langan- "The Changeling"Shaun Hamill- "Music of the Abyss"Caitlín R. Kiernan- "Standing Water"Tade Thompson- "Bone"T. Kingfisher- "Origin Story"Silvia Moreno-Garcia- "The Sound of Footsteps"Laird Barron- "Jōren Falls"Damien Angelica Walters- "Tooth, Tongue, and Claw"Sunny Moraine- "If Living is Seeing I'm Holding My Breath"Matthew Lyons- "Blood Daughter"Jessica Guess- "Mama Tulu"Daniel M. Lavery- "Prodigal Son"Seanan McGuire- "Emergency Landing"Indrapramit Das - "You Will Survive This Night"‘Pemi Aguda- "Things Boys Do"Kelly Link- "The Specialist's Hat"Clay McLeod Chapman- "The Fireplace"Nibedita Sen- "Pigeons"Camilla Grudova- "Ghost Bread"Catherynne M. Valente- "The Days of Flaming Motorcycles"Brian Evenson- "The Cabin"Maria Dahvana Headley- "The Krakatoan"Craig Laurance Gidney- "Spyder Threads"Mariana Enriquez- "Things We Lost in the Fire"Gabino Iglesias- "The Song of the Lady Rose"Nick Antosca- "The Quiet Boy"

    A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.

    Jones to national attention. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and numerous other honors for his novel The Known World, Jones made his literary debut with these powerful tales of ordinary people who live in the shadows in this metropolis of great monuments and rich history. Lost in the City received the Pen/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction and was a National Book Award Finalist. This beautiful 20th Anniversary Edition features a new introduction by the author, and is a wonderful companion piece to Jones’s masterful novel and his second acclaimed collection of stories, All Aunt Hagar’s Children.

    He maintains his innocence over the decades he spends at Shawshank during which time he forms a friendship with "Red", a fellow inmate.Source: stephenking.com

    

    When the legitimacy of her twin babies with Edgar is called into question, the tiny infants are taken from Beth and sent far away. James is adopted by Edgar's uncle, the very wealthy Lord Redfern, master of Redfern Abbey. But little Daisy is sent to a cold-hearted childless couple who raise her to be a maid rather than a daughter. When Daisy, at 16, finally escapes her hard life with her adoptive brother Boyd, they arrive at the Abbey to seek work and refuge. Little does Daisy know that her flesh and blood is the next in line to be Lord of the Abbey. There is a strange connection between Daisy and James, something they can neither explain nor ignore. But will the truth be discovered in time?

    But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

    In modern life, she rebels against the curfews and restrictions of her day, seeing them as unfair hardships. But now in this alien world with its buffalo stampedes, wild Indians, and deadly pestilence, she is about to find out what real hardships are. To get home, she must set aside her Rude Girl persona and learn how to survive.On the trek, Paula meets young Daniel Langdon, hunter and part-time scout, and an infatuation quickly becomes a great passion. She realizes this is the love of her life and to get home she will have to leave him behind. In the tradition of Outlander, The Far Journey is a grand epic of love and tragedy, loyalty and betrayal, peril and survival. Throughout, Paula Masters is tested in body and soul and must discover the strength and toughness inside her. "It has all the elements that make a good book hard to put down." Foster Cline, M. D., author of Parenting with Love and Logic."What a grand, mind-bending tale Tom Reppert has spun!" Jim Payne, author of One Inch above the Water."An Intriguing story that captures you from the first page." Sara Vinduska, author of Reflections.

    Selected from Winner Take Nothing, Men Without Women, and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, this collection includes "The Killers," the first of Hemingway's mature stories to be accepted by an American periodical; the autobiographical "Fathers and Sons," which alludes, for the first time in Hemingway's career, to his father's suicide; "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," a "brilliant fusion of personal observation, hearsay and invention," wrote Hemingway's biographer, Carlos Baker; and the title story itself, of which Hemingway said: "I put all the true stuff in," with enough material, he boasted, to fill four novels. Beautiful in their simplicity, startling in their originality, and unsurpassed in their craftsmanship, the stories in this volume highlight one of America's master storytellers at the top of his form.

    He questions her and finds she thought she was in the apartment of his neighbor, Morris Barnes, who lives above him. While he is on the telephone, she quietly slips out of his flat and heads to Barnes’ abode. A few hours later, she is once again at his door – this time looking scared and faint. She asks Wrayson to escort her downstairs as the hallway is unlit. As they emerge, a hansom sits at the doorway with Morris Barnes in it. But, they discover that Barnes has been strangled. Wrayson soon learns that the young lady is the estranged older daughter of a club acquaintance, retired Colonel Fitzmaurice. He also discovers that he has fallen in love with her. The big question however, has he fallen for a murderess? How can he discover the truth? In typical Oppenheim style, this “whodunit” weaves a tangled web and one must wait until the end to discover the surprising truth. (Summary by Tom Weiss)