Book picks similar to
The Butterfly Ward by Margaret Gibson
fiction
short-stories
mental-health
80s
People You'd Trust Your Life To: Stories
Bronwen Wallace - 1990
Capturing the moment when her unique talent blossomed in a new direction, this new edition of her life-affirming, universal stories will allow her to be read by a another generation of readers. Wallace’s poetry and short stories have been anthologized, and have appeared in periodicals across the country. She won a National Magazine Award, the Pat Lowther Award, the Du Maurier Award for Poetry, and in 1989 she was named Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in the U.K.
Nineteen Ghost Stories of M.R. James to Keep You Up at Night: 3 Volumes
M.R. James - 2009
R. James is best remembered for his ghost stories which are widely regarded as among the finest in English literature. One of James' most important achievements was to redefine the ghost story for the new century by dispensing with many of the formal gothic trappings of his predecessors, and replacing them with more realistic contemporary settings.According to James, a story must "put the reader into the position of saying to himself: 'If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!'"
The Book of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard - 1976
Here is some of Howard's best work.Contents:"Introduction" by Glenn Lord"Pigeons From Hell" "Recompense" (poem)"The Pit of the Serpent" "Empire" (poem)"Etchings in Ivory" (prose poems)"Proem" "Flaming Marble""Skulls and Orchids""Medallions in the Moon""The Gods That Men Forget""Bloodstones and Ebony" "Thor's Son" (poem)"Cimmeria" (poem)"A Sonnet of Good Cheer" (poem)"Red Blades of Black Cathay""The Dust Dance" (poem)"The Bar by the Side of the Road" (poem)"Knife, Bullet and Noose""The Gold and the Grey" (poem)"Gents on the Lynch" "A Song Out of Midian" (poem)"She Devil""The Day That I Die" (poem)"The Voice of El-Lil""Black Wind Blowing" "The Curse of the Golden Skull""Black Talons" Notes
Granta 149: Europe: Strangers in the Land (The Magazine of New Writing)
Sigrid Rausing - 2019
It harks back to the 1989 issue of the same name, themed around the response to the fall of the Berlin wall. Through the lenses of exile and migration, we ask ourselves what it means to be European now. Featuring a photoessay by Bruno Fert who steps inside the temporary homes of refugees in camps in Greece and France.
Small Change
Elizabeth Hay - 1997
A collection of linked stories that navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and endings, its intimacies and betrayals, its joys and humiliations.
Sawn-Off Tales
David Gaffney - 2006
Each story goes off like a tiny depth charge in the mind, leaving you with the trace memory of some new urban myth - comic, absurd and disturbingly true.
Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories
Maria Reva - 2020
So begins Reva's "darkly hilarious" (Anthony Doerr) intertwined narratives, nine stories that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. But even as the benighted denizens of 1933 Ivansk Street weather the official neglect of the increasingly powerless authorities, they devise ingenious ways to survive.In "Bone Music," an agoraphobic recluse survives by selling contraband LPs, mapping the vinyl grooves of illegal Western records into stolen X-ray film. A delusional secret service agent in "Letter of Apology" becomes convinced he's being covertly recruited to guard Lenin's tomb, just as his parents, not seen since he was a small child, supposedly were. Weaving the narratives together is the unforgettable, chameleon-like Zaya: a cleft-lipped orphan in "Little Rabbit," a beauty-pageant crasher in "Miss USSR," a sadist-for-hire to the Eastern Bloc's newly minted oligarchs in "Homecoming."
Captain Maximus
Barry Hannah - 1985
hard drinkers, passionate lovers, good haters, living on the edge, hurling fury at a complacent world."
Eating Naked
Stephen Dobyns - 2000
Marriages unravel, well-laid plans dissolve, and placid lives are turned upside down in this sharp, funny, and profound collection of short fiction.
Permanent Visitors
Kevin Moffett - 2006
Some move toward the future heartened by what they learn from those around them--a tattoo artist, an invented medicine man, zoo animals, strangers, fellow outsiders. Deftly rendered, these stories abound with oddness and grace.In “Tattooizm,” included in The Best American Short Stories 2006, a young woman struggles with a promise that her boyfriend is determined to make her keep. In the Nelson Algren Award–winning “Space,” a reluctantly undertaken errand forces a young man to finally confront the death of his mother. And in “The Medicine Man,” hailed by the Times (U.K.) as “perfectly pitched and perfectly written,” a man recounts his manic attachment to his sister.Moffett’s closely observed stories are candid and complex, funny and moving. The world of Permanent Visitors is an idiosyncratic and generous one, its inhabitants searching for constancy in a place crowded with contradiction.
The Midnight Meat Train
Clive Barker - 2014
Literary eminences like Stephen King noticed early on the creativity and powerful prose throughout the Books of Blood, bringing Clive Barker's stories to the forefront of horror fiction. One of these stories was "The Midnight Meat Train" following one Leon Kaufman as he discovers the origins of a series of grizzly subway train murders in New York City... and the controlling forces behind it all. Clive Barker's The Midnight Meat Train Special Definitive Edition brings the original story back with all-new material: a new afterword written by Clive Barker, seven color paintings based on the story by the author, a new introduction by Phil & Sarah Stokes, a foreword by the movie screenplay writer Jeff Buhler, storyboards from the film, never-before-seen photos, notes, sketches and more. Please note that because the official movie script was in image format we had to remove it from this ebook edition. Many materials from the major motion picture are still in this edition. "What Barker does in THE BOOKS OF BLOOD makes the rest of us look like we've been asleep for the last ten years. . . He's an original." - Stephen King "Clive Barker assaults our senses and our psyche, seeking not so much to tingle our spine as to snap it altogether." - Los Angeles Times "Mixing elements of horror, science fiction and surrealist literature, Barker's work reads like a cross between Stephen King and South American novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He creates a world where our biggest fears appear to be our own dreams." - Boston Herald "Barker's eye is unblinking; he drags out our terrors from the shadows and forces us to look upon them and despair or laugh with relief." - The Washington Post
Yes, Yes, Cherries: Stories
Mary Otis - 2007
A lonely teenage girl falls in love with an older, married neighbor. A woman attends a party at the home of her boyfriend’s ex-wife. A schoolteacher gets fired for teaching time incorrectly to grade-school students. And a young woman recovering from a breakup receives guidance from a drunk therapist. Poignant and sharply rendered, Otis’s stories seek answers to the questions of whom we love and why, how we search for love, lose it, or find it—sometimes at the last moment and in the most unlikely places. Quirky and hilarious, these stories display a knowing affection for human strangeness.
Promising Young Women
Suzanne Scanlon - 2012
With echoes of Sylvia Plath, and against a cultural backdrop that includes Shakespeare, Woody Allen, and Heathers, Suzanne Scanlon's first novel is both a deeply moving account of a life of crisis and a brilliantly original work of art.
Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala
Rick Hautala - 2012
One of 2012’s HWA Lifetime Achievement Award Winners, Rick Hautala has a writing career that spans more than three decades. From Moondeath, his first novel published in 1980, to the republication of his best-selling novel The White Room (DRP, 2012) and his forthcoming “Little Brothers” novella Indian Summer (CD Publications, 2012), his novels and short stories have entertained millions of readers around the world. Now comes Glimpses, a career-spanning “best of” collection that brings together twenty-four stories, including eight from each of Rick’s critically-acclaimed collections Bedbugs and Occasional Demons, and eight previously uncollected stories. And Glimpses delivers what it promises—quick glimpses into the deepest shadows of our lives, around unfamiliar corners of streets we think we know, and down the darkest alleys of strange cities where readers will have to face their worst fears and their most unnerving nightmares. Of course, Glimpses wouldn’t be a Rick Hautala collection if it didn’t included gorgeous original artwork—a wraparound cover and eight new illustrations—from award-winning artist Glenn Chadbourne. So whether it’s in a haunted schoolhouse or an abandoned lighthouse, an iron bridge that spans a fast-moving river or a World War I battlefield, prepare yourself because you never know what you may catch a glimpse of … and by then, it may already be too late.