The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce Volume 2: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians


Ambrose Bierce - 2012
    A collection of 26 stories:Soldiers (15 stories)"A Horseman in the Sky""An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge""Chickamauga""A Son of the Gods""One of the Missing""Killed at Resaca""The Affair at Coulter's Notch""The Coup de Grâce""Parker Adderson, Philosopher""An Affair of Outposts""The Story of a Conscience""One Kind of Officer""One Officer, One Man""George Thurston""The Mocking-Bird"Civilians (11 stories)"The Man Out of the Nose""An Adventure at Brownville""The Famous Gilson Bequest""The Applicant""A Watcher by the Dead""The Man and the Snake""A Holy Terror""The Suitable Surroundings""The Boarded Window""An Heiress from Redhorse""The Eyes of the Panther"

Women of the Night


Martin H. GreenbergTanith Lee - 1994
    Most often the realm of male authors writing about male vampires, over the last century the genre has seen a refreshing swing toward authors of both sexes exploring the other side of the vampiric gender—the women of the night.The sixteen stories collected within these pages are among the very best of their kind, from many of the best fantasy and horror authors writing today. From an encounter with a predatory spouse in a New England storm to a continuation of the Dracula story featuring a completely different tale of love, longing and loss, these stories explore both what it is to be female, human—and vampire, and often all at the same time.The selected stories include: "One for the Road" by Stephen King. The regulars at Tookey’s Bar know better than to wander around Jerusalem’s Lot—especially at night. But when a husband needs help during a snowstorm, they travel into the heart of the blizzard ... and an encounter with pure evil. <?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O /> "Sister Death" by Jane Yolen. Even the heart of a millennia-old vampire who accompanies the Angel of Death on his appointed rounds can be swayed by the yearning look of a young child. "Queen of the Night" by Gene Wolfe. The lady in white came for the boy in the dead of night, spiriting him away to her dark castle, wherehe would experience such things that would change his life forever... "Do Not Hasten to Bid Me Adieu" by Norman Partridge. The real story of what happened after the events of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula is told against the vast, wild Texas frontier, as one of Dracula’s hunters returns home to claim everything that is his ... including his one true love.  With stories by:Stephen King    *      Neil Gaiman    *     Eric Van Lustbader    *     Philip K. Dick    *   Nina Kiriki Hoffman    *     Kristine Kathryn Rusch     *     Nancy Holder    *    Tanith Lee    *    Gene Wolfe    *    P. D. Cacek    *    Jane Yolen    *    Susan Shwartz    *   Tanya Huff    *    Esther M. Friesner    *    Roxanne Longstreet    *    Norman Partridge

Literature: A Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, Interactive Edition


X.J. Kennedy - 1979
    MyLiteratureLab icons are found in the margins of the text along with a list of media assets at the front of the anthology. The most popular Literature anthology continues to bring students the finest literature from fables to poetweets. The Twelfth Edition of "Literature: An Introductiuon to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing," edited" "by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, includes eleven new stories from students' favorite authors: ZZ Packer's "Brownies," Ray Bradbury's, "The Sound of Thunder," Anne Tyler's, "Teenage Wasteland," David Leavitt's, "A Place I've Never Been" and Isabel Allende's "The Judge's Wife." More than 60 new accessible and engaging poems have been added including former Iraqi soldier Brian Turner's "The Hurt Locker," Katha Pollit's "The Mind-Body Problem" as well as poetweets from Lawrence Bridges and Robert Pinsky. In addition, there are new poems from Kay Ryan, Benjamin Alire Saenz, H. D, Gary Snyder, Joy Harjo, Tami Haaland, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams. Three new one-act plays help "ease" students into the study of this genre. The new plays include two comedies-- David Ives's, "Sure Thing" and Jane Martin's "Beauty"--as well as Edward Bok Lee's experimental drama "El Santo Americano." In addition, Milcha Sanchez-Scott's" The Cuban Swimmer "has been added." "

Slow Learner: Early Stories


Thomas Pynchon - 1984
    The collection consists of five short stories: 'The Small Rain', 'Lowlands', 'Entropy', 'Under the Rose', and 'The Secret Integration', as well as an introduction written by Pynchon himself for the 1984 publication. The five stories were originally published individually in various literary magazines but in 1984, after Pynchon had achieved greater recognition, Slow Learner was published to collect and copyright the stories into one volume. The introduction also offers a rare insight into Pynchon's own views on his work and influences.

Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings


Shirley Jackson - 2015
    Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted.As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson’s children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion.Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson’s landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children’s games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community—the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space.For the first time, this collection showcases Shirley Jackson’s radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist.This volume includes a foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.

Cool for America: Stories


Andrew Martin - 2020
    In one story, two New Jersey siblings with substance-abuse problems relapse together on Christmas Eve; in another, a young couple tries to make sense of an increasingly unhinged veterinarian who seems to be tapping, deliberately or otherwise, into the unspoken troubles between them. In tales about characters as they age from punk shows and benders to book clubs and art museums, the promise of community acts--at least temporarily--as a stay against despair.Running throughout Cool for America is the characters' yearning for transcendence through art: the hope that, maybe, the perfect, or even just the good-enough sentence, can finally make things right.

We Are the Stories We Tell


Wendy Martin - 1990
    and Canada in the past 50 years. Authors include Ann Beattie, Ann Tyler, Tama Janowitz and Alice Walker.

Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs


William T. Vollmann - 1991
    Vollmann's growing reputation as the American writer whose books tower over the work of his contemporaries by virtue of their enormous range, huge ambition, stylistic daring, wide learning, audacious innovation, and sardonic wit (Washington Post Book World). All these qualities are in evidence in this collection in which the character of the writer and that of some of his intimates - both real and imaginary - surface and resurface in a series of extraordinary situations and encounters. Two astonishing stories frame this collection. The first, The Ghost of Magnetism, tells about a young man leaving San Francisco to become a sort of literary hobo living on his freeze-dried memories. The last, The Grave of Lost Stories, describes the death of Poe in a fungus-encrusted tomb somewhere deep in the earth. Here is the colorful and disreputable group of people familiar to us from Vollmann's earlier fiction - pimps, tramps, pornographers, witch doctors and massage-parlor girls. Within these stories, Vollmann gives us one of the most searching, bizarre, and subversive views of America today.

Good Bones and Simple Murders


Margaret Atwood - 1994
    Among the jewels gathered here are Gertrude offering Hamlet a piece of her mind, the real truth about the Little Red Hen, a reincarnated bat explaining how Bram Stoker got "Dracula" all wrong, and the five methods of making a man (such as the "Traditional Method": "Take some dust off the ground. Form. Breathe into the nostrils the breath of life. Simple, but effective!") There are parables, monologues, prose poems, condensed science fiction, reconfigured fairy tales, and other miniature masterpieces--punctuated with charming illustrations by the author. A must for her fans, and a wonderful gift for all who savor the art of exquisite prose, "Good Bones And Simple Murders" marks the first time these writings have been available in a trade edition in the United States."[Atwood] proves she is an accomplished miniaturist...She can pack more wallop into less space than any other writer in her weight class".-- "Toronto Globe And Mail"

Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories


Harlan Ellison - 1997
    Which may help explain why he is also one of the most brilliant, innovative, and eloquent writers on earth. Slippage simply presents recent, typical Ellison. In a word, masterful. The 21 stories in this 1997 collection, which is encased in black boxes, show Ellison at the height of his powers, with several of the stories (no surprise here) major award-winners. Highlights include a black mind reader who pays a visit to a white serial killer, a husband who falls prey to a vampiric personal computer, and a love affair between a young man and a woman who may be more undead than alive. Perhaps even more fascinating are the painfully candid snapshots of autobiography running throughout the volume. Even if Ellison's unsettling fictions are not enough to dazzle you, his often bizarre life experiences as an author will still keep you compulsively turning the page like a polite voyeur. --Stanley WiaterContents:The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore (1992)Anywhere but Here, with Anybody but You (1996)Crazy as a Soup Sandwich (1989)Darkness upon the Face of the Deep (1991)The Pale Silver Dollar of the Moon Pays Its Way and Makes Change: Version 1 (1997)The Pale Silver Dollar of the Moon Pays Its Way and Makes Change: Version 2 (1994)The Lingering Scent of Woodsmoke (1996)The Museum on Cyclops Avenue (1995)Go toward the Light (1996)Mefisto in Onyx (1993)Where I Shall Dwell in the Next World (1992)Chatting with Anubis (1995)The Few, the Proud (1989)The Deadly "Nackles" Affair (1987) essayNackles (1964)Nackles (1987)Sensible City (1994)The Dragon on the Bookshelf (1995) with Robert SilverbergKeyboard (1995)Jane Doe #112 (1990)The Dreams a Nightmare Dreams (1997)Pulling Hard Time (1995)Scartaris, June 28th (1990)She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother (1988)Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral (1995)

Orsinian Tales


Ursula K. Le Guin - 1976
    a land of medieval forests, stonewalled cities, and railways reaching into the mountains where the old gods dwell. A country where life is harsh, dreams are gentle, and people feel torn by powerful forces and fight to remain whole. In this enchanting collection, Ursula K. Le Guin brings to mainstream fiction the same compelling mastery of word and deed, of story and character, of violence and love, that has won her the Pushcart Prize, and the Kafka and National Book Awards.

McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories


Michael ChabonJason Roberts - 2004
    Brite - The Devil of Delery StreetChina Mieville- Reports of Certain Events in LondonJoyce Carol Oates - The Fabled Light-house at Vi–a del MarPeter Straub - Mr. Aickman’s Air Rifle

A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories about Human Love


Ben Greenman - 2007
    With a mix of traditional, literary prose and bold – some might even say irresponsible – experimentation, Ben Greenman explores the ins and outs of modern romance. Expect tears, nudity, and recrimination.Both familiar in their humanness and wholly original, these imaginative stories take us all over the map in time, place, and circumstance. From the halfhearted summer affair between a part-time bartender and a married doctor in a Miami hotel to the cryptic pseudo-erotic love letters to a friend who is “more than a friend,” we experience the love of pop songs, the love of cohabitation in Chicago, and love that is so transporting it takes us to the moon–literally.

Berserker


Fred Saberhagen - 1967
    The sole legacy of that war was the weapon that ended it: the death machines, the BERSERKERS. Guided by self-aware computers more intelligent than any human, these world-sized battlecraft carved a swath of death through the galaxy--until they arrived at the outskirts of the fledgling Empire of Man.These are the stories of the frail creatures who must meet this monstrous and implacable enemy--and who, by fighting it to a standstill, become the saviors of all living things.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?


Raymond Carver - 1976
    In the pared-down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed us how humour and tragedy dwelt in the hearts of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that appeared in the last eleven years of his life.