These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable.

    

    This is the real story of a dangerously wily woman; a woman that smuggler Haji Mastan called ‘sister’, and one who even Dawood Ibrahim found formidable. Written by S. Hussain Zaidi, the author of bestselling books on the underworld, this is a rare insight into one of the women who once ruled the Mumbai mafia.Cover is fine too.

    

    She never overcame her humble beginnings and when Willie Eubanks rescued her from the orphanage by marrying her, she ended up right back where she started. Living in the same cabin, she was born in twelve and a half years earlier. However, she grew to love Willie and was determined that she and Willie were not going to end up as her parents had. In addition, she wanted to make sure her children were not going to have to suffer through the same experiences she had.

    See the books that made APJ Abdul Kalam

    Sort of. When Brad Williams is offered a lot of money to take on a case for sly banker Jonas Baxter, he is in no position to refuse. Jonas has been charged with the attempted murder of local prostitute Tina Jade, but it quickly becomes evident that it is not the reason why the prosecution wants Jonas behind bars. So why are they still pressing ahead with the charges? What is Jonas guilty of? This thrilling legal short story will take you for a ride through the courtroom and leave you with twists and turns that you didn’t see coming.

    

    Tracing the lives and aspirations of Russians living in Moscow and Brooklyn, these poignant, sad and funny stories create a luminous new literary world. In the title story, set during the Second World War, Galina, a gentile, offers refuge to a Jewish friend and her daughter, only to find herself increasingly resentful of their presence in her home. In Mistress, a nine-year-old boy, new to America, escorts his grandmother to her weekly doctors’ appointments to interpret her myriad complaints. At the same time, he becomes aware that his grandfather may be involved with another woman. And in Love Lessons–Mondays, 9 A.M. a young math teacher assigned to teach a sex education class becomes all too aware that her students are more experienced than she is.

    In her new collection, gifted poet and novelist Kim Addonizio uses her literary powers to bring to life a variety of settings, all connected through the suggestion that things in the known world are not what they seem.In “Beautiful Lady of the Snow,” young Annabelle turns to a host of family pets to combat the alienation she feels caught between her distracted mother and ailing grandfather; in “Night Owls,” a young college student’s crush on her acting partner is complicated by the bloodlust of being half-vampire; in “Cancer Poems,” a dying woman turns to a poetry workshop to make sense of her terminal diagnosis and final days; in “Intuition,” a young girl’s sexual forays bring her closer to her best friend’s father; and in the collection’s title story, a photographer looks back to his youth spent as a young illusionist under the big tent and his obsessive affair with the carnival owner’s wife.The stories in this collection have appeared in journals ranging from Narrative Magazine to The Fairy Tale Review, and include the much loved "Ever After," which was featured on NPR's "Selected Shorts."Distracted parents, first love, the twin forces of alienation and isolation: the characters in The Palace of Illusions all must contend with these challenges, trafficking in the fault lines between the real and the imaginary, often in a world not of their making.

    A time machine's lesson comes too late. Christmas trees save a lost soul's life. Ten million people live in one man's breath. ...Or Midnight: Murder returns to an infamous moor. Asylum workers find what is worse than insanity. A shunned grave's secrets gain fatal exposure. Nighttime terrors turn all too real. These and other stories comprise a compilation of bittersweet warmth and creeping horror, subtle illumination and dark vistas. Gregory Miller's Scaring the Crows is a genre-spanning collection of short fiction at its finest. Read it at noon...or midnight.

    It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.Ann Beattie published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1972. Twenty-eight years later, she received the 2000 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is, as the Washington Post Book World said, "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form." The eleven stories in her new work are peopled by characters coming to terms with the legacies of long-held family myths or confronting altered circumstances -- new frailty or sudden, unlikely success. Beattie's ear for language, her complex and subtle wit, and her profound compassion are unparalleled. From the elegiac story "The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea," in which two men trade ruminations on illness, art, and servitude, to "The Big-Breasted Pilgrim," wherein a famous chef gets a series of bewildering phone calls from George Stephanopoulos, Perfect Recall comprises Beattie's strongest work in years. It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.

    It is the finest collection yet from a contemporary master of the form.Beginning with the sudden terror of a family caught up in shocking sectarian violence, and ending with the whiteout of an Iowa blizzard and the fear of losing your way very far from home, this collection is about bonds made and broken, secret and known. In the extraordinary story "Up the Coast," a landscape painter discovers a place that makes her, finally, feel whole, only to have that communion shattered by an arbitrary act of aggression that will resonate throughout her life.Written with effortless skill and empathy, these stories are hauntingly real. MacLaverty's perfect attention to every detail, every nuance of idiom and character, remakes the world for us here on the page.

    These fourteen tales map a very particular world—Jews whose lives are anchored in Chicago—in rich, revealing detail even as they brim with universal longings: complex love affairs and unspoken rivalries, family triumphs and private disappointments. Epstein, who “happens to possess a standup comic’s gift for punch lines” (New York Times Book Review), brings his emphatically grown-up characters to witty, rueful, and charming life. The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff is a marvelous collection from a master of the short form and one of the most distinctive writers working in America today.

    A simple touch sending currents of electricity flowing through a body. The feeling of coming home. Friends become lovers. Strangers become soulmates. The chemistry ignited when two people are falling in love is undeniable. Over the course of five short stories, follow these couples on journeys of passion and discover what happens when they decide to let sparks fly…