Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate—a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird.Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weirdinvites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.

    Screenwriter, director, and star of the acclaimed film Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection.

    Scott Fitzgerald is known for his novels, but in his lifetime, his fame stemmed from his prolific achievement as one of America's most gifted (and best-paid) writers of stories and novellas. In 'The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald', Matthew J. Bruccoli, the country's premier Fitzgerald scholar and biographer, assembles a sparkling collection that encompasses the full scope of Fitzgerald's short fiction. The forty-three masterpieces range from early stories that capture the fashion of the times to later ones written after the author's fabled crack-up, which are sober reflections on his own youthful excesses. Included are classic novellas, such as "The Rich Boy," "May Day," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," as well as a remarkable body of work he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and its sister "slicks." These stories can be read as an autobiographical journal of a great writer's career, an experience deepened by the illuminating introductory headnotes that Matthew Bruccoli has written for each story, placing it in its literary and biographical context.Together, these forty-three stories compose a vivid picture of a lost era, but their brilliance is timeless. This essential collection is a monument to the genius of one of the great voices in the history of American literature.

    Thirteen darkly comic stories, Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journey that stretches the boundaries of the ordinary world.

    These pieces illustrate how our possessions act as proxies for ourselves, and how tussles over ownership articulate the power dynamics of our relationships. In Lionel Shriver’s world, we may possess people and objects and places, but in turn they possess us.In the stunning novella "The Standing Chandelier," a woman with a history of attracting other women’s antagonism creates a deeply personal wedding present for her best friend and his fiancée—only to discover that the jealous fiancée wants to cut her out of their lives. In "Domestic Terrorism," a thirty-something son refuses to leave home, resulting in a standoff that renders him a millennial cause célèbre. In "The ChapStick," a middle-aged man subjugated by service to his elderly father discovers that the last place you should finally assert yourself is airport security. In "Vermin," an artistic Brooklyn couple’s purchase of a ramshackle house destroys their once-passionate relationship. In "The Subletter," two women, both foreign conflict junkies, fight over a claim to a territory that doesn’t belong to either.Exhibiting a satisfying thematic unity unusual for a collection, this masterful work showcases the biting insight that has made Shriver one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.

    The books penned by him are well known all over the world, although they were not so popular during Lovecraft's life. The main theme of his creativity is the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft created an entire fictional world; his tales are even classified into a subgenre known as Lovecraftian horror. The tales The Call of Cthulhu, The Color Out of Space, Dagon and others are among the most famous works of Howard Lovecraft.

    Among other fine works, the collection also includes “Wunderkind,” McCullers’s first published story written when she was only seventeen about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist. Newly reset and available for the first time in a handsome trade paperback edition, The Ballad of the Sad Café is a brilliant study of love and longing from one of the South’s finest writers.

    Over the course of eight stories, we are introduced to a host of young people on the cusp of discovery and loss. As he evokes the various states of agony and pleasure--humiliation, rebellion, camaraderie, and desire--Benioff displays a profound understanding of the transformative power of a single moment and how sadness can be illuminated by a humorous flip side. When the Nines Roll Over confirms the promise of a gifted writer emerging as a storytelling force.

    Daisy's valentine --A romantic weekend --something nice --An affair, edited --Connection --Trying to be --Secretary --Other factors --Heaven

    With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest—Dávila’s debut collection in English—you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.

    Containing completely new material not available anywhere else, this is a must-read for all fans of the show.The third in a collection of eight short stories to run alongside the second series of ITV's BAFTA award-winning show, Broadchurch. This story will be released at midnight following the broadcast of episode three.The stories, written by bestselling author Erin Kelly in close collaboration with Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall, will consist of 100% original plotlines that are tied closely to that evening's episode. The stories will offer an unrivalled opportunity to spend more time with the characters, allowing you to delve deeper into their lives, histories and secrets in order to find out what really makes them tick.This first-time creative collaboration between author and series creator will enhance your enjoyment of the TV series in a completely ground-breaking style. You won't be able to wait for the next episode and story!

    Humorous, touching, creepy, but most of all entertaining, this collection is superb." — Tracy Michelle Anderson *** If you're a fan of Roald Dahl or Gillian Flynn you'll love this collection of unsettling stories with a twist in the tale. Get it now.

    Macabre, unsettling and deliciously enjoyable, these stories make the perfect bedtime read – but be warned, once you've started reading you won't be able to stop . .

    A striking and emotionally resonant collection, SUBWAY DANCER AND OTHER STORIES is a compilation of stories originally published in some of the most respected literary magazines in the country, including The Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train and Ploughshares. In the award-winning story “Bloodlines,” two neighbors of different ethnicities are friends in spite of their differences…until an argument about expensive purebred dogs versus mutts from the pound brings the whole neighborhood’s precarious balance crashing down. “Bloodlines” was reprinted in Bark Magazine’s best-selling anthology Dog is My Co-Pilot and was cited in Best American Short Stories. In Witness to Breath, a woman living a dangerous life working on the streets takes in an elderly dog left behind when his owner is killed in a robbery. Despite never having been a dog person, their brief relationship changes her in ways she never could have expected.In Disappearances, a man not fluent in his own emotions tries unsuccessfully to broadside a train in his pickup truck, then spends the rest of the story figuring out the first clue to why he’d try to do such a thing.Among the other riveting and beautifully crafted stories included in this collection, “Five Singing Gardeners and One Dead Stranger” and “Requiem For a Flamer” were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and “The Man Who Found You in the Woods” was cited in Best American Short Stories. This collection includes an Author’s Note by Catherine Ryan Hyde.

    Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources, and the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.