Sionil José's most widely anthologized fiction, is a moving story of a friendship. An American and a Filipino go to the Cordilleras to look at the rice terraces which were built by the Filipino's ancestors. There, they find the meaning of their friendship, how it defines the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.As the Philippines' most widely translated author, F. Sionil José's reputation rests largely on his epic work—the Rosales novels, which span a hundred years of Philippine history and encompass four generations. His short stories, however, are just as memorable for their unerring depiction of the Filipino condition. This collection includes some of the earliest stories he wrote from the late forties to the early fifties. In these stories, he already maps out the boundaries of his literary geography and plumbs the depths of the Filipino character, at the same time hewing to the continuing theme of almost all of his work: the Filipino's often futile search for social justice and a moral order.F. Sionil José's fiction is now translated into 27 languages including Tagalog. Random House has just completed putting out the Rosales saga. Fayard of France has already released four of his five Rosales novels.

    The novel depicts troubles he faced in dealing with other languages, the naive way he behaves with people from the outside world. It ends with his reaching shores of England. First part is set within the years 1850 to 1900, while India was still under British rule. Struggle for independence barely beginning in south India. Parvateesam decides to leave for England because of the way he is taunted by his teacher and friends, thinking becoming barrister is the only solution to redeem him self.. He runs away from home with what little money he had. He knows no other language other than Telugu (spoken in Andhra Pradesh), believing that once he reaches Madras (Chennai : capital city of Tamil Nadu) he can take a ship to England. He knows nothing of the hard ships of this journey.

    The Fonseca family gathers in the Carvalho mansion for the birthday of Savio Fonseca. for his 75th birthday, Savio Fonseca's two daughters Joanna and Carol, who are settled abroad, come down to celebrate his birthday with Savio's son-in-law Sam. On this occasion, Eduardo, who is Savio's cousin drops in with his wife.On the night before Savio's birthday, when the family is spending time together, the electricity fails, because of which the entire place is in darkness. In this dark setting, the occasion seems right for sharing ghost stories. Soon the entire family starts to swap ghost stories, which revolve around the history of the Fonseca family. These stories range from mysterious sightings to lonely buildings and magic spells.The stories are split up into two sections and every character has a story to narrate. These stories have their roots in the Fonseca family and give readers a look into the happenings of the family members in the past. The hopes, dreams, personalities and traits of all the members of this family are revealed through the course of this book. Even the family name is a topic of speculation, with Savio's wife Lillian being keener on safeguarding its honor than Savio himself. This interest raises a number of doubts. The secret that Savio and his wife have been guarding from their daughters is soon to be unravelled.

    A young girl is bleeding from her hands and feet and claims to be talking to the Virgin Mary. But Nightingale soon realises that all is not as it seems - and the girl is in mortal danger. Still Bleeding is about 14,000 words, about forty pages, perfect if you have half an hour to spare. Stephen Leather is one of the UK's most successful thriller writers, an ebook and Sunday Times bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan “Spider’ Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mirror, the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. He is one of the country’s most successful ebook authors and his ebooks have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US. In 2011 alone he sold more than 500,000 eBooks and was voted by The Bookseller magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the UK publishing world. Born in Manchester, he began writing full time in 1992. His bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages. He has also written for television shows such as London's Burning, The Knock and the BBC's Murder in Mind series and two of his books, The Stretch and The Bombmaker, were filmed for TV. You can find out more from his website www.stephenleather.com and you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenleather

    His son is India's best-known cinema superstar - Amitabh Bachchan. The core of this book is a long sequence called Madhushala (the house of wine) which could be compared to the Rubaiyat in imagery and metre.

    While there have been exceptions, many Oprah authors are no more writer's writers than Kenny G is a saxophonist's saxophonist.The best way to find the hottest, most influential writers writing would be (1) to read every issue of every magazine that publishes new fiction, and (2) to read every good book that comes out. Which would work fine if you were Burgess Meredith in that episode of "The Twilight Zone" where everyone in the world disappears except this bookish guy who's left alone -- o, lovely briar patch -- inside a library. (Six words of advice: Take good care of your glasses.) Absent that, what do you do?I've said it before (in this very space), and I'll say it again: The best possible way to keep tabs on what's up with North American fiction is to buy, year in and year out, each year's volume of The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Both collections have been around for more than 80 years, have had their ups (mostly artistic) and downs (mostly commercial), but are both currently enjoying commercial heydays. During the 1970s, BASS's sales sank to a series-threatening 7,000 copies a year, before it hit on some bright ideas that saved it. Beginning in 1978, instead of one editor choosing everything himself (Edward O'Brien, from 1915 to 1940) or herself (Martha Foley, from 1941 to 1977), a series editor winnowed the 3,000 or so published stories each year down to a stack of 120 (a task, says current series editor Katrina Kenison that has become much harder the past couple years than it was when she began in 1991, when she had to scrape to find 120 she thought were terrific). Then a guest editor picks 20 stories to include (this year's, Amy Tan, seems to have done an especially able job and wrote a smart and delightful introduction). Beginning in 1983 (with an Anne Tyler-edited edition that was one of the series's strongest), BASS began to be published simultaneously in both hardback and paperback editions. And in 1987, it began to feature short comments by the writers, talking about their stories. BASS (better selling than O. Henry in recent years) began consistently to sell over 100,000 copies a year.O. HENRY's nadir came more recently. Coinciding with BASS's resurgence, O. Henry, in the 1980s, became the American short story's poor, quirky stepchild. (Not in a good way.) But it received a major overhaul in 1997. A single editor (now Larry Dark) still, as has typically been the case, picks the 20 stories to include. But now, O. Henry also includes a list of 50 short-listed stories (with brief synopses) and comments by the authors of each year's anointed 20. Furthermore, three guest jurors (this year, Sherman Alexie, Stephen King, and Lorrie Moore), pick from those 20 a first, second, and third prize. Sales have zoomed.You could read this year's editions of these two indispensable annuals and -- without breaking a sweat (with no effort more strenuous than feeling the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, though I did, as did Tan, read most of these stories on a StairMaster) -- glean this exemplary shorthand of whom you should be reading, circa 1998-1999.Most Valuable Player: Alice Munro. Why (aside from the fact that she's the greatest living writer in English): Her story, "Save the Reaper," certainly the best short story I read last year, is one of only two included in both the 1999 BASS and O. Henry. In awarding it third prize in O. HENRY, Moore (whose "People Like That Are the Only People Here" was the only story included in both the 1998 BASS and O. Henry) discerns the story's parallels not only with Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" but also with the myths of Eros, Demeter, and Hermes. Moore writes that, in contrast to the O'Connor masterpiece, "[a]s always in the fictional world of Munro, a character's fate pivots not on the penitential moment but on the erotic one."Neither annual allows any writer to be represented by more than one story (a custom that became a rule when both Munro and Richard Bausch landed two gems apiece in BASS 1990), but Munro's "Cortes Island" is short-listed for both and "Before the Change" is short-listed in O. Henry. All three stories are collected in her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning book The Love of a Good Woman.MVP Runners-Up: Annie Proulx, Pam Houston, Lorrie Moore.Why: All three are included in both volumes. Proulx's story "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" is included in BASS and short-listed in O. Henry, "The Mud Below" in O. Henry and short-listed in BASS. Both are included in Proulx's collection Close Range, which includes two other stories honored in previous years ("Brokeback Mountain" and "The Half-Skinned Steer") and, even in an amazing year for short story collections, is one of the year's most talked-about books.Houston is the year's most-cited story writer, with four: "Cataract" is included in O. Henry; "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" is included BASS; two other stories ("Then You Get Up and Have Breakfast" and "Three Lessons in Amazon Biology") are short-listed in BASS. All are included in her collection Waltzing the Cat.In addition to serving as an O. Henry juror, Moore has a story, "Real Estate," included in BASS, and her story "Lucky Ducks" is short-listed there. Both are from the exquisite Birds of America.Rookie of the Year: Jhumpa Lahiri.Why: Her funny, gentle, heartbreaking story "Interpreter of Maladies" -- about a nonjudgmental part-time translator/part-time cabdriver in India, who takes an American family sightseeing, gets a decorous crush on the woman, and leads the children into endangerment at the hands of hanuman monkeys -- is the only other story in both volumes. Although Lahiri's work has appeared in The New Yorker, this story originally ran in The Agni Review -- a good journal, but one you may not regularly read. Both annuals had picked it for inclusion before the publication of Lahiri's first book, also called Interpreter of Maladies. The book is, justly, one of the sleeper successes of the year."Our record of discovery is pretty good," says BASS's Kenison. "Chances are, year in and year out, you'll pick up a volume and read a story by someone you've never heard of. The next year, that writer's everywhere you look."This year, that's Lahiri.Also receiving votes are these 18 writers, an intriguing mix of veterans and new voices, also either short-listed or included in both volumes (and if you want to be the savviest reader on your block, you'll read more of these people's work): Poe Ballantine, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Michael Byers, Kiana Davenport, Chitra Divakaruni, Nathan Englander, Mary Gaitskill, Tim Gautreaux (whose "The Piano Tuner," included in BASS and collected in his new book, Welding with Children, is my favorite non-Munro story in either book), Heidi Julavitz, Sheila Kohler, David Long, Steven Millhauser, Kent Nelson, Cynthia Ozick, Melissa Pritchard, John Updike (he's very good), David Foster Wallace (he's very smart), Joy Williams.—Mark Winegardner

    The story keeps us guessing about the details until the last page and is a pacy read.

    They hide in back yards, car lots, shopping malls. They devour neighbors, dogs and police officers. And they are here to stay. The real question is, what are you going to do about it? How will you survive?How will the world change when the dead begin to rise? Stoker-award-winning author Christopher Golden has assembled an original anthology of never-before-published zombie stories from an eclectic array of today's hottest writers. Inside there are stories about military might in the wake of an outbreak, survival in a wasted wasteland, the ardor of falling in love with a zombie, and a family outing at the circus. Here is a collection of new views on death and resurrection.With stories from Joe Hill, John Connolly, Max Brooks, Kelley Armstrong, Tad Williams, David Wellington, David Liss, Aimee Bender, Jonathan Maberry, and many others, this is a wildly diverse and entertaining collection... the last word on The New Dead.

    Five characters, in very different circumstances—from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, to a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city—find out the meanings of dislocation and the desire for more.Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel of multiple narratives—formally daring, fierce, but full of pity—delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.

    This book will help in quick review before examinations.

    This is a place where teenage love and friendships are tested by the violence that threatens to erupt at the slightest provocation. A town that always pulls you back into its ways, no matter how cosmopolitan the city has made you.In 'Diwali in Muzaffarnagar' - Tanuj Solanki's new book of short stories after 'Neon Noon' - young men and women straddle the past and the present, the metropolis and the small town, and also the parallel needs of life: solitude and family.

    . . a woman lying dead on her bed, a man hanging from the ceiling fan. A suicide note cum murder confession. And a name . . . Shaunak Sodhi.When the case comes their way, Senior Inspector Saralkar has just been diagnosed with hypertension and PSI Motkar is busy with rehearsals of an amateur play.What appears at first to be a commonplace crime by a debt-ridden, cuckolded husband, who has killed his unfaithful wife and then hung himself, soon begins to unfold as a baffling mystery.As clues point to a seven-year-old unsolved murder in Bangalore and other leads emerge closer home, Saralkar and Motkar find themselves investigating shady secrets, bitter grudges, fishy land deals, carnal desires, the dead woman Anushka Doshi’s sinister obsession with past life regression and her husband’s links to a suspicious, small-time god-man, Rangdev Baba. And then, suddenly, the murderer resurfaces and yet another life is in grave danger . . . Can Saralkar and Motkar get to the bottom of an unimaginably shocking motive and stop the malevolent killer from committing the fourth murder . . .?

    Twenty-nine-year-old Malini is single, a cat lover, and a proofreader with a secret crush.Vikram Mathur is a bestselling author with more than a dozen books and a debilitating problem—the writer's block.What Malini wants more than anything is to meet Vikram, but he doesn't even know she exists.What if wishes were to come true! Read this short and sweet story to find out.Will Malini get her heart's desire?Will Vikram be able to write his next bestseller?

    Ali sees his new business flourish as the indomitable Mrs. Ali and his careful assistant, Aruna, look on with vigilant eyes. There's the man who wants a tall son-in-law because his daughter is short; the divorced woman who ends up back with her ex-husband; a salesman who can't seem to sell himself; and a wealthy, young doctor for whom no match is ever perfect. But although his clients go away happy, little does Mr. Ali know that his esteemed Aruna hides a tragedy in her past-a misfortune that the bureau, as luck would have it, serendipitously undoes. Bursting with the color and allure of India, and with a cast of endearing characters, The Marriage Bureau for Rich People has shades of Jane Austen and Alexander McCall Smith but with a resonance and originality entirely its own. Farahad's effortless style reveals a country still grappling with the politics of caste, religion, and civil unrest, all the while delivering a shamefully delightful read.

    It pulls the reader in and holds on! I cannot wait for more from this writer! Wish I could give her ten stars myself!" When headmaster James Leibinger finds one of his teachers dead, the police write it off as suicide. After all Dorian Jones had plenty of problems. However James is convinced Dorian was murdered, but how can he prove it? The he remembers a chance encounter with a female private detective – Jayne Belmont. Would she be able to solve this mystery? Jayne is faced with an entire staff of teachers and an ex-wife who would all like to see the back of Dorian. What's more they all seem to have had opportunity. Jayne slowly narrows down her suspects, but when another body falls to their death and all the suspects were in the same room, the case becomes impossible to solve. Or does it? Join Jayne on her ups and downs in this murder mystery set in the city of Palmerston in Australia's torrid Northern Territory where the heat and humidity combine with circumstances to test Jayne's wits almost to breaking point. Scroll up, buy now and see if you can find out who did it!