Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov and O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection includes Sredni Vastar and The Unrest Cure. 'We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples they sometimes live apart'[Description from back cover]

    Full of memorable characters and masterfully composed narrative, these short stories constitute a wonderful addition to any personal library, and are not to be missed by discerning collectors of Runyon's work. The stories contained herein include: Beach of Promise, Romance in the Roaring Forties, Dream Street Rose, The Old Doll's House, Blood Pressure, The Bloodhounds of Broadway, Tobias the Terrible, The Snatching of Bookie Bob, The Lily of St. Pierre, Earthquake, and more. Alfred Damon Runyon (1880 1946) was an American newspaperman and author, best remembered for his short stories about the world of Broadway in New York City that resulted from the Prohibition era. This volume is being republished now in an affordable, modern edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author."

    From Sarah Orne Jewett's portraits of rural Maine to F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant tales from the Jazz Age, these stories span the breadth of the American experience. In addition to acknowledged masters of the short story form, such as O. Henry, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway, this volume features stories by Charles W. Chesnutt, the first important African-American novelist, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a leading theorist of the early women's movement.

    The freedom to tell each other the stories of ourselves, to retell the stories of our culture and beliefs, is profoundly connected to the larger subject of freedom itself.”—Salman Rushdie, editorIntroduction / by Salman Rushdie --Admiral / T.C. Boyle --The year of silence / Kevin Brockmeier --Galatea / Karen Brown --Man and wife / Katie Chase --Virgins / Danielle Evans --Closely held / Allegra Goodman --May we be forgiven / A.M. Homes --From the desk of Daniel Varsky / Nicole Krauss --The king of sentences / Jonathan Lethem --The worst you ever feel / Rebecca Makkai --The wizard of West Orange / Steven Millhauser --Nawabdin Electrician / Daniyal Mueenuddin --Child's play / Alice Munro --Buying Lenin / Miroslav Penkov --Vampires in the lemon grove / Karen Russell --Puppy / George Saunders --Quality of life / Christine Sneed --Missionaries / Bradford Tice --Straightaway / Mark Wisniewski --Bible / Tobias Wolff

    In four novels and fifty-six short stories, Holmes with his trusted friend Dr. Watson, steps from his comfortable quarters at 221B Baker Street into the swirling fog of London. Combining detailed observation with brilliant deduction, Holmes rescues the innocent, confounds the guilty, and solves the most perplexing puzzles crime has to offer.Volume I of The Complete Sherlock Holmes begins with Holmes's first appearance, A Study in Scarlet, a chilling murder novel complete with bloodstained walls and cryptic clues. This is followed by the baffling The Sign of Four, which introduces Holmes's cocaine problem and Watson's future wife. Volume I also includes the story collections The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and concludes with the tale "The Final Problem," in which Conan Doyle, tired of writing Holmes stories, kills off his famed sleuth.(back cover)

    An FBI agent falls in love with a robot built for a suicide mission. A young woman unintentionally cheats on her husband when she is transformed, nightly, into a deer. Two strangers become lovers and find themselves somehow responsible for the resurrection of a dog. A woman tries to start her life anew after the loss of a child but cannot help riddling that new life with lies. Thirteen pregnant teenagers develop a strange relationship with the Founding Fathers of American history. A lonely woman’s fertility treatments become the stuff of science fiction.Magic intrudes. Technology betrays and disappoints. Infidelities lead us beyond the usual conflict. Our bodies change, reproduce, decay, and surprise. With her characteristic unguarded gaze and offbeat humor, Hunt has conjured stories that urge an understanding of youth and mortality, magnification and loss, and hold out the hope that we can know one another more deeply or at least stand side by side to observe the mystery of the world.

    Alone in his apartment, he reads stories aloud to the point he has them memorized. Sometimes he fantasizes that he wrote them. Sometimes, when they’re his very favorite stories, he’ll fantasize about reading them in front of an audience and taking credit for them. The audience in these fantasies always loves him and gives him the respect he deserves.David Sedaris didn’t write the stories in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules . But he did read them. And he liked them enough to hand pick them for this collection of short fiction. Featuring such notable writers as Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Thompson, and Tobias Wolff, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules includes some of the most influential and talented short story writers, contemporary and classic.Perfect for fans who suffer from Sedaris fever, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules will tide them over and provide relief.2 hrs 56 mins

    In"Bog Girl", a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he's extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In "The Prospectors," two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant's safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void--yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.

    Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.”In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”

    Now the author of the Lincoln Rhyme series ("The Cold Moon" and "The Bone Collector," among others) has compiled a second volume of his award-winning, spine-tingling short stories of suspense.While best known for his twenty-four novels, Jeffery Deaver is also a short story master -- he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader's Award for Best Short Story, and he won the Short Story Dagger from the Crime Writers Association for a piece that appeared in his first short story collection, "Twisted. The New York Times" said of that book: "A mystery hit for those who like their intrigue short and sweet . . . [The stories] feature tight, bare-bones plotting and the sneaky tricks that Mr. Deaver's title promises." The sneaky tricks are here in spades, and Deaver even gives his fans a new Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs story.Deaver is back with sixteen stories in the tradition of O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe. His subjects range from a Westchester commuter to a brilliant Victorian England caper. With these intricately plotted, bone-chilling stories, Jeffery Deaver is at the top of his crime-writing game.

    This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor.

    From a stirring portrait of Rodney King's final days to a surreal video game set in the Middle East, with real consequences, to an indigenous boy's gripping escape from his captors, this collection renders profoundly empathetic depictions of the variety of human experience. These stories are poignant reminders of the possibilities of fiction: as you sink into world after world, become character after character, as Ward writes, youforget yourself, and then, upon surfacing, know yourself and others anew.The Best American Short Stories 2021 includes GABRIEL BUMP - BRANDON HOBSON - DAVID MEANS- JANE PEK - TRACEY ROSE PEYTON - GEORGE SAUNDERS - BRYAN WASHINGTON - KEVIN WILSON - C PAM ZHANG and others

    Wells, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, right up to Graham Greene, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, and many others, The Oxford Book of English Short Stories exhibits the capacious and often capricious nature of the English literary sensibility. There is English empiricism, English pragmatism, English starkness, English humor, English satire, English horror, and English whimsy, notes A.S. Byatt in surveying the stories she has selected. There are characteristic mixed modes which seem to go back further than Austen and Defoe to Chaucer and Shakespeare. Byatt shows us the links between stories, the literary currents that both connect and distinguish writers as diverse as Mary Mann, V.S. Pritchett, P.G. Wodehouse, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Alan Sillitoe. And although the thirty-seven stories gathered here range from socialish realism to surreal fantasy, from rural poverty to war-blitzed London, from tales of the supernatural to precise delineations of the mundane, all are unified by Byatt's demanding criteria that the works be both startling and satisfying. For short story lovers and anyone unable to resist the enchantments of the English imagination, The Oxford Book of Short Stories offers a wide array of unforgettable pleasures.

    C. Boyle writes, “The Model T gave way to the Model A and to the Ferrari and the Prius . . . modernism to postmodernism and post-postmodernism. We advance. We progress. We move on. But we are part of a tradition.” Boyle’s choices of stories reflect a vibrant range of characters, from a numb wife who feels alive only in the presence of violence to a new widower coming to terms with his sudden freedom, from a missing child to a champion speedboat racer. These stories will grab hold and surprise, which according to Boyle is “what the best fiction offers, and there was no shortage of such in this year’s selections.” Mulling over the question of character likability, series editor Heidi Pitlor asks, “Did I like these characters? I very much liked reading their stories, as did T. C. Boyle.” Here are characters who “are living, breathing people who screw up terribly and want and need and think uneasy thoughts.”   T. C. BOYLE, guest editor, has published fifteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his novel World’s End and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, as well as the 2014 Henry David Thoreau Prize for excellence in nature writing. His most recent book is the novel The Harder They Come. HEIDI PITLOR, series editor, is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.

    Volume One, presenting the first five writers to receive the award, features the fiction of: Robert A. HeinleinJack WilliamsonClifford D. SimakL. Sprague de CampFritz Leiber