Bull Mountain


Brian Panowich - 2015
    For generations, the Burroughs clan has made its home on Bull Mountain in North Georgia, running shine, pot, and meth over six state lines, virtually untouched by the rule of law. To distance himself from his family’s criminal empire, Clayton took the job of sheriff in a neighboring community to keep what peace he can. But when a federal agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms shows up at Clayton’s office with a plan to shut down the mountain, his hidden agenda will pit brother against brother, test loyalties, and could lead Clayton down a path to self-destruction.

First Thrills


Lee ChildSean Michael Bailey - 2010
    Showcasing many of the organization’s bestselling authors as well as rising stars in the genre, here are twenty-five brand-new, never-before-published stories packed with murder, mystery, and mayhem.• A cunning criminal thinks he can use a child to take the rap for his crimes.• A hospital intern turned body snatcher• A priest who comes face-to-face with his wife’s murderer on death row• A Confederate soldier comes home to his love, but changed by more than just the war . . . he comes back wrong.• The discovery of a flying saucer in the ocean depths brings one man to the brink of a massive revelation.• A dying man’s last request proves to his ex-wife that he’s still rotten to the core.• A clandestine operative finds himself caught in a wicked game of confusion . . . but who is calling the shots? No matter what type of thriller you listen to, you’ll find something here that will entertain you . . . and perhaps a new writer you’ll cherish for years to come.

Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption


Daniel Jones - 2019
    A man's promising fourth date ends in the emergency room. A female lawyer with bipolar disorder experiences the highs and lows of dating. A widower hesitates about introducing his children to his new girlfriend. A divorcée in her seventies looks back at the beauty and rubble of past relationships.These are just a few of the people who tell their stories in Modern Love, Revised and Updated, featuring dozens of the most memorable essays to run in The New York Times "Modern Love" column since its debut in 2004.Some of the stories are unconventional, while others hit close to home. Some reveal the way technology has changed dating forever; others explore the timeless struggles experienced by anyone who has ever searched for love. But all of the stories are, above everything else, honest. Together, they tell the larger story of how relationships begin, often fail, and--when we're lucky--endure.Edited by longtime "Modern Love" editor Daniel Jones and featuring a diverse selection of contributors--including Mindy Hung, Trey Ellis, Ann Hood, Deborah Copaken, Terri Cheney, and more--this is the perfect book for anyone who's loved, lost, stalked an ex on social media, or pined for true romance: In other words, anyone interested in the endlessly complicated workings of the human heart.

A Cat, a Hat, and a Piece of String


Joanne Harris - 2012
    Worry for a young girl in the Congo who rides the rapids to earn a crust of bread; and spy on Norse gods battling each other for survival in modern Manhattan. In her first short-story collection since Jigs & Reels, let Joanne Harris ensnare and delight you with the variety and inventiveness of her storytelling.

The Tsar of Love and Techno


Anthony Marra - 2015
    A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.The leopard --Granddaughters --The Grozny Tourist Bureau --A prisoner of the Caucasus --The tsar of love and techno --Wolf of White Forest --Palace of the people --A temporary exhibition --The end

The Girl Who Married a Lion: And Other Tales from Africa


Alexander McCall Smith - 2004
    He now shares them in this jewel of a book.

A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction


Terry Pratchett - 2012
    Here for the first time are his short stories and other short form fiction collected into one volume. A Blink of the Screen charts the course of Pratchett's long writing career: from his schooldays through to his first writing job on the Bucks Free Press,; to the origins of his debut novel, The Carpet People; and on again to the dizzy mastery of the phenomenally successful Discworld series.Here are characters both familiar and yet to be discovered; abandoned worlds and others still expanding; adventure, chickens, death, disco and, actually, some quite disturbing ideas about Christmas,all of it shot through with his inimitable brand of humour.With an introduction by Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt, illustrations by the late Josh Kirby and drawings by the author himself, this is a book to treasure.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love


Raymond Carver - 1981
    Alternate-cover edition can be found here In his second collection, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated and beloved short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.

Bone Music


Christopher Rice - 2018
    If only the nightmare had ended when she was rescued. Instead, her real father exploited her tabloid-ready story for fame and profit—until Charlotte finally broke free from her ghoulish past and fled. Just when she thinks she has buried her personal hell forever, Charlotte is swept into a frightening new ordeal. Secretly dosed with an experimental drug, she’s endowed with a shocking new power—but pursued by a treacherous corporation desperate to control her.Except from now on, if anybody is going to control Charlotte, it’s going to be Charlotte herself. She’s determined to use the extraordinary ability she now possesses to fight the kind of evil that shattered her life—by drawing a serial killer out from the shadows to face the righteous fury of a victim turned avenger.

Fragile


Lisa Unger - 2010
    It's a place where neighbors keep an eye on one another's kids, where people say hello in the grocery store, and where high school cliques and antics are never quite forgotten. As a child, Maggie found living under the microscope of small-town life stifling. But as a wife and mother, she has happily returned to The Hollows's insular embrace. As a psychologist, her knowledge of family histories provides powerful insights into her patients' lives. So when the girlfriend of her teenage son, Rick, disappears, Maggie's intuitive gift proves useful to the case--and also dangerous.The investigation has her husband, Jones, the lead detective on the case, acting strangely. Rick, already a brooding teenager, becomes even more withdrawn. In a town where the past is always present, nobody is above suspicion, not even a son in the eyes of his father.Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie pursues her own leads into Charlene's disappearance and exposes a long-buried town secret--one that could destroy everything she holds dear.

The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness & Obsession


David Grann - 2010
    prison system, tracking down a chameleon con artist in Europe, or riding in a cyclone-tossed skiff with a scientist hunting the elusive giant squid, David Grann revels in telling stories that explore the nature of obsession and that piece together true and unforgettable mysteries.Each of the dozen stories in this collection reveals a hidden and often dangerous world and, like Into Thin Air and The Orchid Thief, pivots around the gravitational pull of obsession and the captivating personalities of those caught in its grip. There is the world's foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes who is found dead in mysterious circumstances; an arson sleuth trying to prove that a man about to be executed is innocent, and sandhogs racing to complete the brutally dangerous job of building New York City's water tunnels before the old system collapses. Throughout, Grann's hypnotic accounts display the power-and often the willful perversity-of the human spirit.Compulsively readable, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant mosaic of ambition, madness, passion, and folly.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005


Laura Furman - 2005
    Jones Dues Dale Peck Speckle Trout Ron Rash Sphinxes Timothy Crouse Grace Paula Fox Snowbound Liza Ward Tea Nancy Reisman Christie Caitlin Macy Refuge in London Ruth Prawer Jhabvala The Drowned Woman Frances De Pontes Peebles The Card Trick Tessa Hadley What You Pawn I Will Redeem Sherman Alexie

Sorry Please Thank You


Charles Yu - 2012
    . . A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape . . . A company outsources grief for profit, their tagline: "Don't feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you."

Vanishing and Other Stories


Deborah Willis - 2009
    Evocative and passionately written, Vanishing brilliantly explores emotional and physical absences; the ways in which people leave and are left; and whether it’s ever possible to move on.

The Director


David Ignatius - 2014
    This is the moment a CIA director most dreads. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it's drawn, The Director is a maze of double dealing, about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones—and nothing can be trusted.