In Magical Mr. Goat, a young girl's imaginary friend yearns to become "more than friends." In Unprotected, an unused prophylactic recalls his years spent trapped inside a teen boy's wallet. The stories in Simon Rich's new book are bizarre, funny, and yet...relatable. Rich explores love's many complications-losing it, finding it, breaking it, and making it-and turns the ordinary into the absurd. With razor-sharp humor and illustrations, and just in time for Valentine's Day, Rich takes readers for an exhilarating, hilarious ride on the rollercoaster of love.

    The classic story of a boy's adventures in the Mississippi Valley.

    For hundreds of years, the danger of collision has been ignored as mere crackpot theories, until now, and now it's too late. Collision is a short story commissioned by Vanquish Motion Pictures for development in film and television, and is the first in a series of character-rich, mystery-driven science fiction grounded in science fact.

    Unmarried, he’s keen to settle and as he and Gerda spend more and more time onboard together they realise that each has found someone very special.But it’s the afternoon before they dock in Liverpool, and tragedy strikes. As the torpedoed ship lists to one side Jack and Gerda must make frightening decisions that become a matter of life or death …A beautiful, romantic and moving tale based on a true story.***This is a short story, which you can also buy as part of the Love…Maybe Eshort Collection***

     Like the fierce, powerful, young characters that appear in her stories, Kaui Hart Hemmings demands our immediate attention. In this exciting debut collection of short stories, Hemmings establishes herself as one of the most original, unapologetic, and honest young voices to come out of the next batch of freshly schooled fiction writers. A member of upper-class Hawaiian society, she has set the beautiful island as a backdrop, indeed a foil, to describe the small torments and victories of growing up and finding one's place. Bold, frustrated teenagers and the adults who raise them wrestle with one another over the age-old issues of deprived freedom, misguided love, being cool, and being true, and they experience together the loneliness of feeling miserable in paradise. Hemmings's tart, confident voice plunges us headfirst into the unfamiliar world of a Hawaii far from the tourist track, providing revealing glimpses of the island's divisive racial and class issues as well as the proud heritage of kings and warriors and the legacy of colonialists and missionaries. Her unceremonious dealing with issues like drugs, sex, and abandonment, and her entirely unselfconscious prose allow her stories to wash effortlessly over us like an ocean wave, always leaving behind an unusual shell, a curiously shaped rock--something to ponder that is fascinating and true. A single mother's discovery of a pornographic magazine in her thirteen-year-old son's room sends her down a spiral of jealousy that ultimately guarantees her loss of him. A white man who is left by his native Hawaiian wife struggles to understand why he and his daughter, abandoned together, feel such deep resentment for each other. A boy who insists on the illusion of his happy family suddenly recognizes his father's lack of real love and comes to the understanding that certain things are severed and they can't grow again, the acknowledgment of the waste that comes from loving a place that doesn't love you back. The stories in House of Thieves are told from varied points of view--a father, a child, a young woman, an adolescent boy, and more. Rooted in the circumstances and situations of island people, Hemmings's sharp and entertaining stories reveal the mundane cycle of small tragedies and victories that make up the lives of ordinary people everywhere.

    In her sweetly vibrant Mississippi drawl, Ms. Welty deftly draws the listener in to the uproariously multilayered "Why I Live at the P.O.," the spontaneous "Powerhouse" and the insightful voice of women's truths in "Petrified Man." Ms. Welty's reading brings immediacy and resonance to these wonderful tales.

    By day, he teaches literature. At night, he steals it. Adam is a plagiarist, an expert reader with an eye for great works. He prowls simulated worlds perusing virtual texts, looking for the next big thing. And when he finds it, he memorizes it page by page, line by line, word for word. And then he brings it back to his world. But what happens when these virtual worlds begin to seem more real than his own? What happens when the people within them mean more to him than flesh and blood? What happens when a living thing falls in love with someone who does not actually exist?

    A rich and emotionally resonant collection of twelve stories of hope, momentary joy, and powerful endurance.

    Would they buy a silver fox coat, or mink?

    In I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy, Gilchrist writes again of one of her most beloved characters, with the hilarity, wisdom, and poignancy that marks all of her fiction. Here, a clutch of stories are told in the voice of Rhoda -- as a child, as a divorced mother of three sons, and as an old woman, recalling the curse and blessing of being the only daughter of Big Dudley. In The Abortion, a young girl whose father is dying and the boy who loves her struggle with clashing notions of what makes life meaningful. In Remorse, a small town hairdresser revisits the last days of his best friend's life and what he might have done to save her. There is a rich vein of sorrow here, but Gilchrist lightens the burden with a grasp of how both folly and grace are born of love. As her characters, both new and familiar, spin out their unlikely fates, Gilchrist proves once again that there is no other Southern writer quite like her.

    A short story written for Halloween

    Intelligent and brutally direct talk to a reader about our times, Russia, the Russians, and much more.

    There’s something in his bag. Something silver and glistening, sparkling with hopes and dreams of a bright and beautiful future. The only thing standing between him and his soon to be fiancée Emma is his arduous, mind-numbing drive home. But something isn’t right. His phone, his hearing, the music, the traffic; everything just seems off and out of sync, and Riley can’t quite put his finger on it.All he has to do is keep his eyes on the road…All he has to do is take it slow…In this brooding and deeply moving short story by Jack Harding, buckle up and settle down for a journey that will stir your senses and pull on your heart strings, keeping you guessing right until the end of the road.

    These 11 profoundly moving and finely crafted stories encapsulate wildly divergent themes of love and loss, containment and exclusion. In the title story, a parks & rec worker faces an assailant who does not leave the altercation intact. A medical researcher and his claustrophobic fiancée are locked in the trunk of their car after a failed carjacking (the thief can't drive standard). A young woman enters a pharmaceutical trial in the outer reaches of suburbia and slips between sleeping and waking with increasingly alarming ease. Pairing the cultural acuity of Lost in Translation with the compassion and reach of The World According to Garp, Heighton breathes new life into the short story, a genre that is finally coming into its own.

    For the one canine who lives inside a CHRONOS field, they’re a major headache. Can Daphne find a way to save her pack from the Circles-That-Whine?