A retelling of The Canterbury Tales

    Entire relationships are encapsulated in a few, stingingly perfect lines: "Colleen was Walter's ex-girlfriend from med school. She loved to dance with men at weddings." Pricking our insecurities, Shapton introduces us to Kim, whose ex "kept a drawerful of love letters in a kitchen drawer . . . She would stare at it while she cooked." And Ben's ex, "a physiotherapist for the U.S. men's and women's Olympic swim teams. She wore small white shorts year-round."Fascinated by her own jealousy, Shapton interviewed acquaintances about their anxieties and peccadilloes, and the result is a book of surpassing originality: one of those unusual books that comes along to delight us all, like An Exaltation of Larks or Love, Loss, and What I Wore or Griffin and Sabine. Was She Pretty? can also share the shelf with the work of the legendary William Steig, whose early, psychologically revealing work inspired Shapton. An unflinching observer of human behavior, she invites us to peer into the hearts and minds of her characters--while reminding us that we shouldn't be surprised if we see ourselves staring right back.

    His humor and short fiction appear in various publications throughout the Southeast.

    Ranging from tiny sketches and prose poems to longer, more conventional narratives, the stories included here are:A Country Doctor - In the Gods - An Old Folio - Before the Law - Jackals and Arabs - A Visit to the Mine - The Next Village - An Imperial Message - A Paterfamilias Perplexed - Eleven Sons - A Fratricide - A Dream - Bucket Rider - Of Metaphors - The Silence of the Sirens - Gracchus the Hunter - The Knock on the Courtyard Door - Advocates - The Vulture - At Night - A Little Fable.This e-book has a total length of around 16,000 words.

    When Nor’easter Igor unearths gold coins on Bounty Beach in the Outer Banks seaside town of Treasure Harbor, North Carolina, treasure seekers from near and far converge on the town in hopes of finding riches and the secret of a lifetime. Join your favorite contemporary Christian romance authors for the journey as seven couples find love in the midst of Treasure Harbor's Chaos. Some Kind Of Wonderful-1 When journalist Lara Callahan returns home to Treasure Harbor, North Carolina in order to write a series about pirate Drake Burton and his lost treasure, she joins forces with her childhood crush, Ryan Burton, who is determined to hunt down the missing treasure. Can Lara and Ryan find common ground in a town that has gone treasure crazy? The Space Between Us-2 When rumors of the legendary lost treasure resurface, Avery despairs of the attention it brings. She’d rather ignore the whole mess, but that’s impossibley. When Brody Chance shows her attention, she can’t help but roll her eyes-he's not her idea of husband material, however, her heart has different ideas. Treasured Love-3 Kori James is looking for a lost treasure and a fresh start. She doesn't want a relationship with gook-looking Max from Treasure Harbor. Max doesn’t care about the legendary treasure, but that new girl, Kori, just might be what he’s been seeking all his life. Stolen Legacy-4 Mallory is a lonely antique restorer who’s lived her life without a sense of belonging. Is her faith strong enough to help Victor overcome his pirate ancestry and find the treasure that is his heart? His Timeless Treasure-5 Professor Bree Burton is determined to use her academic skills to set the record straight about her family's history, but she finds she needs the platform of a most unlikely partner, meteorologist Reid Knight, who isn't afraid to ask questions--or keep secrets. Along the way, they both discover that there's truth and lies in all legends--and that the most timeless treasure in this coastal town might just be true love. His Precious Jewel-6 Archeologist Roman Sant'Angelo arrives in Treasure Harbor, North Carolina, in search of the famous missing jewel, the Star of Imara. When he teams up with beautiful local jeweler, Jade Sims, on a quest to find the legendary piece, the secrets he's keeping might jeopardize their blossoming love The Sum of Love-7 Paige Burton never knew why Levi left without an explanation two days after their engagement. Now he was back and she intended to get the answers—but what if the answers weren’t what she expected? Can a reconciliation lead to the end of the centuries-old feud between the Callahan and Burton families, and the discovery of the lost treasure?

    There are the surprising, fresh little phrases minted expressly to convey the delicate realities of the made-up world. There's the humor, fierce and sly but always kind. There's the imagination that changes gender and historical epoch at whim, and does so convincingly; and the characters themselves, a sundry bunch of men and women not necessarily successful or commendable but always, somehow, likable. Best of all, by their very diversity, these stories reveal glimpses of the smart and enigmatic woman behind the work. In "Atlantic Crossing," Winterson becomes a middle-aged businessman of the mid-20th century, accidentally assigned to share his second-class cabin with a young black woman on a transatlantic crossing. In the realm of event, little happens, but in its depth of perception and what it tells of the nuances of regret, the story is as rich as a novel in another writer's hands. A few scant pages later, Winterson becomes a kind of lost female Homer, telling Orion's story from Artemis's point of view: "When she returned she saw this huge rag of a man eating her goat, raw.... His reputation hung about him like bad breath." In "The Poetics of Sex," she creates a lesbian love story that evokes her characters' personalities as explicitly as their erotic pleasures. "The 24-Hour Dog," the story of a woman writer returning a puppy she had thought to adopt, is remorseless as a psychological thriller in the squirmy depths it plumbs: "I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated: his heart and mine." Read The World and Other Places twice, once for instruction, once for joy. --Joyce Thompson

    "This drowsy denison of the realms of the Pharaohs will do us no harm." And he remained by the tank. What is more, he took his glove and began tickling the crocodile's nose with it, wishing, as he said afterwards, to induce him to snort.Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky is best known for his exploration of the human dark side of the psyche, but this collection shows he is equally adept at sarcastic and absurdist commentary.

    Carver Country presents the stark but human reality of one man's world, a man who was generous in his spirit and in his gifts, and who rose above his beginnings - but Raymond Carver never left his native ground or gave up his love for its terrain and its people. Raymond Carver's gritty texts, including his poems, short stories and unpublished letters, combined with Bob Adelman's photographs of Carver's people and haunts, re-create the world of this major writer, bringing to life the bleak, blue-collar towns, people, and places that became the inspiration for much of his work. Includes 113 duotone photos.

    Or how about when you got stood up on that tinder date and go home disappointed, only to realize it was all a trick so he'd know where you live? Then there's those letters your dead wife keeps writing you... There can be no light without darkness, pleasure without pain, or love without loss. 17 authors have teamed up to collect all our favorite supernatural and psychological horror stories about love.Jealous murders, monstrous doppelgangers, heart-rending romances, devils and angels, cannibals and virtual worlds - over 350 pages of your most desperate longings and worst nightmares all rolled into one. Shocking twists and absolute mind-fuckery will thrill and terrify you to the last page!

    0-935906-02-9$5.00 / Javan Press

    Prabhat Prakashan has a glorious history of fifty years of publishing quality books on almost all streams of literature, viz. children books, fiction, science, quiz, humanities, personality development, health, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc. For the last fifteen years, Prabhat Prakashan has been continuously winning accolades for excellence in book publication.

    Bingham's strange sense of morbid fancy collides with a gutsy realism; the result is splendid wreckage: a young man is seduced by his first cousin (or maybe it's the other way around) at her brother's wake ("The Other Family"); a bored couple plot to kill a man during their ski-resort honeymoon ("Marriage Is Murder"); a yuppie banker risks his whole perfect life for an affair with a junkie ("The Fixers"); an insurance-company bounty hunter tracks down walk-aways from drug and alcohol rehab ("Preexisting Condition"); and in the title story, an eleven-year-old boy is caught at the exquisitely uneasy intersection of the safety of childhood play and the pain of grown-up love and longing.These lean, potent stories are utterly original, and yet by turns recall Salinger, in their intellectual acuity, emotional depth, and wicked, dark humor; Fitzgerald, in their vivid chronicling of a new, restless social elite; and the work of "transgressive" writers, in their pervasive sense of the imminent possibility of danger and violence, even in the most civilized surroundings. Above all, the stories in Pure Slaughter Value mark the debut of a striking new literary voice--unsparing, bold, ironic, and true--that will haunt us for a long time to come.

    Past winners and shortlisted authors have included the Pulitzer winners Junot Díaz, Anthony Doerr and Adam Johnson, plus Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith, Yiyun Li, CK Stead and Elizabeth Strout.Six Shorts 2017 brings together the six stories shortlisted for this year's award: ‘Reputation Management’ by Kathleen Alcott; ‘Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows about Horses’ by Bret Anthony Johnston; ‘The Hazel Twig and the Olive Tree’ by Richard Lambert; ‘The Tenant’ by Victor Lodato; ‘Every Little Thing’ by Celeste Ng; and ‘Mr Salary’ by Sally Rooney.Chosen by a hugely experienced and prestigious judging panel that included Booker-winner Anne Enright, Orange- and Whitbread-winner Rose Tremain, Booker-shortlistee Neel Mukherjee and critic and novelist Mark Lawson, the six stories represent the very best in contemporary English-language short fiction.

    The exalted, memorable characters in Kirn's acclaimed debut short story col lection confront the real hard bargains in life that spring up from the business of simply living, and Kirn transforms these hard-luck stories into strapping moral lessons which evoke the bonds that unite us all.

    No other version has so vividly expressed the horror, cruelty, beauty, and outrageous imaginative flight of Dante's original vision.