Nebraska: Stories


Ron Hansen - 1988
    These 11 gemlike tales range from the blue heart of the blizzard of 1888 to the sweltering jungles of war.Wickedness --Playland --The killers --His dog --The sun so hot I froze to death --Can I just sit here for a while? --The boogeyman --True romance --Sleepless --Red-letter days --Nebraska

Four Short Stories By Emile Zola


Émile Zola - 2006
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Indelible Acts


A.L. Kennedy - 2002
    A. L. Kennedy’s men and women huddle in foreign hotel rooms, immobilized by travel-sickness and betrayal. They plan seductions on the line at a cheese shop. They’re undone by a passing embrace in the office men’s room. Their passion is so urgent and imperious that it invades the stories they tell their children.By turns chaste and ferociously sexy, funny and unbearably sad, every story in Indelible Acts is a testament to the lengths to which desire drives us. And all are marked by Kennedy’s wisdom and humanity, and language that captures the briefest tremor of the infatuated heart.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories


Grace Paley - 1974
    Seventeen stories written over the past fifteen years reveal the author's vision of human love and tragedy.Wants --Debts --Distance --Faith in the afternoon --Gloomy tune --Living --Come on, ye sons of art --Faith in a tree --Samuel --The burdened man --Enormous changes at the last minute --Politics --Northeast playground --The little girl --A conversation with my father --The immigrant story --The long-distance runner

Hornblower and His Majesty


C.S. Forester - 1940
    For his first command after escaping from France, Hornblower is given charge of the royal yacht - and he soon requires all his skill and instinct to prevent disaster!

Jane Austen: Her Complete Novels in One Sitting


Jennifer Kasius - 2012
    All six of her classic novels, Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park; Emma; Northanger Abbey; and Persuasion are efficiently organized in this compact tome, which is perfect for either digesting small bites of information or devouring in one sitting. Featuring synopses, character profiles, and two-color illustrations, this mini book brings to life a collection of timeless stories and the iconic characters that populate the novels of Jane Austen.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven


Sherman Alexie - 1993
    These 22 interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents hoping that the alcohol seeping through their skins might help him sleep. Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who tells his stories long after people stop listening, and Jimmy Many Horses, dying of cancer, who writes letters on stationary that reads "From the Death Bed of James Many Horses III," even though he actually writes them on his kitchen table. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and most poetically, between modern Indians and the traditions of the past.

Enigma Variations


André Aciman - 2017
    Whether in southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents’ cabinet maker, or on a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he’ll meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men; on a tennis court in Central Park, or a sidewalk in early spring New York, his attachments are ungraspable, transient and forever underwritten by raw desire—not for just one person’s body but, inevitably, for someone else’s as well. In mapping the most inscrutable corners of desire, Aciman proves to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche and a master stylist of contemporary literature. With language at once lyrical, bare-knuckled, and unabashedly candid, he casts a sensuous, shimmering light over each facet of desire to probe how we ache, want, and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of those who may want only to offer what we crave from them. Behind every step the hero takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are always ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love always casts its luminous halo. We may not always know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and others. But sooner or later we discover who we’ve always known we were.

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart


Joyce Carol Oates - 1990
    At the heart of the story are two people, Iris Courtney, who is white, and handsome Jinx Fairchild, the black basketball player who, in protecting Iris, kills a white man.Iris is the only witness to the crime.The two of them are growing up in the early 1950s in a New York industrial town where racial boundaries keep people apart - or bring them together in explosive scenes of fear or desire. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a murder...and a bond of passion and guilt is formed between them. How this one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies becomes Joyce Carol Oate's finest, emotion-packed novel - a work the critics are calling a masterpiece, the best work of America's best writer of contemporary realism.