In these ten bracingly transgressive tales, all her gifts of characterisation and observation are fully engaged, ushering concealed horrors into the light. Childhood cruelty is played out behind the bushes in 'Comma'; nurses clash in 'Harley Street' over something more than professional differences; and in the title story, staying in for the plumber turns into an ambiguous and potentially deadly waiting game.Whether set in a claustrophobic Saudi Arabian flat or on a precarious mountain road on a Greek island, these stories share an insight into the darkest recesses of the spirit. Displaying all of Mantel's unmistakable style and wit, they reveal a great writer at the peak of her powers.

    This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman's children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

    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.

    An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

    And no story about a young writer struggling to launch his career ever matched its subject matter better than the tale behind Leonard's Western oeuvre.In 1950, fresh out of college -- having written two "pointless" stories, as he describes them -- Leonard decided he needed to pick a market, a big one, which would give him a better chance to be published while he learned to write. In choosing between crime and Westerns, the latter had an irresistible pull -- Leonard loved movies set in the West. As he researched deeper into settings, Arizona in the 1880s captured his imagination: the Spanish influence, the standoffs and shootouts between Apache Indians and the U.S. cavalry ...His first dozen stories sold for 2 cents a word, for $100 each. The rest is history.This first-ever complete collection of Leonard's thirty Western tales will thrill lovers of the genre, his die-hard fans, and everyone in between -- and makes a terrific study of the launch of a phenomenal career.From his very first story ever published -- "The Trail of the Apache" -- through five decades of classic Western tales, The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard demonstrates again and again the superb talent for language and gripping narrative that has made Leonard one of the most acclaimed and influential writers of our time.

    Here we encounter a tutor and his pupil, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they meet again years later; a young girl who discovers the mother she believed dead is alive and well; and a piano-teacher who accepts her pupil's theft in exchange for his beautiful music.

    Some money from each copy of Speaking with the Angel sold will benefit autism education charities around the world, including The Treehouse School in London, where Nick’s son Danny is a student, and the New York Child Learning Institute here in the States. This project is truly a labor of love for Hornby and the other writers involved, many of whom are Nick’s friends.These original first-person narratives come from the most exciting voices in fiction. Melissa Bank gives readers a glimpse into the mind of a modern New Yorker whose still-new relationship is a constant source of surprise in “The Wonder Spot.” In Zadie Smith’s “I’m the Only One,” a young man recalls his strained relationship with his diva-esque sister. Dave Egger’s “After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned,” is told from the viewpoint of an unfortunate pit bull. Helen Fielding offers up a new twist on I’ve fallen and I can’t get up in “Luckybitch.” And in Nick Hornby’s “NippleJesus,” a bruiser finds out that guarding modern art is far more hazardous than controlling the velvet ropes at a nightclub. Speaking with the Angel also includes stories from Roddy Doyle, Irvine Welsh, Colin Firth, John O’Farrell, Robert Harris, Patrick Marber, and Giles Smith.Twelve completely new stories, written by twelve undeniably imaginative voices. Speaking with the Angel is at turns clever, outrageous, witty, edgy, tender, and wicked. This is what they meant by original.

    Alwyn Tower, an American expatriate and sometime novelist, is staying with a friend outside of Paris, when a well-heeled, itinerant Irish couple drops in—with Lucy, their trained hawk, a restless, sullen, disturbingly totemic presence. Lunch is prepared, drink flows. A masquerade, at once harrowing and farcical, begins. A work of classical elegance and concision, The Pilgrim Hawk stands with Faulkner’s The Bear as one of the finest American short novels: a beautifully crafted story that is also a poignant evocation of the implacable power of love.

    First published in 1878, the novella brought American novelist Henry James (1843-1916), then living in London, his first international success. Like many of James's early works, it portrays a venturesome American girl in the treacherous waters of European society - a theme that would culminate in his 1881 masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady. On the surface, Daisy Miller unfolds a simple story of a young American girl's willful yet innocent flirtation with a young Italian, and its unfortunate consequences. But throughout the narrative, James contrasts American customs and values with European manners and morals in a tale rich in psychological and social insight. A vivid portrayal of Americans abroad and a telling encounter between the values of the Old and New Worlds, Daisy Miller is an ideal introduction to the work of one of America's greatest writers of fiction.

    The impact is at once harrowing and thrilling.An elderly inventor, burning with manic creativity, tries to reconcile with his estranged gay son. A bereaved boy draws a thuggish classmate into a relationship of escalating guilt and violence. A genteel middle-aged woman, a long-time resident of a psychiatric hospital, becomes the confidante of a lovelorn teenaged volunteer. Told with Chekhovian restraint and compassion, and conveying both the sorrow of life and the courage with which people rise to meet it, You Are Not a Stranger Here is a triumph of storytelling.

    The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord. In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa. Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent.

    Already an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her debut, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decides where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream.With penetrating insight that belies her youth—she was only nineteen years old when Seventeen magazine printed her first published story—ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking performance—fresh, versatile, and captivating. It introduces us to an arresting and unforgettable new voice.Brownies --Every tongue shall confess --Our Lady of Peace --The ant of the self --Drinking coffee elsewhere --Speaking in tongues --Geese --Doris is coming

    Whether his characters are struggling to save trees in their yards, their marriages, or themselves, Cannin renders their moments of revelation with rich observation, energy, humor, and grace.

    When he discovers a rare giant squid, he instantly becomes a local phenomenon shadowed by people curious as to whether this speed-reading, Rachel Carson obsessed teenager is just an observant boy or an unlikely prophet. But Miles is really just a kid on the verge of growing up, infatuated with the girl next door, worried that his bickering parents will divorce, and fearful that everything, even the bay he loves, is shifting away from him. As the sea continues to offer up discoveries from its mysterious depths, Miles struggles to deal with the difficulties that attend the equally mysterious process of growing up.

    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.