He is famous not only for his love of the hills, but for imbuing the countryside with life and vibrancy through moving descriptions. The simple people who inhabit his stories evoke sympathy and laughter in equal measure. This wonderful collection of seventy stories, including classics like ‘A Face in Dark’, ‘The Kitemaker’, ‘The Tunnel’, ‘The Room of Many Colours’, ‘Dust on the Mountain’ and ‘Times Stops at Shamli’, is a must-have for any bookshelf.

    The narrator recalls a girl he once knew. He and Evangeline, both shy, never find the courage to speak to each other in high school. Every evening, however, Evangeline meets him at the Osage orange tree on the edge of her property. He delivers a newspaper to her, and they talk—and as the year progresses a secret friendship blossoms. This magical coming-of-age tale is brought to life through linocut illustrations by Oregon artist Dennis Cunningham, with an afterword by poet Naomi Shihab Nye, a personal friend of Stafford’s.In the tradition of the work of great fiction writers like Steinbeck, O’Connor, and Welty, The Osage Orange Tree stands the test of time, not just as an ode to a place and a generation but as a testament to the resilience of a nation and the strength of the human heart.

    The fifteen stories featured, many of them set in her native New Zealand, vary in length and tone from the opening story, "At the Bay, " a vivid impressionistic evocation of family life, to the short, sharp sketch "Mrs. Brill, " in which a lonely woman's precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed when she overhears two young lovers mocking her. Sensitive revelations of human behaviour, these stories reveal Mansfield's supreme talent as an innovator who freed the story from its conventions and gave it a new strength and prestige.

    "The madder she got, the greener everything grew."

    In the centerpiece story, an eighteenth-century Eno Indian tells of the fiery fate of his adopted father, English explorer John Lawson. In the surrounding stories, the age-old conflicts between newcomer and old-timer play out as twenty-first century retirees, carnies, runaways, heartbroken women, and farmers stumble into new lives and new insights in Ambler County, North Carolina. "Hudson's prose is pure as birdsong," says novelist Doris Betts. "These fine stories of change and discovery are a field guide to the human species in transition."

    A collection of short stories by the author of Transactions in a Foreign Currency features a tale of a two childhood friends who renew old ties and recall old wounds, and a suburban dinner party that uncovers dark truths.

    

    With a foreword by Robert Shapard and an afterword by Christopher Merrill, this book brings you fresh approaches to an exacting form that demands precision, a species of brevity that is surprisingly expansive. Writers say the pieces are hard to compose, but readers say they are easy to appreciate, a pleasure to envision, a wonder to watch life spun out and painted in small places. Real and surreal, lyrical and prosaic, here are 135 stories by 89 authors, certain to make you think.

    One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo's stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

    L. Kennedy's first collection of stories, are small people - the kind who inhabit the silence in libraries, who never appear on screen and who never make the headlines. Often alone and sometimes lonely, her characters ponder the mysteries of sex and death-and the ability of public transport to affect our lives.

    See the books that made APJ Abdul Kalam

    How did he allow the other person to die? How did he help the other person to hang himself to death? He was terribly upset about this. The moment his eyes saw a rope in any form he used to remember everything.........

    Nine parallel lives, interlocked by four infidelities, one missing person and a mysterious stiletto, are woven through a fragmented series of confessionals and interrogations that gradually reveal a darker side of human nature.

    11 stories: The AwakeningBeyond the BayouMa'ame PelagieDesiree's BabyA Respectable WomanThe KissA Pair of Silk StockingsThe LocketA ReflectionAt the 'Cadian BallThe Storm

    Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling—these stories will remind readers of the late giant David Foster Wallace, in their straightforward accounts of anything-but-straightforward events; of modern short story pioneer Raymond Carver, a bit, in their blunt, unadorned dialogue; and of Julia Whitty, a bit, in their willingness to believe what is happening, even if it absolutely shouldn’t be. Funny, piercing, unique, memorable, this is a collection of stories readers will find nearly impossible to forget:... The barber who shaves the heads of the thugs in Bin Laden’s cave tells cheerful stories of life with the preening video-obsessed leader, who has a bald spot shaped just like Iceland.... A husband gathers all of his wife’s previous boyfriends for a long day on a winery-touring bus.... A teenage boy drives off into the sunset with his troubled sister’s small daughters…and the loser husband locked in the trunk of the car.... The late Joseph Kennedy pours out his heart to a golf-course bartender moments before the stroke that silenced him forever.… A man digging in his garden finds a brand-new baby boy, still alive, and has a chat with the teenage neighbor girl whose son it is.... A man born on a Greyhound bus eventually buys the entire Greyhound Bus Company and revolutionizes Western civilization.... A mountainous bishop dies and the counting of the various keys to his house turns… tense.... A man discovers his wife having an affair, takes up running to grapple with his emotions, and discovers everyone else on the road is a cuckold too.And many others.