A lonely teenage girl falls in love with an older, married neighbor. A woman attends a party at the home of her boyfriend’s ex-wife. A schoolteacher gets fired for teaching time incorrectly to grade-school students. And a young woman recovering from a breakup receives guidance from a drunk therapist. Poignant and sharply rendered, Otis’s stories seek answers to the questions of whom we love and why, how we search for love, lose it, or find it—sometimes at the last moment and in the most unlikely places. Quirky and hilarious, these stories display a knowing affection for human strangeness.

    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.

    This collection of eight stories and sketches, among them the celebrated classic "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," shows the great humorist at the top of his form.Also included here are "Journalism in Tennessee," in which a novice newspaperman is shown the "correct way" to report a news story; "About Barbers," a delightful account of every barbershop customer's worst fear; "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," Twain's hilarious savaging of that author's style; and four more: "A Literary Nightmare," "The Stolen White Elephant," "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed," and "How to Tell a Story."Delightfully entertaining, these charming pieces will find an appreciative audience among students, general readers, and lovers of classic American humor.

    An elderly woman recounts a chilling childhood memory on the family farm. A taxi driver with a missing wife reveals unexpected skills. An inherited painting brings an eerily troubling legacy.Subtle, compelling and unsettling, Amanda O’Callaghan’s stories work at the edges of the sayable, through secrets, erasures and glimpsed moments of disclosure. They shimmer with unspoken histories and characters who have a ‘taste for silence’.

    Gathering works from the previously published Monday or Tuesday, as well as stories published in American and British magazines, this book compiles some of the best shorter fiction of one of the most important writers of our time.

    . . or tragedy.  But the subtle danger lurking beneath the surface in Daisy Miller evolves into a classic tale of terror and obsession in The Turn Of The Screw.  "The imagination," Henry James said to Bernard Shaw,  "has a life if its own."  In this blood-curdling story, that imagination weaves the lives of two children, a governess in love with her employer, and a sprawling country house into a flawless story, still unsurpassed as the prototype of modern horror fiction.

    Ghosts witnessed in the grand old hotels and theatres of Winnipeg, lake spectors, sea vessels, lights along train tracks, legends on hills, and amidst the snow.

    Scott Fitzgerald was at the height of his creative powers, these ten lyric tales represent some of the author's finest fiction. In them, Fitzgerald creates vivid, timeless characters -- a dissatisfied southern belle seeking adventure in the north; the tragic hero of the title story who lost more than money in the stock market; giddy and dissipated young men and women of the interwar period. From the lazy town of Tarleton, Georgia, to the glittering cosmopolitan centers of New York and Paris, Fitzgerald brings the society of the "Lost Generation" to life in these masterfully crafted gems, showcasing the many gifts of one of our most popular writers.

    In the O. Henry award-winning title story, "Heat," young twin sisters are murdered, and both they and their killer remembered by a woman who was their contemprary and, in a way, a victim as well...In "Leiila Lee," a young woman who married an older man tried to develop a relationship with her husband's angry teenage son...In "House Hunting," a husband perplexed by his disintegrating marriage goes househunting without his wife, and embarks on a quest - not only for a house, but for his future. From small towns to big cities, from the working-class to the upper-class, there is scarcely an aspect of the American experience that Joyce Carol Oates has not magically made her own. Her stories shock, provoke, and astound us with their commentary on the human condition.

    These are stories about friendships and relationships confused by unsettling tensions bubbling beneath the surface. A woman who plans to conceive ends up in the arms of her husband's best friend; a man who baby-sits a neglected four-year-old ends up questioning his own dysfunctional relationship; a chance encounter at a gala event causes a woman to remember when she volunteered for a nightmarish drug-testing clinic; another woman discovers that her best friend who is about to get married has just had an affair; a young teenager tries to escape from her controlling father and finds an unexpected lover on a bus ride home; a wife tries to overcome her dying mother-in-law's resistance to her marriage by revealing to her own strange aural stigmata; a friend tries to talk another friend out of dating her cheating ex-boyfriend; and a superstitious candle-maker confesses to a tempestuous relationship that implodes spectacularly. Sarah Selecky is a talented young writer who evokes a generation teetering on the shoals of consumerism and ambiguous mores. Reminiscent of early Atwood, with echoes of Lisa Moore and Barbara Gowdy, these absorbing stories are about love and longing, stories that touch us in a myriad of subtle and affecting ways."

    They range from the tragically funny opening story “Emergency Contact” to the audacious, drug-fuelled rush of “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” to the deranged and thrilling extreme of “King Me.”The Beggar’s Garden is a powerful and affecting debut, written with an exceptional eye and ear and heart.

    However, as the characters in the stories prove, misunderstanding and confusion are inherent in everyday life.

    In Like a House on Fire, Kennedy once again takes ordinary lives and dissects their ironies, injustices and pleasures with her humane eye and wry sense of humour. In ‘Laminex and Mirrors’, a young woman working as a cleaner in a hospital helps an elderly patient defy doctor’s orders. In ‘Cross-Country’, a jilted lover manages to misinterpret her ex’s new life. And in ‘Ashes’, a son accompanies his mother on a journey to scatter his father’s remains, while lifelong resentments simmer in the background. Cate Kennedy’s poignant short stories find the beauty and tragedy in illness and mortality, life and love.

    Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection.

    Her characters are young men and women discovering what it means to be a grown-up in a country that promised them they'd stay young forever. And here, in shapely, penetrating stories, Beattie confirms why she is one of the most widely imitated -- yet surely inimitable -- literary stylists of her generation.In The Burning House, Beattie's characters go from dealing drugs to taking care of a bereaved friend. They watch their marriages fail not with a bang but with a wisecrack. And afterward, they may find themselves trading confidences with their spouses' new lovers. The Burning House proves that Beattie has no peer when it comes to revealing the hidden shapes of our relationships, or the depths of tenderness, grief, and anger that lie beneath the surfaces of our daily lives.