Something is creeping up the stairs, something is standing outside the door. Something is sobbing, sobbing in the dark; something is sighing across the floor... "The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link is one of 27 short horror stories in Nightfire's audio anthology.Come Join Us by the Fire S2 is the second installment of Nightfire's audio-only horror anthology, featuring a wide collection of short stories from emerging voices in the horror genre as well as longtime fan favorites. The collection showcases the breadth of talent writing in the horror genre today, with contributions from a wide range of genre luminaries including Laird Barron, Indrapramit Das, Shaun Hamill, Daniel M. Lavery, Matthew Lyons, T. Kingfisher, Seanan McGuire, Nibedita Sen, and Nightfire’s own Cassandra Khaw and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.The full Table of Contents is as follows:Cassandra Khaw- "Some Breakable Things"Sarah Langan- "The Changeling"Shaun Hamill- "Music of the Abyss"Caitlín R. Kiernan- "Standing Water"Tade Thompson- "Bone"T. Kingfisher- "Origin Story"Silvia Moreno-Garcia- "The Sound of Footsteps"Laird Barron- "Jōren Falls"Damien Angelica Walters- "Tooth, Tongue, and Claw"Sunny Moraine- "If Living is Seeing I'm Holding My Breath"Matthew Lyons- "Blood Daughter"Jessica Guess- "Mama Tulu"Daniel M. Lavery- "Prodigal Son"Seanan McGuire- "Emergency Landing"Indrapramit Das - "You Will Survive This Night"‘Pemi Aguda- "Things Boys Do"Kelly Link- "The Specialist's Hat"Clay McLeod Chapman- "The Fireplace"Nibedita Sen- "Pigeons"Camilla Grudova- "Ghost Bread"Catherynne M. Valente- "The Days of Flaming Motorcycles"Brian Evenson- "The Cabin"Maria Dahvana Headley- "The Krakatoan"Craig Laurance Gidney- "Spyder Threads"Mariana Enriquez- "Things We Lost in the Fire"Gabino Iglesias- "The Song of the Lady Rose"Nick Antosca- "The Quiet Boy"

    Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Jane Austen (1775-1817). Austen's works available in Penguin Classics are Emma, Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon, Love and Freindship and Other Youthful Writings, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.

    Each story follows the life of a person living on a fictitious council estate in London. The stories illustrate the realities and struggles that ordinary people go through at a time when people are feeling disenfranchised and are frustrated at not having their voices heard. Ranging from a humorous look at the gentrification of London to the realities of living with addiction the stories place the reader in the shoes of each character allowing them to feel their emotions.

    When he is angry, clouds darken. When he cries, rivers burst their banks. And when he touches a basketball, deities want courtside seats. Half Nigerian mortal, half Grecian God: Demi is the Half-God of Rainfall.His mother, Modupe, looks on with a mixture of pride and worry. From close encounters, she knows that Gods are just like men: the same fragile egos, the same subsequent fury, the same sense of entitlement to the bodies of mortals. The Gods will one day tire of sports fans, their fickle allegiances and their prayers to Demi.And when that moment comes, it won’t matter how special he is. Only the women in Demi’s life, the mothers, the Goddesses, will stand between him and a lightning bolt.

    The middle-class pair become victims of the same brutal violence that the poor and powerless suffer.

    Jim Tomlinson’s characters each face the desire to reclaim dreams left behind, along with something of the dreamer that was also lost. Starkly rendered, these spiraling characters inhabit a specific place and class---small-town Kentucky, working-class America---but the stories, told in all their humor and tragedy, are universal.In each story the characters face conflict, sometimes within themselves, sometimes with each other. Each carries a past and with it an urge to return and repair. In “First Husband, First Wife,” ex-spouses are repeatedly drawn together by a shared history they cannot seem to escape, and they are finally forced to choose between leaving the past or leaving each other. LeAnn and Cass are grown sisters who conspire to help their prideful mother in “Things Kept.” “Prologue” is a voyeuristic journey through the surprisingly different lives of two star-crossed friends, each with its successes and pitfalls, told through their letters over thirty-five years. In “Stainless,” Annie and Warren divide their possessions on the final night of their marriage. Their realtor has advised them to “declutter” the house they are leaving, but they discover that most of the clutter cannot be so easily removed. The choices are never simple, and for every thing kept, something must be abandoned. Tomlinson’s characters struggle but eventually find their way, often unknowingly, to points of departure, to places where things just might change.

    She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash.As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord.Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assem­blage of Marina’s essays and stories that, like The Last Lecture, articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.

    In her sweetly vibrant Mississippi drawl, Ms. Welty deftly draws the listener in to the uproariously multilayered "Why I Live at the P.O.," the spontaneous "Powerhouse" and the insightful voice of women's truths in "Petrified Man." Ms. Welty's reading brings immediacy and resonance to these wonderful tales.

    Each day brings worry and struggle for her mam and da and Ellen works hard as a factory girl to help her family. Together, they get by. She has never imagined any other existence until one night she joins a gathering of suffragettes. Suddenly anything seems possible. But she's soon to discover how much courage it takes to fight for better. And, just when all seems lost, Eddie Shaw walks into her world... Includes the first chapter of Lyn's captivating new novel FROM LIVERPOOL WITH LOVE.

    Henry Prize stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. Such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (1927); William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1939); Carson McCuller’s A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud (1943); Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1949); J.D. Salinger’s For Esme with Love and Squalor (1963); John Cheever’s The Country Husband (1956) ; and Flannery O’Conner’s Everything that Rises Must Converge (1963) all were O. Henry Prize stories. An accomplished new series editor--novelist and short story writer Laura Furman--has read more than a thousand stories to identify the 20 winners, each one a pleasure to read today, each one a potential classic. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 also contains brief essays from each of the three distinguished judges on their favorite story, and comments from the prize-winning writers on what inspired their stories. There is nothing like the ever rich, surprising, and original O. Henry collection for enjoying the contemporary short story.The Thing in the Forest A. S. Byatt The Shell Collector Anthony Doerr Burn Your Maps Robyn Jay Leff Lush Bradford Morrow God’s Goodness Marjorie Kemper Bleed Blue in Indonesia Adam Desnoyers The Story Edith Pearlman Swept Away T. Coraghessan Boyle Meanwhile Ann Harleman Three Days. A Month. More. Douglas Light The High Road Joan Silber Election Eve Evan S. Connell Irish Girl Tim Johnston What Went Wrong Tim O’Brien The American Embassy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Kissing William Kittredge Sacred Statues William Trevor Two Words Molly Giles Fathers Alice Munro Train Dreams Denis Johnson

    One night, a carload of strangers appears on the Hollands' property, carrying the air of incipient danger underneath a veneer of pleasantries. Weldon finds himself inexplicably drawn to the group of trespassing vagabonds—who, despite being camped out on a hidden riverbank in the middle of nowhere, drive the most expensive automobile that Weldon has ever seen. In the unbearable, rainless heat of a Dust Bowl summer, Weldon will find himself mixed up in an encounter with the infamous bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde—an encounter that changes the course of Weldon's life…and history itself. Rich with criminal and social history of the American West and a young boy’s struggle to become a man, “A Dust Bowl Tale of Bonnie and Clyde” is just the beginning of Weldon Holland’s story.

    This early novel deals with the pain and dislocation of the clash of the old and new ways - the educated young man determined to go overseas, and the elders of the family believing his duty is to stay and head the family.

    Casey, author of Stygian Doorways

    As in her acclaimed novels The Siege and A Spell of Winter, world-class storyteller Helen Dunmore shows us with subtlety and humor precisely who her characters are and why we should care for them. In each taut, agile tale, they grow to surprise, concern, and move us as they negotiate situations that are often both mundane and bizarre: a cafeteria cook confronts her Polish pen pal in a meeting that is unexpectedly intense; a divorced mother gains insight from a parking meter; a boastful writer is put in his place in spectacular fashion; and in a chilling future, conception is ruthlessly controlled by the government. In several stories a soulful, curious woman named Ulli takes up residence in the reader's imagination -- stumbling across a strangely magnetic collector of religious icons, contemplating a youthful pregnancy, and remembering a troubled lover. In Ice Cream, Dunmore reveals both her poet's ear for the concise and piercing potentialities of language and the novelist's ambition of scope, proving her status as "a master of the shorter form" (The Sunday Telegraph). "Spellbinding ... She captures a moment in time and leaves us reeling at the echoes." -- Michael McLoughlin, The Irish News "Cool, elegant, and beautifully controlled, the stories collected in Ice Cream display Dunmore's virtuosity of language." -- Pamela Norris, The Independent on Sunday "All the senses are vibrantly alive in these stories." -- Katie Owen, The Sunday Telegraph

    Little by little, Jacinta’s mother lost her—first to college, then to a boy she said she loved, and then, finally, to the rage of a school shooter. Snap. In an instant it was all gone. All she has now is her daughter’s phone. Like an album, gripped in the palm of her hand—texts, photos, messages, and videos of her daughter’s first three years at college. With it, Jacinta’s mother is reconstructing her daughter’s last three weeks.In this uniquely moving exploration of mourning, fury, and reminiscence, Susan Straight evokes—through a grieving mother’s devastating internal monologue—both a modern-day nightmare and exquisite proof of love’s extraordinary power to overcome it.