Taut, brooding, and densely atmospheric, these stories show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness. These tales are as horrifying as anything written by Clive Barker or Stephen King, but they are crafted with a lyricism and intensity that compel us to confront our secret kinship with the horrifying.

    Volume One contains the following 48 short stories:- The Dead Past- The Foundation of S. F. Success- Franchise- Gimmicks Three- Kid Stuff- The Watery Place- Living Space- The Message- Satisfaction Guaranteed- Hell-Fire- The Last Trump- The Fun They Had- Jokester- The Immortal Bard- Someday- The Author's Ordeal- Dreaming Is a Private Thing- Profession- The Feeling of Power- The Dying Night- I'm in Marsport Without Hilda- The Gentle Vultures- All the Troubles of the World- Spell My Name with an S- The Last Question- The Ugly Little Boy- Nightfall- Green Patches- Hostess- Breeds There a Man…?- C-Chute- In a Good Cause—- What If—- Sally- Flies- Nobody Here But—- It's Such a Beautiful Day- Strikebreaker- Insert Knob A in Hole B- The Up-to-Date Sorcerer- Unto the Fourth Generation- What Is This Thing Called Love?- The Machine That Won the War- My Son, the Physicist- Eyes Do More Than See- Segregationist- I Just Make Them Up, See!- Rejection Slips.

    Twenty-five or so outstanding writers have been asked by Zadie Smith to make up a fictional character. By any measure, creating character is at the heart of the fictional enterprise, and this book concentrates on writers who share a talent for making something recognizably human out of words (and, in the case of the graphic novelists, pictures). But the purpose of the book is variety: straight "realism"-if such a thing exists-is not the point. There are as many ways to create character as there are writers, and this anthology features a rich assortment of exceptional examples. The writers featured in The Book of Other People include: Aleksandar Hemon Nick Hornby Hari Kunzru Toby Litt David Mitchell George Saunders Colm Tóibín Chris Ware, and more

    Comprised of a surprising mix of newly minted professionals, ex-prisoners, intellectuals, musicians, and faithful Party workers, the community is vibrant and resilient and life in Magadan thrives even under the cover of near-perpetual snow. By blending history and fable, each of Melnik's stories transports us somewhere completely new: a married Magadan woman considers a proposition from an Italian footballer in '70s Moscow; an ailing young girl visits a witch doctor’s house where nothing is as it seems; a middle-aged dance teacher is entranced by a new student’s raw talent; a former Soviet boss tells his granddaughter the story of a thorny friendship; and a woman in 1958 jumps into a marriage with an army officer far too soon.Weaving in and out of the last half of the twentieth century, Snow in May is an inventive, gorgeously rendered, and touching portrait of lives lived on the periphery where, despite their isolation—and perhaps because of it—the most seemingly insignificant moments can be beautiful, haunting, and effervescent.

    Alone in his apartment, he reads stories aloud to the point he has them memorized. Sometimes he fantasizes that he wrote them. Sometimes, when they’re his very favorite stories, he’ll fantasize about reading them in front of an audience and taking credit for them. The audience in these fantasies always loves him and gives him the respect he deserves.David Sedaris didn’t write the stories in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules . But he did read them. And he liked them enough to hand pick them for this collection of short fiction. Featuring such notable writers as Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Thompson, and Tobias Wolff, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules includes some of the most influential and talented short story writers, contemporary and classic.Perfect for fans who suffer from Sedaris fever, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules will tide them over and provide relief.2 hrs 56 mins

    Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours. This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.

    Using a range of approaches from bitter realism to demented fantasy, Irvine Welsh is able to evoke the essential humanity, well hidden as it is, of his generally depraved, lazy, manipulative, and vicious characters. He specializes particularly in cosmic reversals--God turns a hapless footballer into a fly; an acid head and a newborn infant exchange consciousnesses with sardonically unexpected results--always displaying a corrosive wit and a telling accuracy of language and detail. Irvine Welsh is one hilariously dangerous writer and he is bound to create a sensation. Includes the following stories: "The Shooter""Eurotrash""Stoke Newington Blues""Vat '96""A Soft Touch""The Last Resort on the Adriatic""Sexual Disaster Quartet""Snuff""A Blockage in the System""Wayne Foster""Where the Debris Meets the Sea""Granny's Old Junk""The House of John Deaf""Across the Hall""Lisa's Mum Meets the Queen Mum""The Two Philosophers""Disnae Matter""The Granton Star Cause""Snowman Building Parts for Rico the Squirrel""Sport for All""The Acid House"A Smart Cunt: a novella

    Angela Carter takes real people and literary legends - most often women - who have been mythologized or marginalized and recasts them in a new light. In a style that is sensual, cerebral, almost hypnotic, "The Fall River Axe-Murders" portrays the last hours before Lizzie Borden's infamous act: the sweltering heat, the weight of flannel and corsets, the clanging of the factory bells, the food reheated and reserved despite the lack of adequate refrigeration, the house "full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors." In "Our Lady of the Massacre" the no-nonsense voice of an eighteenth-century prostitute/runaway slave questions who is civilized - the Indians or the white men? "Black Venus" gives voice to Charles Baudelaire's Creole mistress, Jeanne Duval: "you could say, not so much that Jeanne did not understand the lapidary, troubled serenity of her lover's poetry but, that it was a perpetual affront to her. He recited it to her by the hour and she ached, raged and chafed under it because his eloquence denied her language." "The Kiss" takes the traditional story of Tamburlaine's wife and gives it a new and refreshing ending. Sometimes disquieting, sometimes funny, always thought-provoking, Angela Carter's stories offer a feminist revision of images that lie deep in the public psyche.

    In this early work, Böll’s style is already powerful and evocative, engaging in the moral drama that will come to fruition in such later works as Billiards at Half-Past Nine, The Clown, Group Portrait with Lady, and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum.

    Six-year-old Kassandra is given a doll: "I put her to sleep in her box, but first I cut off her legs and arms so she'd fit," she tells us, "Later, I cut her head off too, so she wouldn't be so heavy. Now I love her very much." Kassandra is an unforgettable narrator, a perfect, brutal guide to childhood as we've never seen it, a journey that passes through the looking glass but finds the darkest corners of the real world.This edition brings Kassandra and the Wolf back into print at last, a tour de force and, as Karapanou liked to call it, a scary monster of a book.

    These works of supreme imagination demonstrate the breadth of Levi's graceful writing, extraordinary wit and keen scientific mind, as they explore the evolution of our technological culture—its effects on our daily lives, on our emotions, on our sex lives and on our children. Brilliantly conceived, Levi's tales reflect his search for a more perfect world—one without sorrow or pain, greed and murder. Keeping a focus on scientific advancements, Levi conjures up remarkable new machines, including one that can duplicate anything, even human beings; another that feeds the hungry by dropping milk into gigantic pits; and a drug that converts all pain into pleasure. In the title story, Levi portrays a world assembled by a scientific committee, replacing the biblical creator, and his panel of experts wildly debates the most efficient body for humans—eliminating fish and bird bodies only at the end of a fierce battle. Throughout, Levi's stories—sometimes extremely funny, sometimes darkly portentous—reveal his concern with how scientific advancement changes the world and its people. These works of fantasy serve as delightful reminders that science must serve human needs and that neither can work without the other. This volume includes all short stories from Storie Naturali and part of those published in Vizio di forma.

    Darkly funny, searingly honest short stories from Hans Fallada, author of bestselling Alone in BerlinIn these stories, criminals lament how hard it is to scrape a living by breaking and entering; families measure their daily struggles in marks and pfennigs; a convict makes a desperate leap from a moving train; a ring - and with it a marriage - is lost in a basket of potatoes.Here, as in his novels, Fallada is by turns tough, darkly funny, streetwise and effortlessly engaging, writing with acute feeling about ordinary lives shaped by forces larger than themselves: addiction, love, money.

    as one of this century's most innovative writers. Now Godine is pleased to issue two of his most powerful novels in one volume: Things, in an authoritative new translation, and A Man Asleep, making its first English appearance. Both provoked strong reactions when they first appeared in the 1960s; both which speak with disquieting immediacy to the conscience of today's readers. In each tale Perec subtly probes our compulsive obsession with society's trappings the seductive mass of things that crams our lives, masquerading as stability and meaning.Jerome and Sylvie, the young, upwardly mobile couple in Things, lust for the good life. "They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership." Surrounded by Paris's tantalizing exclusive boutiques, they exist in a paralyzing vacuum of frustration, caught between the fantasy of "the film they would have liked to live" and the reality of life's daily mundanities.In direct contrast with Jerome and Sylvie's cravings, the nameless student in A Man Asleep attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambition. He longs "to want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep." Yearning to exist on neutral ground as "a blessed parenthesis," he discovers that this wish is by its very nature a defeat.Accessible, sobering, and deeply involving, each novel distills Perec's unerring grasp of the human condition as well as displaying his rare comic talent. His generosity of observation is both detached and compassionate.

    in the 1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her first hand experiences in the L.A. cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.

    At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.