• The Best Short Stories 2023

    The Best Short Stories 2023

    "Contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Guest editor Lauren Groff has selected an exciting and engaging variety of stories by an international array of both celebrated and emerging writers. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Groff, fascinating observations from the winning writers on what inspired their work, and an extensive and useful directory of magazines and literary websites that publish short fiction"--Page 4 of cover.

    Format: Book

    View The Best Short Stories 2023
  • Normal Rules Don't Apply

    Normal Rules Don't Apply

    Atkinson, Kate

    "A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels--the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop. In this brilliant volume, nothing is quite as it seems. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a lost man who bets on a horse that may--or may not--have spoken to him. Witty and wise, with subtle connections between the stories,...

    Format: Book

    View Normal Rules Don't Apply
  • The Big Game Is Every Night

    The Big Game Is Every Night

    Maynor, Robert

    "Grady Hayes is a young high school football player being raised by his hard working single mother. His life revolves around football, until-in a game against cross-county rivals-he breaks his leg. Cut off from his teammates, Grady is lost. He takes prescription pills to dull the pain and pass the time. But when his leg finally heals and Grady tries to return to the team, his spot has been filled and he can't relate to his teammates anymore. Grady takes up with Hambone, a brooding older boy, and they start hunting together in the swamp at night. Their relationship is...

    Format: Book

    View The Big Game Is Every Night
  • The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

    Dickens, Charles

    Format: Book

    View The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
  • Wild Geese

    Wild Geese

    Emmanuel, Soula

    "Wild Geese is Irish novelist Soula Emmanuel's debut novel. Phoebe Forde has a new home, a new name, and is newly thirty. An Irish transplant and PhD candidate, she's overeducated and underpaid, but finally settling into her new life in Copenhagen. Almost three years into her gender transition, Phoebe has learned to move through the world carefully, savoring small moments of joy. After all, a woman without a past can be anyone she wants. But an unexpected visit from her ex-girlfriend Grace brings back memories of Dublin and the life she thought she'd left behind. Over the course of a...

    Format: Book

    View Wild Geese
  • Many Worlds, Or, The Simulacra

    Many Worlds, Or, The Simulacra

    Many Worlds, or The Simulacra is an anthology of reality-bending stories from a one-of-a-kind collective of authors building a shared multiverse. The stories in this anthology range from quietly strange to ambitiously speculative. Humans transform into cosmic energy or sentient algae. A man wakes up in a new body in a world with continents cut out, months absent from the calendar year, and souls misplaced. Students at a high school regularly vanish without a trace. A woman descends into the depths of the ocean and encounters all-knowing creatures who may have the answers to her deepest questions. Mech-suits and parallel...

    Format: Book

    View Many Worlds, Or, The Simulacra
  • Bloom

    Bloom

    Hardt, Helen

    "Under his touch, your every desire will...Bloom. Today is the day Francesca Thomas was supposed to get married. All she wants is a stiff drink and a whole lot of distraction...which is exactly when she meets him. Tall, dark, and deliciously disguised, the man known only as Phantom awakens her every sense. All Frankie really knows about him is the raw, untamed chemistry that makes her want to relinquish herself--body and soul--to his touch...Phantom has rules, all designed to protect his identity. No names. No personal information. But Frankie is a too-tempting ingenue who threatens all of his cautious, careful...

    Format: Book

    View Bloom
  • The Last Unicorn

    Beagle, Peter S.

    "The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone... ...so she ventured out from the safety of the enchanted forest on a quest for others of her kind. Joined along the way by the bumbling magician Schmendrick and the indomitable Molly Grue, the unicorn learns all about the joys and sorrows of life and love before meeting her destiny in the castle of a despondent monarch--and confronting the creature that would drive her kind to extinction... In The Last Unicorn, renowned and beloved novelist Peter S. Beagle spins a poignant tale of love, loss, and wonder that...

    Format: Book

    View The Last Unicorn
  • A Leopard-skin Hat

    A Leopard-skin Hat

    Serre, Anne

    "A Leopard-Skin Hat may be the French writer Anne Serre's most moving novel yet. Hailed in Le Point as a "masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance," it is the story of an intense friendship between "the Narrator" and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator's loving and anguished attachment to her. Anne Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question...

    Format: Book

    View A Leopard-skin Hat
  • The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings

    The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings

    Hofmannsthal, Hugo von

    "Hugo von Hofmannsthal made his mark as a poet, as a playwright, and as the librettist for Richard Strauss's greatest operas, but he was no less accomplished as a writer of short, strangely evocative prose works. The atmospheric stories and sketches collected here - fin de siecle fairy tales from the Vienna of Klimt and Freud, a number of them never before translated into English propel the reader into a shadowy world of uncanny fates and secret desires. An aristocrat from Paris in the plague years shares a single night of passion with an unknown woman, a cavalry sergeant meets...

    Format: Book

    View The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings