American Short

Symone Davenport is a 22-year-old college senior who has set herself up for a very secure future, but all her achievements feel more like a duty than a labor of love. It takes the help of Jaylen Richards, the handsome new choir director, to not only unlock her talent and try to bring her into the spotlight but to unlock her heart. Janice was never very thin. With a gorgeous face, personality, and brains, she isn't lacking friends, but her insecurities about her weight gain get in the way of things reaching the next level with men.

Young Alice leads an ordinary sort of life until, one day, she follows a rabbit down a hole and embarks on a series of adventures with some of the most weird and wonderful characters anyone has ever encountered! She soon discovers that nothing is ordinary in Wonderland, least of all the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat, the Duchess, and the Mock Turtle.

Containing over 47 stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train - a bullet couldn't pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes.

In this moving collection, author Keith Ankenbauer blends personal experiences and vivid imagination to take listeners on a journey of heartwarming romance and life-defining challenges. Follow the young cowboy as he faces heartache, triumphs, and the steady presence of the woman who transforms his life. From quiet ranches to bustling city streets, these stories offer unforgettable moments of joy, loss, and the enduring power of love.

Represented here are 16 short stories by seven great American writers, dating from the 19th and 20th centuries. Different in atmosphere and writing style, they nevertheless caught the mood and concerns of the day in a way that was distinctly American.

Eight exciting classic American Tall Tales! This collection includes the famed stories of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Stormalong, Mike Fink, Davy Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, and Joe Magarac.

This exciting collection presents two previously unpublished stories by SF legend Octavia E. Butler. A Necessary Being precedes the events of Survivor, Butler's third (famously disowned) installment in her Patternist series, and includes characters from it, focusing exclusively on the Kohn, aliens who build their social hierarchies on the blueness of their fur. In Childfinder, a black woman with the gift of identifying children with latent psychic ability refuses to share her skill with an organization of white telepaths.

A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous while others are devastatingly poignant. Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship.

A celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return listeners to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar characters who form a tight-knit community within.

Few Americans and even fewer citizens of other nations understand the electoral process in the United States. Still fewer understand the role played by political parties in the electoral process or the ironies within the system. This Very Short Introduction audiobook introduces the listener to these issues and more, providing an insider's view of how the system actually works while shining a light on some of its flaws.

Widely acclaimed as a progenitor of 20th-century Latin American fiction, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil's greatest writer. His prodigious output of novels, plays, and stories rivaled contemporaries like Chekhov, Flaubert, and Maupassant, but, shockingly, he was barely translated into English until 1963, and still lacks proper recognition today.

Today’s fans of science fiction and fantasy have an appetite for stories that address a wide variety of voices, perspectives, and styles. There is an openness to experiment and pushing boundaries, combined with the classic desire to hear about spaceships and dragons, future technology and ancient magic, and the places where they intersect. With a diverse selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and Diana Gabaldon, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 explores the ever-expanding and changing world of SFF today.

Art and life. Each the mirror of the other. This then is the classic definition of what ‘Realism’ as a writing form really is. Some might call it a fancy term for the mundane day to day pursuits but in the hands of an author it comes alive. We are drawn into characters and landscapes that we can empathize with, we can, metaphorically speaking, help shoulder their burden, be on the long trail with them whatever the landscapes, the hurdles, incidents and other people may place in their literary way.

In the title story of Walk Between the Raindrops, a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In “Thirteen Days,” passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And “Hyena” begins simply: “That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit—it was there and it came for him.”

C. J. Box, #1 New York Times best-selling author of the hugely popular Joe Pickett series, selects the best short mystery and crime fiction of the year in this annual “treat for crime-fiction fans” (Library Journal).

Americans have vivid, colourful and mesmerising imaginations. On the flip side they are equally adept at Realism. In this volume their famed authors explore short stories that bring us up close and personal to reality.

In 11 sharp, surprising stories, Neel Patel gives voice to our deeply held stereotypes and then slowly undermines them. His characters, almost all of who are first-generation Indian Americans, subvert our expectations that they will sit quietly by. We meet two brothers caught in an elaborate web of envy and loathing; a young gay man who becomes involved with an older man whose secret he could never guess; three women who throw off the pleasant agreeability society asks of them; and, in the final pair of linked stories, a young couple struggling against the force of community gossip.

An incident at a TSA security check point sows chaos and rumors, creating a chain of events that impacts twelve young Asian Americans in a crowded and restless airport. As their disrupted journeys crisscross and collide, they encounter fellow travelers—some helpful, some hostile—as they discover the challenges of friendship, the power of courage, the importance of the right word at the right time, and the unexpected significance of a blue Stratocaster electric guitar.

Here is the preface to twelve magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates - with unequaled grace and tenderness - the deepest feelings we have.

It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and 15-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine’s father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church - a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.