New Literary Fiction

Since 1944, when she published her first story, Elizabeth Spencer has been acclaimed as a writer of short fiction in the great tradition of Welty, Chopin, and Mansfield. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, her first collection in almost fifteen years, again makes available the author's most masterful stories and novellas, including "The Light in the Piazza" and publishes more than ten new stories for the first time.

From Kate Walbert, the highly acclaimed National Book Award nominee, comes a dazzling, career-spanning collection of new and selected stories. In these 12 deft, acutely funny, and often heartbreaking stories, Kate Walbert delves into the hearts and minds of women. Her characters are searchers, uneasy in one way or another. They yearn for connection. They question the definitions assigned to them as wives, mothers, and daughters; they seek their own way within isolated, and often isolating, circumstances, reveling in small, everyday epiphanies and moments of clarity.

Ron Hansen has long been a master of the short form. His stories have been called "beautifully crafted" ( The New York Times), "unforgettable" ( San Francisco Chronicle), and "diverse and expansive" ( The Washington Post). Ranging over subjects as diverse as Oscar Wilde, murder, dementia, and romance, this collection shows Ron Hansen at his storytelling best. Most of these pieces are set in the present with the balance set in the historical past. Surprising in its variety, She Loves Me Not shows Hansen at the height of his powers.

Doctorow returns with an enthralling collection of brilliant, startling short fiction about people who, as the author notes in his Preface, are somehow “distinct from their surroundings—people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world”.

Two weddings and a baby...but who will get their happy ever after? Emily Prescott’s life isn’t going to plan. Her dreams of starting a family with fireman boyfriend Greg and opening up her own bakery in London feel like they will never come true. So when a wedding invite arrives from her oldest friend, Beth Williams, Emily is thrilled. Not only will she get to return to her childhood home in Scotland, but best of all - Beth wants her to bake the wedding cake! However, her excitement is cut short when she discovers that Greg has cheated on her.

Book 3: The New World: In the days of the Comet in 1906 is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells in which humanity is exalted when a comet causes the nitrogen of the air, the old azote, to change out of itself and become a respirable gas, differing indeed from oxygen, but helping and sustaining its action, a bath of strength and healing for nerve and brain. The result The great Change has come for evermore, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men.

Elizabeth Blau upended her life in the city to move to the Middle of Nowhere and start over. She reconnects with her estranged brother and begins her new life. First, Elizabeth lands a great job, then a date, and her luck seems to change for the better. But when the man’s body is found mangled in a ravine, the murder rocks the small town as fault descends upon the Blau Family.

Dubrovsky is a young nobleman whose land is confiscated by a greedy and powerful aristocrat, Kirila Petrovitch Troekurov. Determined to get justice one way or another, Dubrovsky gathers a band of serfs and goes on the rampage, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Along the way, Dubrovsky falls in love with Masha, Troekurov's daughter, and lets his guard down, with tragic results. Please note: This audiobook is in Russian.

This novel is about one of the most ungodlike but lovable divine characters in mythology anywhere. It takes off from where the rest of the legends about Krishna stop. Krishna is shown here more as the human avatara he assumes rather than the God behind the avatar.

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face-to-face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth? Please note: This audiobook is in Russian.

The "Viy" is a monstrous creation of popular fancy. It is the name which the inhabitants of Little Russia give to the king of the gnomes, whose eyelashes reach to the ground. The following story is a specimen of such folklore. Please note: This audiobook is in Russian.

In the final years of his life, Chekhov produced some of the stories that rank among his masterpieces and some of the most highly regarded works in Russian literature. With the works collected here, Chekhov moved away from the realism of his earlier tales - developing a broader range of characters and subject matter, while forging the spare minimalist style that would inspire such modern short-story writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Please note: This audiobook is in Russian.

A young Puritan woman gives birth to an illegitimate child in 17th-century New England and must endure public condemnation and the burden of a terrible secret.

After a lucrative television writing career comes to an abrupt end, ex–high school teacher Ray Mitchell returns to the New Jersey city of his birth—to rethink his life, reconnect with his teenage daughter and to spread the wealth on the housing project that reared him. He begins teaching again, embarks on an affair with a married woman from the old neighborhood and becomes a mentor to a former student recently released from jail. Then, disaster: he is found beaten nearly to death in his own apartment.

Somewhere in the United Kingdom, an eight year old boy is removed from his home in the middle of the night. He is a victim of an extraordinary experiment. In an attempt to reform society, the government has divided the population into four groups, each group representing a different personality type.

Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; the obsessed, vengeful Chillingworth; and the defiant Hester Prynne, who, unwilling to name her partner in adultery, is condemned to wear a scarlet "A" on the breast of her gown for the remainder of her life.

Meet the Laments—the affably dysfunctional globetrotting family at the center of George Hagen’s exuberant debut novel. Howard is an engineer who dreams of irrigating the Sahara and lives by the motto “Laments move!” His wife Julia is a fiery spirit who must balance her husband’s oddly peripatetic nature with unexpected aspirations of her own. And Will is the “waif with a paper-thin heart” who is given to Howard and Julia in return for their own child who has been lost in a bizarre maternity ward mishap.

After moving past her painful breakup with Xander years ago, Ivy was poised to become the next big name in music, when suddenly she withdrew from the limelight - the same day she announced her engagement to her controlling agent, Damon Wolf. Xander knows he should keep his distance. But once they're on the road, he can't resist pursuing her for a second chance. Yet a jealous Damon can't let her go - and he's keeping dangerous secrets that could destroy them all.

Jewell Parker Rhodes follows up her acclaimed Voodoo Dreams with a present-day mystery surrounding the gifts of an ancestor of the Voodoo Queen. Doctor Marie Levant can't explain why she's drawn to New Orleans, or why it's comforting and unsettling at the same time. And she can't shake her haunting dreams. But when she delivers a dead woman's baby, Marie knows malevolent forces are at work, and it's up to her to stop them.

The Girl Who Invoked Fire continues the odyssey of Jian Byrne, an unassuming but gifted Irish orphan who bears the scars of lifetimes. Guided by unseen forces, Jian is shown visions of her mother as a young woman, which spurs her search into her family’s disappearance and beyond into life’s profound secrets.