Short Family

In Meet Me at the Emotional Baggage Claim, the mother-daughter duo of Lisa Scottoline and Francesca Serritella continue the conversation with more hilarious and honest tales of life inside an ordinary, extraordinary family. These stories will make you laugh, cry, and call your mother, daughter, and all your girlfriends.

After the stunning historical novels The Clearing and The Missing, Tim Gautreaux now ranges freely through contemporary life with 12 new stories and eight from previous collections. Most are set in his beloved Louisiana, many hard by or on the Mississippi River, others in North Carolina, and even in midwinter Minnesota. But generally it's heat, humidity, and bugs that beset his people as they wrestle with affairs of the heart, matters of faith, and the pros and cons of tight-knit communities.

Meet Ruby, Pearl and Jade--three sisters who grew up in the paradise of St. Thomas. Each young woman has a unique path to walk, and a unique love to discover--and they are as different as the gemstones they're named for.

In 1956, Updike published a story, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement.

The story before the story...What happened before A Family Affair began? Best-selling author Mary Campisi answers this question in her new Park Bench series. These short stories make the perfect park-bench listen and are named after her signature park-bench covers.

Things are looking up for Millie Thorn. She's finally enjoying life as a witch, and she's even taken a part-time job teaching cookery in a school for paranormal children. She's come to terms with the fact that the local policeman, Sergeant David Spencer, is her father, and she's accepted that it might be better to wait a little longer until she drops that bombshell at his feet. When a trouble-making werewolf is murdered while in police custody, and the magical poison is traced back to cakes that Millie may or may not have helped bake, things begin to go wrong. Quickly.

Here is the preface to 12 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.

This short story might well have been called, "All I Even Needed to Know About Humanity I Learned From Chickens". At times humorous, at times sympathetic, the author reveals the inadequacies of chickens and then points to our own inadequacies. As much as we hate chickens we can despise the things we believe are lacking in our own lives. That’s the philosophy of the story, perhaps it is equally enjoyable as a story about a family that just can’t seem to move far enough away from demented fowl.

An Upper Egyptian woman is besieged by the cruelty of her husband's family because she only has girls, until she ends up facing a deadly fate. Is the dream worth the price?

From the best-selling author of The Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson, comes Princess Mirror-Belle, the exciting adventures of a princess with a difference. Ellen gets a big shock when her double appears out of the bathroom mirror. But Mirror-Belle is a double with a difference! She is a princess and a very mischievous one at that. Join magically mischievous Mirror-Belle as she comes popping out of Ellen's mirror to sweep her into a variety of hilarious escapades.

Over the past decade, Simon Van Booy has been listening to people’s stories. With these personal accounts as a starting point, he has crafted a powerful collection of short fiction that takes listeners into the innermost lives of everyday people. From a family saved from ruin by a mysterious benefactor to a downtrodden boxer who shows unexpected kindness to a mugger, these tales reveal not only the precarious balance maintained between grief and happiness in our lives but also how the echoes of personal tragedy can shape us for the better.

పద్దెనిమిది యేండ్ల వయస్సులో రామయ్యకు సంసారాభారం మీదపడింది. ఇంట్లో ఒక వితంతు సోదరి, ఒక పెళ్లికాని చెల్లి మరియు అరవై యేండ్ల ముసలి తల్లి ఉన్నారు. తండ్రి మిగిల్చిపోయిన భూమి మీద కేవలం రెండు పుట్ల ధాన్యము మాత్రమే వస్తుంది. వేరే ఆదాయమేమి లేదు.

When Ava Barnes’s boyfriend, Justin, proposes after a whirlwind romance, the young couple embarks on a quest that will test their love. For generations, engaged couples in Ava’s family have traveled into the Everglades to retrieve the egg of the magnificent frigate bird in order to bake it into a marriage cake. Those who succeed live happily ever after, while those who fail are destined for heartbreak. With Ava’s beloved grandmother gravely ill, never has the marriage tradition meant so much.

Sebastiano rientra al paese d’origine, in Puglia, dopo un periodo trascorso all’estero. Deve comparire in tribunale per la sentenza di separazione dalla moglie Magda. Trova lavoro, per sé e per il padre disoccupato, come censore dei lampioni di strada per la società Electric Sole; e decide di rimanere.Il lavoro fianco a fianco col padre, che molti anni prima aveva lasciato senza apparenti motivi la famiglia, mette in luce antichi dissapori. Il tutto si complica ancora con la nascita di una relazione tra il padre di Sebastiano e Magda.

I knew Jay long before he became my stepfather. We shared a fantasy. Something that now I knew that he and my mother had gone away, I could try. The last thing I expected was for him to come home and catch me.

John Updike's 21st novel, a bildungsroman, follows its hero, Owen Mackenzie, from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, an early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River.

John Updike reads six stories he has selected from the 100-odd he has published. Mr. Updike, when asked to described his method of reading aloud, said "I try to picture the things described and to speak the words distinctly, and to let the emotion come through on its own." The method works beautifully.

Miriam was raised in a society without children. To offset the devastation of climate change, state-of-the-art birth control has made daycares and playgrounds things of the past. As tempting as the government inducements are to remain child-free, Miriam’s curiosity about the people who “drop out” of society to become parents grows. When she finds a like-minded partner, she must choose between the rewarding comforts she knows and the unknowable mysteries of being a mother.

Few winter stories are more affecting than Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl. Written in 1848, and strictly speaking a New Year's Eve story, it showed so clearly then, as it does now, that the Christmas holidays do not represent fireside, food, and presents for all. This story never fails to move, yet it somehow avoids serious sentimentality.

How far should Viviana’s family go to avoid being thirteen at the table? Should Melina and Tanino attend a New Year’s party hosted by Melina’s old flame? Why do Don Pericle’s clients want a Christmas wedding at all costs? Ten humorous and heart-warming short stories shining with the Sicilian sunshine, fragrant with red wine and ringing with Christmas bells, perfect for the festive season.