Short Family

La Condena de Franz Kafka es un cuento que sigue al protagonista, Georg Bendemann, mientras recibe una carta de su padre. En la carta, el padre de Georg expresa su desaprobación por el compromiso de Georg y exige que Georg abandone sus planes de casarse. Angustiado por la repentina condena de su padre, Georg se ve consumido por sentimientos de culpa y dudas sobre sí mismo. A medida que se desarrolla la historia, la agitación interior de Georg alcanza un clímax cuando finalmente sucumbe a los deseos de su padre y decide sacrificar su propia felicidad en aras del deber familiar.

A razor-sharp story collection from a writer who is always "furiously good" (Zadie Smith, best-selling author of Swing Time). With her signature humor and compassion, A.M. Homes exposes the heart of an uneasy America in this collection - exploring our attachments to each other through characters who aren't quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be.

In Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone, his sixth collection of stories, John Edgar Wideman imbues with energy and life the concerns that have consistently infused his fiction and nonfiction. How does it feel to grow up in America, a nation that - despite knowing better, despite its own laws, despite experiencing for hundreds of years the deadly perils and heartbreak of racial division - encourages (sometimes unwittingly, but often on purpose) its citizens to see themselves as colored or white, as inferior or superior.

At first glance, the stories in Sweet and Low seem grounded in the everyday: they paint pictures of idyllic Southern landscapes, characters fulfilling their roles as students, wives, boyfriends. But they are not what they seem. In these stories, Nick White deconstructs the core qualities of Southern fiction, exposing deeply flawed and fascinating characters - promiscuous academics, aging podcasters, woodpecker assassins, and lawnmower enthusiasts, among others - all on wildly compelling quests. White's honest and provocative prose will jolt listeners awake with its urgency.

The truth is, as a character in this provocative new collection puts it, "passionate, beautiful, and hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it's always liberating." In "After the Season", a man of humble means falls quickly in love with a woman belonging to a much elevated financial status and wrestles with his feelings and his beliefs about the rich. A son takes his distant father to a Bach festival in "Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen" only to learn that perhaps he was the one who was never really present in their relationship. And in "The Night in Baden-Baden" a man who's caught in a lie changes his ways.

These are some of the stories of Manorsfields' residents, their relatives and their caregivers. There is humor, poignancy, even romance, but above all they demonstrate that life is very often stranger than fiction.

A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother’s wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy—and vulnerability—of fatherhood. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex.

The stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals take place at the confluence of the commonplace and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. A fossil-hunter, a comedian, a hot- air balloon pilot, parents and children, believers and nonbelievers, the people in these stories are struggling to understand the absurdity and the magnitude of what it means to exist in a family, to exist in the world.

Russo's characters in these four expansive stories bear little similarity to the blue-collar citizens we're familiar with from many of his novels. In "Horseman", a professor confronts a young plagiarist as well as her own weaknesses as the Thanksgiving holiday looms closer and closer: "And after that, who knew?" In "Intervention", a realtor facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father's shadow while he presses forward - or not.

In this addictive short story collection, 24 very different women reach a pivotal moment in their lives. A widow is liberated by a new job but keeps it secret from her family. A date in suburbia has dramatic results. A seamstress takes revenge on an unsuspecting customer while in France, a mother is promised 'fantastic news' - and lets her imagination run away with her.

Another Friday night in the small fishing village along the New Jersey coast. A return to see how everyone has fared in the last five years and who's made the right and wrong decisions in their life. Check back in with Willie, April, Tommy, George, Frankie, Gary, Billy, Jimmy, and Garrett 10 years after the events of the original Belford Stories!

The stories in The Two of Us focus on pairs: intense one-on-one relationships and encounters. Characters undergo genetic testing, garden, overeat, starve themselves, consider suicide, travel, have their hair cut, fall pregnant, all while simultaneously driving each other towards moments where they - sometimes unwillingly - glimpse the meaning and shape of their lives and who they might become.

These interrelated stories are arranged in two sections, one devoted to virtues ("Bravery", "Loyalty", "Chastity", "Charity", and "Forbearance") and the other to vices ("Lust", "Sloth", "Avarice", "Gluttony", and "Vanity"). They are cast with characters who appear and reappear throughout the collection, their actions equally divided between the praiseworthy and the loathsome.

These stories introduce us not only to ordinary people seeking to live extraordinary lives, but also to the skunk ape (a southern variant of Bigfoot), the ghost of Jesse James, and a bone-tired Jack the Giant Killer. Whether it's Appalachia, Nashville, the Carolina Coast, or a make-believe land of talking dogs, each world Earley creates is indelible.

A cynical Hollywood moviemaker confronts his dead wife’s lover and abruptly realizes the depth of his own passion. As his parents’ marriage disintegrates, a precocious fifth-grader distracts himself with meditations on baseball, spaghetti, and his place in the universe. And in the title story, an elderly nun enters a college creative writing class and plays havoc with its tidy notions of fact and fiction. The Whore’s Child is further proof that Russo is one of the finest writers we have.

A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions quickly escalate between them and their religious neighbors. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband. Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope.

In the 10 luminous stories of D. Wystan Owen's Other People's Love Affairs, the people of Glass, a picturesque village on the rugged English coast, are haunted by longings and deeply held secrets, captive to pasts that remain as alive as the present. Each story takes us into the lives of characters reaching earnestly and often courageously for connection to the people they have loved. Owen observes their heartbreaks, their small triumphs, and their generous capacity for grace. Surprising and powerful, these stories mark the debut of a remarkable new talent.

The premise is simple; the execution is passionate: 13 short stories of fiction from eight emerging women writers. This anthology is a wonderful example of women lifting up other women, of writers supporting writers, of a community coming together to fulfill ambitions and dreams.

With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships—with friends, roommates, siblings—while trying to move forward into an uncertain future.

Through Their Lenses is a collection of 29 award-winning short stories by tweens. These stories encompass a wide range of genres, inviting listeners to explore a wealth of important themes passionately crafted by these young writers, from a girl going on a quest to release a curse bestowed on her by a witch to a guy trying to escape after being stranded in a different time.