Short Family

An exquisite new collection from a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of the short story, the culmination of a five-decade career: work that takes us beneath the placid surface of suburban life into the elusive strangeness of the everyday.

This is a mini-sequel to The Other Son, a little gift for all those listeners who have been begging to know what happens next. Alice has been lying to herself for years, holding fast to the belief that the needs of her family far outweigh her own. But her outwardly successful marriage hides dark secrets, and for much of her life, the children were the only reason she stuck around.

When Zikora, a DC lawyer from Nigeria, tells her equally high-powered lover that she’s pregnant, he abandons her. But it’s Zikora’s demanding, self-possessed mother, in town for the birth, who makes Zikora feel like a lonely little girl all over again. Stunned by the speed with which her ideal life fell apart, she turns to reflecting on her mother’s painful past and struggle for dignity. Preparing for motherhood, Zikora begins to see more clearly what her own mother wants for her, for her new baby, and for herself.

The Family Novak is an mpreg bear-shifter series featuring a family that lives on the shady side of the law, but always stands for what’s right when it comes to protecting what’s theirs.

Coconut Dreams explores the lives of the Pinto family through seventeen linked short stories. Starting with a ghost story set in Goa, India in the 1950s, the collection weaves through various timelines and perspectives to focus on two children, Aiden and Ally Pinto. These siblings tackle their adventures in a predominantly white suburb with innocence, intelligence and a timid foot in two distinct cultures.

When Jules first meets the handsome artist Kirin, she’s still mourning her husband’s death, but a fairytale romance soon sweeps her off her feet. Now she and her daughter Scout are moving out of the city and into Kirin’s once-lonely mansion. He’s thoughtfully updated and adapted the home to match their personalities. But Scout is determined to keep her father’s memory alive by rejecting the new life her mother and Kirin have spun for her.

The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters love and betray one another; their richly fraught relationships can act as anchors, lifelines, or deadly poison. Bonnie Jo Campbell's working-class protagonists are at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny, and they are always getting into or out of trouble.

What happens when Joey and his sister, Mary Alice - two city slickers from Chicago - make their annual summer visits to Grandma Dowdel's seemingly sleepy Illinois town? Joey and Mary Alice make seven summer trips to Grandma's, each one funnier and more surprising than the year before.

How quickly the ground shifts beneath our feet. We make choices—in the face of love, or violence, or necessity—and the effects ripple outward. In these moving short stories, acclaimed authors examine the foundations of the past, uncovering the irreversible decisions and life-changing encounters that mark the turning point between before and after.

It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. In flowing, relentless prose, Conway recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband, citizen. His ruminations move from childhood memories of his father's deftness with machines to his own work as a civil engineer, from transformations in the local economy to the tidal wave of global financial collapse. Conway's thoughts go still further, outward to the vast systems of time and history that hold us all.

If you are a French language learner looking to advance your reading skills and enhance your vocabulary, then this book will guide you through dialogue and story listening in your second language. We often are instructed with conventional activities in the form of worksheets, overlooking that words are 20 times more likely to be remembered if they are a part of a story (Bruner, 2017). Language learners retain more in the context of a story and become accustomed to the natural syntax of that language.

Seven stories to span the Christmas holidays: 'A Faraway Smell of Lemon': The school term has ended. It is almost Christmas, but Binny, out last-minute shopping, couldn't feel less like wishing glad tidings to all men. Ducking out of the rain, she finds herself in the sort of shop she would never normally visit. 'The Marriage Manual': Christmas Eve. Two parents endeavour to construct their son's Christmas present from a DIY kit and in the process find themselves deconstructing their marriage.

Assembled here are stories new and old, spanning from 1960 to today. Meet the death-defying motorcycle trick riders in the carnival's Devil's Tub, a man who keeps an alligator in his bathtub, a Chinese launder in Coney Island in search of love, a frontiersman who saves himself from a mauling grizzly bear by hiding in a beaver dam, three men from a circus looking for trouble at a rodeo, a washed out boxer trying to hang onto his career, and dozens of others rich characters.

Growing up homeschooled in Berkeley, California, Beatrice Quinn is a statistical genius who has dreamed her whole life of discovering new mathematical challenges at a school like Oxford University. She always thought the hardest part would be getting in, not convincing her parents to let her go. But while math has always made sense to Beatrice, making friends is a problem she hasn’t been able to solve. The compromise? The Connecticut Shakespearean Summer Academy.

Every morning, Judy measures Stink, and it's always the same: 3 feet, 8 inches tall. Stink feels like even the class newt is growing faster than he is. Then one day, the ruler reads 3 feet, 7 and 3/4 inches! Can it be? Is Stink shrinking? Stink tries everything to look like he's growing, but wearing up-and-down stripes and spiking his hair don't seem to be fooling anybody into thinking he's taller.

From a comic mastermind comes this brilliant collection of stories. Three teenagers believe they are witches. A woman defaces a local billboard. A bored landlord tries to influence his son's best friend. A cul-de-sac WhatsApp group discusses eggs at length. A heavily pregnant woman finds a way to time travel and a girl discovers joy on a stolen bicycle. Each tale paints a life in miniature and offers an escape chute from the catastrophes of modern life.

I’m Stephen Lund, confirmed bachelor…and son of a successful billionaire whose sins I can’t forget - or forgive. Though he insisted I get over his transgressions, I can’t. So I put space between us with a temporary getaway to Maui. My rental’s sexy caretaker, Skye Ingram, is a beautiful distraction. Yeah, it’s a terrible time to start a fling, but I can’t help wanting to give her every bit of pleasure she’s willing to take. When Skye needs a date to her ex-boyfriend’s wedding, I’m game to play her pretend fiancé.

When his parents return from Kenya with a cute little green lizard on his eighth birthday (he's two times two times two), Jacob Two-Two is thrilled. But it isn't long before Jacob realizes that his new pet, Dippy, isn't a lizard after all. And as months pass, it is apparent Dippy isn't so little either. Soon Dippy is attracting all sorts of unwanted attention, and before he knows it, Jacob is on the run from the Canadian government with a full-grown dinosaur to hide.

Diagnosed as severely autistic at the age of three, Tito, nearly nonverbal, was brought up by his loving mother Soma, who taught him to read English and challenged him to write his own stories. The initial result was The Mind Tree, published in 2003, which Tito wrote between the ages of eight and 11. The Gold of the Sunbeams is an equally impressive, beautiful collection of stories, each prefaced by a charming note from Tito explaining how the story came into being.

In Mules and Men, some of the rich cultural heritage of black America is revealed and preserved. In the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her home town of Eatonville, Florida, to collect and record the oral histories, songs, and sermons, many dating back to slavery times, that she remembered hearing as a child. These highly metaphorical folktales, "big old lies", and powerful songs helped her to recover her history, and preserve an important part of American culture.