Short Fiction Collection

CSA Word continues its ever-popular series of classic short stories, featuring writers such as Jerome K. Jerome, Louisa May Alcott and Saki, read by such respected and revered readers as Derek Jacobi, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.

Listen and relive exciting tales from Highlights, now on audio! Learn what happens when Arizona and Ollie bake cookies to welcome their new neighbor and about the time that Arizona had to overcome stage fright, along with other stories. Stories include: Ask Arizona: A Cat Named Charlie, Ask Arizona: Agree to Disagree, Ask Arizona: Clowning Around, Ask Arizona: Facing Food Fears, Ask Arizona: Flying Solo, and more!

Listen and relive exciting tales from Highlights, now on audio! Learn why Tex and Indi named their cat Cow and about the time the twins dressed in red, white, and blue for their Fourth of July picnic, along with other stories about Tex and Indi by Lissa Rovetch. Stories include: A Cat Named Cow, Alone and Together, Buried Treasure, Can We Agree?, Down We Go!, Elly the Elephant, Feeding the Birds, Going to the Fair, Half for You, Half for Me, Indi’s Surprise, and more!

Six award-winning authors have contributed brand new stories to A Timeless Romance Anthology: Winter Collection. A collection unlike any other, listeners will love this compilation of six sweet historical romance novellas, set in varying eras, yet all with one thing in common: Romance.

Laird Barron’s fourth collection gathers a dozen stories set against the backdrops of the Alaskan wilderness, far-future dystopias, and giallo-fueled nightmare vistas. Combining hard-boiled noir, psychological horror, and the occult, Swift to Chase continues three-time Shirley Jackson Award winner Barron’s harrowing inquiry into the darkness of the human heart.

"Stranger's Thing" by Robert Bevan: Four friends get more than they bargained for when they break into a seemingly abandoned research lab. "The Shingling" by Steve Wetherell: Johnny Terry, a recovering meth addict, is excited to start his new life as the caretaker at the Underpass Motel. Unfortunately, the Underpass is haunted by the ghosts of dead porn stars. "The Haunting of Whore House" by Robert Bevan: Lucy and her brother, Junkie, find out that moving was only the beginning of their troubles when they encounter the ghost of a little boy in the woods. Plus three more!

The crime fiction canopy's a broad one, with room to give shelter to writing of all sorts, as editor Lawrence Block shows with At Home in the Dark.

Established by the leaders of the country's only successful slave revolt in the mid-19th century, Cross River still evokes the fierce rhythms of its founding. In lyrical prose and singular dialect, a saga beats forward that echoes the fables carried down for generations - like the screecher birds who swoop down for their periodic sacrifice, and the water women who lure men to wet deaths.

Abbey Mei Otis's short stories are contemporary fiction at its strongest: taking apart the supposed equality that is clearly just not there, putting humans under an alien microscope, putting humans under government control, and more. Otis has long been fascinated in using strange situations to explore dynamics of power, oppression, and grief, and the 12 stories collected here are at once a striking indictment of the present and a powerful warning about the future.

The National Book Award finalist for Refund returns with a new collection of stories that boldly examines the changes in American culture over the last two years through the increasing presence of violence, bigotry, sexual harassment, and the emotional costs of living under constant threat. In the title story, the competition between two middle school cellists is affected by a shooting at their school, and it is only years later that they realize how the intrusion of violence affected the course of their lives.

In 11 beautifully wrought stories - ranging from occupied Czechoslovakia to California's Central Valley to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest - Mark Slouka explores moments in life when our backs are to the wall. Alternately harrowing and redemptive, these are stories of ordinary men and women, doing everything possible to tighten their grip on life.

I am Mareth, and I collect tales - tales that do not make the official histories. Join me and learn the secret stories of those who sparked the wildfire. Stories from our past, from that fateful summer and its aftermath. If you loved Kingshold, discover the next installment in the epic Wildfire Cycle. Tales of Kingshold, book one-point-five of the Wildfire Cycle, includes four novelettes and six short stories.

A medieval slave-turned-sultan, an alien who declines to visit Earth, a prophet who dares to ask "is God funny?" and a ghost who fears the living - these are among the terrifying, tragic, passionate, and comic characters who animate Michael Oren's stories. Crisscrossing genres, they explore the outer bounds of imagination and artistic freedom, exposing the listener to a kaleidoscope of human emotions and experience. In The Night Archer, the acclaimed historian, political commentator, and statesman Michael Oren is revealed as a writer of bold versatility.

In Bucak's dreamlike narratives, dead girls recount the effects of an earthquake and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. The anguish of an Armenian refugee is "performed" at an American fund-raiser. An Ottoman ambassador in Paris amasses a tantalizing collection of erotic art. And Greek God Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war.

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.

Known for his New York Times best-selling alternate history novels, Flint is equally a master of shorter forms, and this second large volume gathers more of Flint's shorter works. Including several stories and a short novel set in Flint's celebrated Ring of Fire alternate history series. A commemorative novelette set in Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos universe. A story with Dave Freer, set in his and Flint's popular Rats, Bats, and Vats series. Several humorous short stories addressing Biblical literalism. A long novella in a Martian steampunk setting.

It's time to cozy up with some werewolves who might be fighting for their lives but are still managing to find love. Three previously released titles in one handy collection. Fated mates romance featuring werewolves and a few vampires.

Odd Jobs & After Hours tells a story of drifting down the East Coast while getting involved in one sketchy so-called opportunity after another.

A striking and nuanced collection, bringing to life awkward college students, disgraced public figures, raunchy grandparents, and mystical godmothers. To listen to these stories is to experience the transporting joys of discovery and affirmation, and to realize that story writing in America continues to flourish.

How well do you know people? How well do they know you? Six award-winning, bestselling authors of suspense explore the lingering threat of secrets and the inescapable fear that they can’t stay buried forever. No matter how dark the hiding place, the consequences of revealing the truth can bring out the worst in lovers, friends, family, and strangers.