Short Storey Fiction Writing

Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his listener to a ground-level perspective, recreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold", the taps of his shoes, and the "engines of sparks that lived beneath my soles", his worn tennies smelling of "summer grass, asphalt, the moist sock breathing the defeat of baseball". The child’s world is made up of small things - small, very important things.

A soldier struggles with the emptiness left behind by amnesia until he learns he is more than the world would have him remember. The Earth is desolate, and only one ship of humans remains. An assassin plays god, dealing out justice and mercy as he sees fit. Explore the outer reaches of the imagination through these and other short stories. From brainwashed clones to winged aliens of destruction, the stories in Stellar Cloud will pull in any lover of science fiction and fantasy.

"You had better shove this in the stove," Mark Twain said at the top of an 1865 letter to his brother, "for I don't want any absurd 'literary remains' and 'unpublished letters of Mark Twain' published after I am planted." He was joking, of course. But when Mark Twain died in 1910, he left behind the largest collection of personal papers created by any nineteenth-century American author.

Michael Brein's Travel Tales Collection, Spooky Tales 1, features a bunch of bizarre and strange tales of the paranormal that can happen to you in your travels. Strange things do happen, and mostly they are the usual, typical, expected sorts of normal experiences. But there are also those unexpected, strange surprises that pop up now and again in your journeys.

Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker: literally. As the home of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M. F. K. Fisher, who practically invented American food writing, the magazine established a tradition that is carried forward today by irrepressible literary gastronomes, including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this indispensable collection, The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing on food and drink.

If you're a Twilight Zone lover or a fantasy freak, this short story about a woman's journey of self-discovery will keep you hooked right up to the end.

Shortly after discovering an ancient grave, Amon's sister disappeared. Twenty years later she arrives at his doorstep, screaming at full pitch. The plea for help draws him into a world where danger shuffles behind every corner.

Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey. Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1. Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist. John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean."

This collection brings together the best of Ruskin Bond's cameos, all beautifully imagined and crafted, inspired by people who have left a lasting impression on him. In addition, there are a host of characters culled from Bond's numerous short stories. Taken together, they constitute a magnificent evocation of the small-town India by one of the country's best storytellers.

Sara Marcello, a writer with roots in Italy, is invited to the island villa of Ugo and Olivia Bellini, two wealthy and worldly antiquarians. In this place of myth, belonging as much to Homer and Prospero as to the present, Sara discovers that she is at the center of Olivia's obsessive desire to possess the secret of creative genius. And, although she doesn't know it, Sara is also replaying the sixty-year-old tragedy of her grandmother, Gelsomina.

Like a genie’s lamp, whenever someone rubs against the coin, their deepest wish comes true. The other effect is that rubbing on the coin also brings them what they need the most. This coin only works once for each person but has changed hands many times.

A selection of the stories that Jane wrote for her family when she was between the ages of 12 and 15. AUTHOR: Jane Austen was born in 1775 in her father’s Rectory in the village of Steventon in Hampshire. By the time of her death in 1817 she had written 6 major novels, left two others unfinished and was the author of a considerable amount of correspondence.

What's supposed to be an upcoming authors dream would turn into a night of hell and become a curse to any one that happened to glance upon the last writings of author Richard Valance from the unfinished horror novel titled A Blast from Hell. Richard's publisher said in angry voice, if you don't finish that book tonight you're a dead man, and just to make sure, I'm coming over until you finish the last pen stroke. I've got too much money invested for this novel to die from someone that made a promise to me and not deliver.

Collected here are the stories, poems, and religious writings that preceded and helped form the science fiction and fantasy genres. The collection explores the key imaginative roots and their later literary permutations. The author list alone reads like a literary who’s who and includes many writers not primarily known for their forays into the fantastic. Organized by topic rather than simple chronology, this volume allows the listener to trace the history of robots, aliens, and apocalypses up to some of their most recent manifestations.

In Entrapment and Other Writings - containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays - Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon, despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure.

Urdu-language selections, featuring "Khaana Vazir", "Jul Kuukri", "Chauthi ka Jora", and more.

Urdu-language selections, featuring "Kaanta", "Eid Gah", "Subh kay Khush Naseeb", and more.

This collection features "Ghalib kay Khutoot" by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, "Woh aur Mein" by Intizar Hussain, "Cheeni Ashtray ki Yaad Mein" by Mujtaba Husain, an excerpt of Mir Baqir Ali by Ashraf Suboohi Dehlvi, and more.

In this Urdu-language collection: "Woh jo Devaar ko na Chaat Sakay" by Intizar Hussain; "Bhabie" by Ismat Chughtai; and "Pukka Gaana" by Zamiruddin Ahmed.

In this Urdu-language collection: "Vehshi" by Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi; "Phir Wohi Eid" by Shaukat Thanvi; "Kahin Yeh Purvai Tau Nahin" by Altaf Fatima; and "Ishqiya Kahaani" by Saadat Hasan Manto.