Short Stories

Townie is a brief yet dramatic glimpse at a blossoming friendship between two young women in a small college town - Amal, a transplant from LA, and Bridgette, a local 20-something who feels lost in her own life and becomes enamored with her new friend’s confidence. At first, the new relationship is intoxicating, and the two women spend every spare minute getting drunk on cheap liquor, party-hopping, and binging reality TV. But soon, a secret is revealed that shifts the dynamic, and Bridgette makes a choice she can never take back.

This captivating listen begins with fan letters to a beloved young actress, Seraphina, that become increasingly unhinged. As more and more is revealed about the troubled woman behind the fan mail and her connection to the starlet, a story of obsession becomes an expertly plotted tale of wrongdoing and revenge.

Two centuries ago, the First Expansionary Fleet set off to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, hoping to explore, colonize, and conquer new worlds in the name of humanity. But when the fleet was violently and unexpectedly thrown off course, the colonists found themselves trapped in an unexplored region of the galaxy—and caught right in the middle of a bloody interstellar war. Now, after generations of relentless fighting, a tentative truce has finally ushered in an era of growth and prosperity.

From the opening story, "Willing" - about a second-rate movie actress in her 30s who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being - Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.

All of Edgar Allan Poe’s great short stories in one 16-hour collection.

From the internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami comes a mind-bending new collection of short stories, all touching beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory...all with a signature Murakami twist. The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world.

More than any other writer before or since, Louis L'Amour brought the American West to life. His action-packed stories deal with eternal themes: honor, deceit, passion, betrayal, loyalty, courage, love. His settings are historically accurate, his prose riveting, and his characters colorful: good guys, bad buys, toughs, roughs, sidekicks and saints.

A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers.

The war is tearing our world apart. Instead of big armies with tanks in the field, the Vampire War is fought in the streets, neighbor against neighbor, family against family. Anyone can turn at any time. The blood hunger can suddenly appear in the middle of a kiss. The person who sleeps next to you every night could wake up in the dead of night... hungry. So hungry.

Did you know that over 220 million people around the world speak French? Now is the time to join them and tap into the countless opportunities that come with mastering this widely spoken language.

When the UN invaded the Freehold of Grainne, the intent was simple: Force a noncompliant star nation back into the collective. What the politicians hadn't accounted for was that the Freehold had spent 200 years as the haven for every independent, rebellious, self-reliant adventurer in human space. Its military are scattered remnants, its bases smoking ruins, its cities occupied. But Grainne and its space habitats have resources beyond measure.

Space pirates! Words that conjure up rousing tales of adventure, derring-do, brave heroes battling the scurvy vermin of the galaxy. Those vermin have taken to pillaging cargo ships and, even worse, space liners, relieving the helpless passengers of their valuables, and worse with the comely women passengers, then spacing the lot - unless one or more of the aforementioned brave heroes arrive in the nick of time, and turn the tables, making the spaceways safe again for the innocent and helpless.

If you give Oberon the Irish wolfhound a bath, he's going to ask you for a story. Fortunately, his human, Atticus, has many centuries of life under his belt as the Iron Druid, and a whole lot of stories to share. Enjoy twelve new short stories from the New York Times bestselling series the Iron Druid Chronicles. Join Oberon and his Boston terrier buddy, Starbuck, in the tub as they hear about Corrie Ten Boom, Junko Tabei, Francisco de Miranda, Johannes Kepler, and many other figures from history spanning centuries. Sack Rome with King Alaric of the Visigoths or have a think with Auguste Rodin!

Just After Sunset - call it dusk, call it twilight, it's a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It's the perfect time for Stephen King.

One Good Story, That One is a collection steeped in native oral tradition and shot through with Thomas King's special brand of wit and comic imagination. These highly acclaimed stories conjure up Native and Judeo-Christian myths, present-day pop culture, and literature while mixing in just the right amount of perception and experience.

County Sheriff Brody Hayes is in the midst of a missing person's call - for a five-month-old baby. Deep in the mountains of his hometown, Bowie, Wyoming, Brody's desperate search for the helpless child through a worsening snowstorm leads him on an even greater journey - one through his memories of his childhood, his brother, his son, and a life for himself that he thought was lost.

When a robot defies his programming, is he broken? Or is he something else?

A collection of classic works by Edgar Allan Poe, American author, poet, editor, and literary critic. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Hiccup and his dragon Toothless are back for more exciting and hilarious adventures! In How to Train Your Viking, Hiccup's dragon, Toothless, remembers one of Hiccup's early adventures, in which he, TOOTHLESS, was the one who saved the day. In The Day of the Dreader, Hiccup, Toothless and the Hairy Hooligans confront the perilous BIG DREADER, who has the Isle of Berk under siege! And in How to Train Your Hogfly, Hiccup must save his father's life, and prevent a new Viking Blood Feud from breaking out...by training an UNTRAINABLE dragon.

One of India's finest and most prolific writers, Ruskin Bond has been putting pen to paper for well over six decades. Since The Room on the Roof - his award-winning debut novel, which introduced readers to the unforgettable Rusty, the orphan from Dehradun - Bond has created characters both charming and eccentric, which have endured in the popular imagination.