American Short

Ayesha Shetty lost her brother seven years ago, the same time she lost everything else important to her: her dreams, her fierce independence, and the man she loved. Not wanting to see her mother hurt anymore, she put her wild self away and became the dutiful daughter her mother needed and took on her brother’s role in the family business. Now her best friend’s big, fat Indian wedding is a chance to get away from her endless duties at the restaurant and maybe even have some fun (if she remembers how).

Major Hastings and Hercule Poirot are not interested in the mystery of the Spanish Chest, which has been reported in the papers so often that it seems to be an entirely closed case. But, when Hastings persuades Poirot to attend a fabulous party given by Lady Chatterton, they discover someone...

Few Americans and even fewer citizens of other nations understand the electoral process in the United States. Still fewer understand the role played by political parties in the electoral process or the ironies within the system. This Very Short Introduction audiobook introduces the listener to these issues and more, providing an insider's view of how the system actually works while shining a light on some of its flaws.

From New York Times bestselling author James Rollins comes a thrilling short story that delves deep beneath the city of Paris to a dark necropolis, where the only means for escape is…The Skeleton Key. Seichan is ripped out of the Sigma series for an adventure all her own—but can she survive?...

A collection of short stories of rural Ireland in the classic Irish mode: full of love (and sex), melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today—from the author of the wildly acclaimed Night Boat to Tangier. With three novels and two short story...

For Unique, life is good until her dope-dealing boyfriend, Took, is arrested and winds up in jail. Now she's broke as a joke, trying to put every petty hustle into play to chase hard times away from the door. With an empty refrigerator, a stack of bills piling up, a tenth-grade education, a big butt and a smile, it doesn't take long for her to learn to pull the wool over the eyes of any fool who's blinded by her good looks.

A fantastic short story collection from critically acclaimed, and bestselling author, John Updike...

A variety of work from one of the most quotable of all twentieth-century authors—the inimitable Dorothy Parker Author, poet, screenwriter and outstanding member of the legendary Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker was known for her quick wit, keen observations, and remarkable insight into...

Art and life. Each the mirror of the other. This then is the classic definition of what ‘Realism’ as a writing form really is. Some might call it a fancy term for the mundane day to day pursuits but in the hands of an author it comes alive. We are drawn into characters and landscapes that we can empathize with, we can, metaphorically speaking, help shoulder their burden, be on the long trail with them whatever the landscapes, the hurdles, incidents and other people may place in their literary way.

The titles in this collection include: "The Storm" by Kate Chopin, "Life In the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis, "A Humble Romance", "Two Old Lovers", "On the Walpole Road", "An Honest Soul" and "A Conflict Ended" all by Mary Wilkins Freeman, and "Between Two Shores" by Ellen Glasgow.

This short story collection from New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner “shouldn’t be missed” (Entertainment Weekly). Jennifer Weiner's talent shines like never before in this collection of short stories, following the tender, often hilarious, progress of love and relationships...

To this irresistible debut collection of short stories, Richard Russo brings the same bittersweet wit, deep knowledge of human nature, and spellbinding narrative gifts that distinguish his best-selling novels. His themes are the imperfect bargains of marriage; the discoveries and...

A definitive collection of new and selected stories by a master of the form “Comparisons might be drawn to writers ranging from Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami to Margaret Atwood and J. D. Salinger. All of Lethem’s stories are enlivened by his wit and provocative wordplay.”...

“Jackson at her best: plumbing the extraordinary from the depths of mid-twentieth-century common. [Just an Ordinary Day] is a gift to a new generation.”—San Francisco Chronicle Acclaimed in her own time for her short story “The Lottery” and her novel The Haunting of Hill...

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. For America, as the century closes, she is becoming less isolated. Her industrial might, her rising military power are pulling her ever closer into the entangled globe of nations. Her authors flex ideas and lexicons with riveting tales of this astonishing society.

John Updike reads six stories he has selected from the hundred-odd he has published. "A&P", recounting a moral crisis on the checkout counter, is his most anthologized story. "Pigeon Feathers," the longest story included, tells of a fourteen-year-old boy's fear of death and the answer he finds...

From one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists comes Certain American States, whose insightful and lonely stories beg you to discover the emotional universes hiding at their cores. Catherine Lacey brings her narrative mastery to Certain American States, her first collection of short stories. As with her acclaimed novels, she gives life to a group of subtly complex, instantly memorable characters whose searches for love, struggles with grief, and tentative journeys into the minutiae of the human condition are simultaneously gripping and devastating.

Finalist for the Locus Award Belletrist Book Club Pick From Philip K. Dick Award finalist Elwin Cotman, an irresistibly unnerving collection of stories that explore the anxieties of living while Black—a high-wire act of literary-fantastical hybrid fiction. A rural town finds itself under the...

For Jack Cho, a fortysomething gay man, being able to marry someone he loves is so unfamiliar it’s terrifying. Then a wedding invitation from a college friend brings about a collision with those fears--and his own secret history. Jack and his new boyfriend, Caleb, are attending the wedding of Jack’s estranged straight friend Scott. No sooner do the guests start to mingle than questions arise

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the smash bestseller Orphan Train, a stunning and atmospheric novel of friendship, passion, and art, inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s mysterious and iconic painting Christina’s World. ""Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the...