American Short

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.

This collection is full of gritty stories of strong, spirited women who deal with everything from homicide and drugs to all sorts of turmoil - all while showing the men of the streets of Brooklyn that they are not afraid of anything. Perhaps the edgiest of all the Girls from da Hood books, this drama-filled installment follows a drug-fueled crime operation, which could put the girls and their extravagant lifestyles in permanent danger. But these girls from da hood are trying to find a way out of their troubles, by any means necessary.

Urban Books' popular Girls from da Hood series is back, bringing listeners more dramatic tales about the lives of some tough, resourceful women who can hold their own when things get rough on the streets. This time, Redd, Nikki-Michelle, and Erick S. Gray deliver the stories with their trademark flair. Like a hood-rich Bonnie and Clyde, Candy and Raynail have their hands on all of the drugs that run through the veins of Westwood. When Raynail is set up to take the fall for a crime he didn't commit, Candy goes on a mission to take down everyone involved.

Young, impressionable Aubrey is fascinated by the enigmatic Lord Ruthven, and accompanies him on a tour to Europe. But Aubrey develops a growing distaste for Lord Ruthven’s sinister and grotesque conduct - especially as it concerns human blood. This novella, penned during that tempestuous night in Switzerland amongst such notables as Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley, served as the great inspiration for Bram Stoker to create Dracula.

In the tradition of George Saunders and Aimee Bender, an exuberantly imagined debut that chronicles an ordinary world marked by unusual phenomena. The eighteen stories of Manuel Gonzales’s exhilarating first book render the fantastic commonplace and the ordinary extraordinary, in prose that...

In the tradition of Evicted and Invisible Child, a “moving, real-life saga” (The New Yorker) that follows a single mother of six in Los Angeles courageously struggling to keep her family together and her children in school amid the devastating housing crisis—from the bestselling author of...

From the universally acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, a brilliant, deeply moving work of fiction that explores the world of a "dew breaker", a torturer, a man whose brutal crimes in the country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new American reality.

Collected for the first time, the New York stories of John O'Hara, "among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language" (Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker) Collected for the first time, here are the New York stories of one of the twentieth century’s definitive...

A much-anticipated collection of brilliantly observant short stories from one of the great American masters of the form, performed by a remarkable cast: Deborah Eisenberg, Julianne Moore, Josh Hamilton, and Wallace Shawn. At times raucously hilarious, at times charming and delightful, at times...

Containing over 47 stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train - a bullet couldn't pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes.

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “As impeccable as [the] title story is, every entry astonishes” (The New York Times), from the National Jewish Book Award-winning author of A Play for the End of the World "Whether in Brooklyn, Kolkata, upstate New York or elsewhere, these characters...

A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and 60s America. In this first and only collection by a masterful storyteller finally taking her rightful place in the canon, Oliver’s insightful stories reverberate into the present day.

A dazzling debut, a blazingly original voice: the ten stories in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves introduce a radiant new talent. In the collection’s title story, a pack of girls raised by wolves are painstakingly reeducated by nuns. In “Haunting Olivia,” two young boys make...

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR From the renowned author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, a spectacular volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, and other writings. Features “Family Treasures,” nominated for the Edgar Award for...

A compilation of popular short stories from American literature narrated by professional voice actor Jake Phillips.

In this terrifying tale by New York Times bestselling author Richard Kadrey, a young aspiring serial killer goes in search of a mentor—the supreme, the ultimate killer. What he finds is much greater and much worse than he ever could have imagined...

Best Black Women's Erotica 2 showcases the hottest, most arousing and surprising erotic literature by African American women writers. Representing a wide range of styles and voices, these 20 stories offer a steamy assortment of fiction from popular authors, including C.C. Carter, T'Ashia Asante, Dorothy Randal Gray, Carol Smith Passariello, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Shawn F. Rhea, Opal Palmer Adisa, R. Erica Doyle, Tara Betts, and Tracy Price-Thompson among others.

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories brings together 15 stories that span Hisaye Yamamoto's 40-year career. It was her first book to be published in the United States. Yamamoto's themes include the cultural conflicts between the first generation, the Issei and their children, the Nisei; coping with prejudice; and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.

While T.C. Boyle is known as one of our greatest American novelists, he is also an acknowledged master of the short story and is perhaps at his funniest, his most moving, and his most surprising in the short form. In The Relive Box, Boyle's sharp wit and rich imagination combine with a...

Big Cats opens with "Charlotte," in which a young girl with a broken pelvis spies on her voluptuous neighbor during a long, hot summer night, setting the tone of irrepressible curiosity and yearning that is evident throughout the collection. In "Get Away from Me, David," a bank manager tries to...