American Short

The heralded Queen of Hip-Hop Lit presents an addictive collection of celebrated urban authors with their fingers on the pulse of the streets. Street lit’s finest female voices—Keisha Starr, Tysha, LaKesa Cox, and Monique S. Hall—deliver searing stories about women who make hard sacrifices to stay on top of their hustle and seize the power, money, and fame they can’t live without.

There's a saying in Brooklyn that if you come from my part of town, you're from around the way. Well Lyric, Juicy, and Precious are all from around the way. They all live in Crown Heights, one of the most notorious sections of Brooklyn, but to them it's just a place they call home. Around the Way Girls 2 is a fast-paced look at the life of some street-smart women who think they know it all but are about to get the lessons of their lives.

Symone Davenport is a 22-year-old college senior who has set herself up for a very secure future, but all her achievements feel more like a duty than a labor of love. It takes the help of Jaylen Richards, the handsome new choir director, to not only unlock her talent and try to bring her into the spotlight but to unlock her heart. Janice was never very thin. With a gorgeous face, personality, and brains, she isn't lacking friends, but her insecurities about her weight gain get in the way of things reaching the next level with men.

Meet the women of American Housewife: They wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it's cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. They pump the salad spinner like it's a CPR dummy. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven. These 12 irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation ritual of a book club to the getaway car of a pageant princess on the lam.

In They Call Me Farang, Mallon delivers a timeless collection of insightful, compelling short stories in the only way he knows, with dry humor and a straightforward, no-holds-barred voice. Learn what life is really like as an expatriate in Thailand; there is action, advice, comedy, love, and of course, plenty of commentary on Thailand’s beautiful women. Get all the gritty details in this semi-autobiographical account of his two decades in the country.

"Nachbarn" ist eines jener seltenen Werke in der Literatur, die ihre Zeit einfangen und ihr doch weit voraus sind. Diane Oliver erkundet darin die sich wandelnden sozialen Umstände: Beäugt von den Nachbarn, fragen sich Ellie und ihre Familie, ob es richtig ist, den kleinen Bruder morgen als einziges Kind auf die Schule der Weißen zu schicken. Ein Paar wird durch rassistische Übergriffe dazu getrieben, im Wald zu leben, und entwickelt eine mörderische Wut. Meg heiratet einen Schwarzen, doch die Liebe fordert über die Grenzen der Hautfarbe ihren Preis.

Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.

Set in Soweto, the urban heartbeat of South Africa, Innards tells the intimate stories of everyday Black folks processing the savagery of apartheid with grit, wit, and their own distinctive bewildering humor. Rich with the thrilling textures of township language and life, it braids the voices and perspectives of an indelible cast of characters into a breathtaking collection flush with forgiveness, rage, ugliness, and beauty.

Alexander Shalom Joseph’s American Wasteland is a collection of stories about the contemporary day-to-day in America. It is said in the Talmud that one job of certain Jews is to justify the existence of humanity to God; in this collection, Joseph attempts to do just this with his stories, which speak to the everyday mundane and the vast richness in both meaning and meaninglessness that abound all around us. These stories, vivid in detail, portray a stagnant land full of longing and millions of lost people trying to make sense of a world which can seem both crushing and light.

The third in a series of American Western short stories compiled by Jon Tuska, and preformed by celebrity readers.

Framed as a reference work of humorous “entries” that offer trenchant social commentary, Everything Abridged presages a dark vision of the near future but tells jokes in the face of it: An intelligence agency operative uncovers a conspiracy to generate conspiracies and realizes his participation in the scheme. A Caribbean monarch meets four decades of American presidents and adjusts his country’s foreign policy accordingly. Experiment participants are asked to bring back a gun as quickly as possible.

This collection features seven tales inspired by America's colorful history, from colonial times to the early 20th century, including the Newbery Medal winner "The Matchlock Gun". In "The Matchlock Gun", young Edward must protect his family from marauding Indians when his father is called away. In "Two Logs Crossing", John Haskell spends two harsh winters fur trapping with a wise Indian to pay off his father's tremendous debt.

Proverbs for the People is an astounding collection of contemporary African-American fiction, featuring stories by such well known authors as Pearl Cleage, Omar Tyree, Margaret Johnson-Hodge, Travis Hunter, Parry "Ebony Satin" Brown, Gwynne Forster, Edward Jackson and Vicki L. Andrews. These widely varied stories resonate with the power and wisdom of the ages, speaking of universal truths that will heal and guide the wayward spirit.

An early desktop computer becomes the third partner in a doomed relationship; an older brother figure whose father lives in exile imparts hilarious life lessons to his young protégé. A man attempts to quit smoking despite the fact that he’s very good at it; another masquerades as the family man he'll never be. Throughout, Pinochet’s dictatorship casts a long shadow, and men in relationships exhibit their profound capacity for both love and harm.

Ten superbly narrated stories that help explain America by America's best writers.

Gary Pak has emerged as one of the most important Asian Hawaiian writers of our time. In this new collection, Pak expertly crafts a memorable cast of Hawai'i's Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Native Hawaiians, amplifying our cross-cultural understanding of Hawaiian life today.

Trapped in a London flat, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster’s cottage, miles from Moscow. A father, finally free of his daughter’s demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor.Rose Tremain awakens the senses in this diverse collection of short stories.

A mother and daughter negotiate the Oregon Trail with grisly results; an elementary teacher watches the carnage of the Challenger explosion spill over into her own classroom. A possible prospector traveling west is drawn to an isolated inn where no one walks away hungry; a 1950s housewife shares the gruesome repertoire of behavior expected of a proper lady. Prohibition and women’s suffrage, the Civil War and the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination conspiracy and the Y2K hysteria.

Set in the present, American Z is centered around a deeply rooted and disturbing evolution of the zombie in America, and the scientific T.S.O.M.B.I.E. [zom-bie] program. A powerful group of elitists, known as The Society, has been secretly controlling governments for years, and are now on the brink of being able to control humanity itself. One man believes he is destined to stop them and is willing to do whatever it takes, including betraying those closest to him. American Z is sure to slowly eat away at your conscious, long after putting it down.

In this singular collection, John Edgar Wideman, the acclaimed author of Writing to Save a Life, blends the personal, historical, and political to invent complex, charged stories about love, death, struggle, and what we owe each other. With characters ranging from everyday Americans to Jean-Michel Basquiat to Nat Turner, American Histories is a journey through time, experience, and the soul of our country. Navigating an extraordinary range, Wideman challenges the boundaries of traditional forms, and delivers unforgettable, narratives that touch the core of what it means to be alive.