Anthology World Literature

Jack and Maggie Harris are adrift on ravaged streets during the London Blitz. Their home is gone. They have nowhere to go and nothing left to lose. With only the memories of their greatest loss - the death of their child during a Christmas years before - Jack and Maggie settle in a seemingly deserted mansion for the night.

Adelaide—heiress to the wealthiest man in the Ceithren Empire—has felt a void since her sister's death. Just as she's resigned herself to the empty life her father chose for her, a relic from a world that shouldn't exist plunges her into chaos. Clark—son of the greatest terrorist the empire has ever known—is still reeling from his father's death. Since then, his life has boiled down to two things: his brothers and his next mission. When his mission to bring back a mystical artifact goes awry, he's forced to choose between getting the job done and saving the life of a spoiled socialite.

In crisp, unembellished prose, Eunyoung Choi paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In "A Song from Afar", a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, traveling to Russia to search for information about the deceased. In "Secret", the parents of a teacher killed in the Sewol ferry sinking hide the news of her death from her grandmother.

In 1950, publisher Fawcett Books founded its Gold Medal imprint, inaugurating the reign of lesbian pulp fiction. These were the books that small-town lesbians and prurient men bought by the millions - cheap, easy to find in drugstores, and immediately recognizable by their lurid covers: often a hard-looking brunette standing over a scantily clad blonde, or a man gazing in tormented lust at a lovely, unobtainable lesbian. For women leading straight lives, here was confirmation that they were not alone.

A striking and nuanced collection, bringing to life awkward college students, disgraced public figures, raunchy grandparents, and mystical godmothers. To listen to these stories is to experience the transporting joys of discovery and affirmation, and to realize that story writing in America continues to flourish.

Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the 17th century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes 'The Contract' and 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity'.

“Short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages,” writes R. F. Kuang in her introduction. “The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird.” The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises.

New York Times Notable Book author Charles Yu wrote the best-selling novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. In his stunning, often humorous, collection Sorry Please Thank You, Yu draws on pop culture and science to make incisive observations about society - and offer touching insight into the human condition. In two of Yu’s remarkable stories, he focuses on a big-box-store night-shift employee with girl trouble and a company that outsources grief for profit.

American Book Award-winning author Edwidge Danticat earned a National Book Award nomination for this brilliant collection of stories, which includes the Pushcart Prize-winner "Between the Pool and the Gardenias". A remarkably gifted writer, Danticat examines the brutality of her native Haiti, particularly as it affects women, in tales that soar with raw emotion.

In this long-awaited collection, Hopkinson continues to expand the boundaries of culture and imagination. Whether she is retelling The Tempest as a new Caribbean myth, filling a shopping mall with unfulfilled ghosts, or herding chickens that occasionally breathe fire, Hopkinson continues to create bold fiction that transcends boundaries and borders.

It is said that books are written to bring sunshine into our dull, grey lives—to show us places we want to escape to, lives we want to live, people we want to love. But there are also stories that can only be found in the deepest, darkest corners of the library. Stories about the unexplained, of lost souls, of things that go bump before the silence. Before the screaming. And some stories just disappear. Stories printed in old newspapers, broadcast live on the wireless, sometimes not even published at all—these are the stories you cannot find on even the dustiest of library shelves.

In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limon, this book challenges what we think we know about "nature poetry," illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes—both literal and literary—are changing. You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more.

After her mother’s passing, Aldona finds a tin filled with old letters from a prisoner at Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp in northern Germany. Amid the descriptions of daily deprivations and humiliations at the camp, she uncovers the heart-wrenching story of a small circle of women who risked their lives to hide a baby girl from the guards. Aldona is rocked to the core by this record of courage and sisterhood during one of the grimmest chapters of human history.

On a diplomatic mission to discuss possible E&E assistance to the European Union, Donald Jefferson falls victim to an international assassin. With the intelligence community at a loss, Noah and Team Camelot are called on to track down the elusive criminal kingpin - known only as Spear - and bring his powerful murder cartel to an end. Trouble follows, though, when Renée seems to have turned against the team. With Marco insisting that Renee would never turn traitor, Noah has to decide whether to obey the order to eliminate her, or risk everything to bring her back.

The HG Wells Collection includes 4 of Wells' most beloved novels: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. All read by the new voice of H.G. Wells, Malk Williams, this collection is the perfect opportunity to delve into some of Wells' most formative and iconic writings.

In Mules and Men, some of the rich cultural heritage of black America is revealed and preserved. In the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her home town of Eatonville, Florida, to collect and record the oral histories, songs, and sermons, many dating back to slavery times, that she remembered hearing as a child. These highly metaphorical folktales, "big old lies", and powerful songs helped her to recover her history, and preserve an important part of American culture.

Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. In Cowboy Graves, Arturo Belano - Bolaño's alter ego - returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism.

Noreen McAuliffe's Come Down in the World, a story about a nineteenth-century logging camp, wears a style so seamless and perfectly matched it feels tailor-made. From the first few lines to the quietly explosive finale, the listener is surrounded with instant authenticity that transports us to a time, place, and situation with stakes so high that most of us need a daring writer to imagine them for us.

Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

A rickshaw driver dreams of being a Bombay movie star; Indian diplomats, who as childhood friends hatched Star Trek fantasies, must boldly go into a hidden universe of conspiracy and violence; and Hamlet's jester is caught up in murderous intrigues. In Rushdie's hybrid world, an Indian guru can be a redheaded Welshman, while Christopher Columbus is an immigrant, dreaming of Western glory. Rushdie allows himself, like his characters, to be pulled now in one direction, then in another.