Dark Comedy Short Stories

Hollywood and Broadway are icons of the American Dream. But what happens to those who feed off that dream? Just as drug cartels have many underlings who must get paid along the journey to the addicts, so do the characters who need to be nourished by the luminaries who make up this star-studded world above us. James Musgrave’s collection of 11 stories, in many ways, addresses the theme of “star power”, but in a way that satirizes the stereotypical “Hollywood endings” in very unique and literary ways.

In this unforgettable work of fiction, Donald Ray Pollock peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted, but resilient lives of its residents. Spanning a period from the mid-'60s to the late '90s, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are woebegone, baffled, and depraved - but irresistibly, undeniably real. Rendered in the American vernacular with vivid imagery and a wry, dark sense of humor, these thwarted and sometimes violent lives jump at the listener with inexorable force.

This is a collection of the fourth six short stories in the Caverns and Creatures series.

A hypnotic collection of speculative fiction about compassion, love, and human resilience in the technological hyper-age, from Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World. Universal Love welcomes listeners to a near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally...

Diane Williams, an American master of the short story who will "rewire your brain" (NPR), is back with a collection in which she once again expands the possibilities of fiction. These stories depict ordinary moments - a visit to the doctor's office or a married couple's hundredth dance together - but within the quotidian, Williams delivers a lifetime of insecurities, lusts, rejections, and revelations, making her work equally discomfiting and amusing.

This is a collection of the second six short stories in the Caverns and Creatures series.

"J'ai commencé à éprouver un sentiment, je veux dire un vrai, à ce moment-là. En sortant de la voiture, à Wandermines, sous la pluie. On ne parle pas assez de l'influence des lieux sur l'affect. Certaines nostalgies remontent à la surface sans prévenir. Les êtres changent de nature, comme dans les contes. Au milieu de cette confrérie en habits du dimanche, se pressant vers la mairie pour échapper aux gouttes, tenant le bras d'Odile pour l'aider sur le parvis glissant, j'ai éprouvé la catastrophe du sentiment.

A funny and heartwarming debut for fans of Celia Imrie and Dawn French. Evie Gallagher is regretting her hasty move into a care home. She may be 75 and recently widowed, but she’s absolutely not dead yet. And so, one morning, Evie walks out of Sheldon Lodge and sets off on a Great Adventure across Europe. But not everyone thinks Great Adventures are appropriate for women of Evie’s age, least of all her son, Brendan, and his wife, Maura, who follow a trail of puzzling text messages to bring her home.

Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño is a forthcoming title from Farrar, Straus and Giroux...

Bubba’s back from Fairyland, and sometimes it feels like they shoulda just stayed there! Man, coming back to the real world sucks. Bubba and his whole team have been fired on account of going MIA for a year and a half (yeah, time moves differently in Fairyland - yay), and now they’ve got to…get jobs? Oh, this is going to go well.

An urgent and unforgettable collection of stories, Show Them a Good Time explores types - men and women, their assigned roles and meanings - in modern society. A young, broke Irish woman narrates her relationship with a successful comedian in New York; two hapless university students take to the stage in a bid to assert their autonomy; a school teacher makes her way through a series of dead-end dates, gamely searching for love or distraction as the world teeters towards ruin.

From the award-winning author of Occupational Hazards come nine more tales of blue-collar fiction, including The Destroyer (sequel to Jar Baby) and the author's autobiographical Memoir of a Murderer, narrated by an all-star cast of performers. There's horror, there's humor, there's horrific humor. It slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries. Treat yourself. You deserve it.

It's 1928 and Bright Young Things are taking London by storm, but Lady Ophelia's life is all mapped out: marriage to a cod-faced aristocrat and a life of dull respectability. Refusing to play along, Ophelia is banished to her ancestral home in the Highlands of Scotland. There, she'll be so bored, she'll come to her senses... won't she? Meeting her eccentric relatives (not to mention ruggedly handsome estate manager Hamish) Ophelia isn't so sure. Let the mayhem begin!

"Faire rentrer toute la vie d'un homme ou d'une femme dans une goutte d'eau", telle est la définition des "Microfictions" que propose son auteur et dans lesquelles sont rassemblés des "fragments de la vie des gens". Aucun domaine de nos vies n'échappe à Régis Jauffret, explorateur infatigable du quotidien, et à son regard grinçant sur l'existence.

Ordinary realities and yearnings to transcend them lead to miraculous other worlds in this dazzling collection of stories. A woman's deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife; a Russian professor in a small American town constructs elaborate fantasies during her cigarette break; a man falls in love with a marble statue as his marriage falls apart. With the emotional insight of Chekhov, the surreal satire of Gogol, and a unique blend of humor and poetry all her own, Tolstaya transmutes the quotidian into aetherial alternatives.

From an acclaimed and original writer comes a new collection of stories bursting with absurdist plot twists and laced with trenchant wit. The title story delivers a cringingly biting dissection of racial attitudes in contemporary America, and Clarke also turns his eagle eye to subjects like PTSD, the fate of child actors, and, most especially, marital discord in stories like "Considering Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife" and "The Misunderstandings".

With these 13 transfixing, ingenious stories, Ben Marcus gives us timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world - cosmically and comically apt. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.

Incendiary Girls explores our baser instincts with vivid imagination and humor. In these stories, our bodies become strange and unfamiliar terrain, a medium for transformation. In "Fundamental Laws of Nature", a doctor considers her legacy, both good and bad, when she discovers that her mother has been reincarnated as a thoroughbred mare. In the title story, a mischievous angel chronicles the remarkable life of a girl just beyond death’s reach.

If you're a fan of Roald Dahl or Gillian Flynn you'll love these unsettling stories with a twist in the tale. Are you ready to stay up all night with USA Today best-selling author JT Lawrence? Click now to start listening.

Alicia Erian's characters are brave, disarming, affectionate, and deeply flawed. They inhabit the not-so-very-wide space between a good intention and a bad outcome. The Brutal Language of Love challenges traditional notions of right and wrong with what has become Erian's signature—an achingly stylish humor and a deep understanding of the brutal truth about human nature. These surprising, provocative, and deeply resonant stories marked the emergence of a major talent.