Fiction Literature Short Stories

It’s summertime in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ian has lost his job, while his wife, Parker, thrives in her e-commerce career. Parker’s days are frenetic and full. When she’s not in Zoom meetings, she’s doom-scrolling about the virus or hanging out on Houseparty with her friends. Meanwhile, Ian claims to spend his days looking for a full-time job, but he’s mostly goofing around on Tik Tok and taking their dog, Hutch, for longer-than-necessary walks. What he really wants is to start a family, but Parker still isn’t ready.

The Sisters Fen, Mary and Rose, live alone in their family's old estate, Small Stone. They have a meager income that comes from royalties on their father's films. After three attempts, their father succeeds in killing himself, leaving the girls to fend off the outside world alone. When their house catches on fire after an unfortunate gardening accident, it’s up to the older sister, Mary, to find the money to fix the burnt roof. Mary decides to revive their father’s pornography business.

An accountant by day, Mr. Rodgers spends his nights and weekends indulging in a unique passion. Traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood as an unknown entity, he uses unconventional methods to help long-suffering wives rediscover the love they once had for themselves and their husbands. Some might consider him a selfless hero, ahead of his time. The residents of Poagstown, however, have cutting-edge ideas of their own.

When a star running back is gunned down by a cop with a questionable history, the city of L.A. is on the verge of a racial explosion. Enter a lawyer who comes to the cop's defense...but a desire for justice has nothing to do with it.

Forty-eight of H.P. Lovecraft’s most important stories are brought together in this collection–available only from Audible–selected and with introductions by the award-winning, best-selling Lovecraft editor Leslie S. Klinger. Howard Philips Lovecraft was the early 20th-century genius who, almost singlehandedly, pioneered horror and scientific fiction, only to die in near-obscurity. Rediscovered by critics and scholars in the 1970s, Lovecraft’s work has influenced—by their own admission—every major horror or science-fiction writer of today.

The remarkable renaissance of Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories, featuring the groundbreaking novels Strangers on a Train and The Price of Salt as well as a trove of penetrating short stories. With a critical introduction by Joan Schenkar, situating Highsmith’s classic works within her own tumultuous life, this book provides a useful guide to some of her most dazzlingly seductive writing.

In a military kingdom where the king is selected through a series of challenges and through combat, with 600 competitors in the mix, a human warrior struggles to reach the top of an alien society and claim the throne. With his inclusion in the tournament, the first human in centuries to participate, Marcus comes to uncover a deeper and more sinister plot by the king that could see an end to tradition.

After a bad breakup, Nola wants nothing to do with Christmas, especially in her quaint hometown of Bright Harbor, Maine. Infuriatingly charming and cheery, Nola’s surroundings only worsen her sour mood. To make matters worse, Caleb, the boy who broke her heart years ago, is all grown up and still living in town. While doing her best to avoid him, Nola bumps into the local mailman, who gives her a mysterious letter. And when she finds that the writer is a fellow Scrooge, she can’t help but feel her spirit lifting.

After witnessing the birth of baby Jesus, the Little Horse dreams of being ridden by him. So he spends his life in passionate pursuit of the King of Kings - across the River Jordan, into the wilderness, and even to the cross - but the Little Horse always just misses his chance to be ridden. Then when all seems lost, his dream comes true.

A group of writers from Nashville pile into a car and head to the mountains of North Georgia for a work retreat - and a bit of drinking and gossip. They’ve booked a cabin in the woods with no internet and no cell service and, hopefully, no interruptions. Near the cabin, the friends discover the beautiful but decrepit Catwood Manor, abandoned decades earlier.

The human mind… a maze of secrets and contradictions! Why do we act the way we do? What really controls our decisions? A philosophical journey into the depths of human behavior!

Mirren’s beloved great-aunt Violet is seriously ill. Her one Christmas wish is to be reunited with a long-lost hand-illustrated book from her childhood, a challenge Mirren gladly accepts to give Violet some much-needed festive cheer. With no sign of the cherished volume online, Mirren falls into the fascinating world of rare books. From London to snowy Hay-on-Wye and Edinburgh’s cobbled streets, she chases leads from bookshop to bookshop—and bumps into mysterious, charming Theo, who, unbeknownst to her, is searching for the same book for reasons of his own…

From Oklahoma to California, the heroes of A Calm & Normal Heart are modern-day adventurers—seeking out new places to call their own inside a nation to which they do not entirely belong. A member of the Osage tribe, author Chelsea T. Hicks's stories are compelled by an overlooked diaspora happening inside America itself: that of young Native people.

A hit woman’s work doesn’t stop for the holidays. As the advent calendar winds down, Paige slips into a palatial house, ignoring a blizzard of texts from her ex-husband. No surprise—Julian always gets maudlin this time of year. The real shock comes when the target is not alone. His young daughter is there too.

Nathan Tyler is an unassuming professor at a middling American university with a rather obscure specialty in mathematics—in short, a nobody from nowhere. So why is the White House calling? Summoned to Washington, DC, for a top-secret briefing, Nathan discovers that he’s the key to a massive foreign intelligence breakthrough. Reading between the lines of a cryptic series of equations, he could open a door straight into the heart of the Kremlin and change the global balance of power forever.

It’s Christmas Eve and Stella Hansen is broke. She is so broke that despite working two jobs, she can’t even afford a present for her husband on their first Christmas as man and wife. But then a mysterious storekeeper at a pawn shop offers Stella an intriguing trade. Stella wants more than anything to buy her husband the Christmas gift of his dreams. But will it come at a terrible price?

In Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone, his sixth collection of stories, John Edgar Wideman imbues with energy and life the concerns that have consistently infused his fiction and nonfiction. How does it feel to grow up in America, a nation that - despite knowing better, despite its own laws, despite experiencing for hundreds of years the deadly perils and heartbreak of racial division - encourages (sometimes unwittingly, but often on purpose) its citizens to see themselves as colored or white, as inferior or superior.

Yarima Lalo believes he has been murdered twice before. The cause? Love. To make sense of these vivid memories he cannot shake, he travels from Abuja to Kano with his new friend and love interest Aziza to meet an old woman who he might have known in a past life. She is skeptical at first - and hesitant to revisit painful memories of her own - but together, they dig deeper and deeper into the past, piecing together a shared history with ripple effects that could shape Lalo’s future.

Nada Alic's women—the perverts, nobodies, reality TV stars, poetic hopefuls, shameless party girls, and self-help addicts of Los Angeles and its environs—are all wrestling with a shared stark reality: the modern world. To cope, they live in their baddest thoughts: the lush, strange landscape of female make-believe.

China thought it would be a quick war, an easy war. But now, years later, as the insurgency on the streets of Los Angeles escalates but the propaganda never changes, a Chinese officer can’t keep silent any longer. Torn between loyalty to his country and loyalty to his troops, he writes a brutally honest—and possibly suicidal—letter home to unmask the truth. Brooks combines his signature meticulous research with unforgettable characters in this landmark work of speculative fiction.