Short Stories

Austin joins Dallas and Houston in Akashic's deep dive into the Lone Star State's darkest dimensions. Featuring brand-new stories by: Gabino Iglesias, Ace Atkins, Amanda Moore, Jeff Abbott, Scott Montgomery, Richard Z. Santos, Alexandra Burt, Lee Thomas, Miriam Kuznets, Jacob Grovey, Chaitali Sen, Molly Odintz, Amy Gentry, and Andrew Hilbert.

“Short stories can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values,” writes guest editor Celeste Ng. “In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” The Best American Short Stories 2025 resonates precisely at this...

Finding helpful and engaging material you can actually understand! That's exactly what inspired us to bundle Volume 1, 2, and 3 of our French short stories. How's a student supposed to learn when language instructors love providing challenging materials that are tough expert-level literature with tons of grammar and rules? That approach for new language learners can be overwhelming, and lead you to flip back and forth between a dictionary and your book constantly!

A classic tale featuring two of the most-memorable characters in sword and sorcery, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Over a span of 50 years, the late Fritz Leiber wrote dozens of adventures, set in the fictional city of Lankhmar, featuring the seven-foot-tall barbarian and the diminuitive thief. The stories were recognized with both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

In short stories, poems, and monumental novels, James Joyce set out to discover the meaning of his nationality, simultaneously celebrating and ridiculing the history of Ireland in the brilliant style that has made him the most towering figure in the literary landscape of the early 20th century. In this audio, Dublin-born Gabriel Byrne brings to life Joyce's short stories from Dubliners, as well as selections from the brilliant A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the dream-like Chamber Music.

A classic tale featuring two of the most-memorable characters in sword and sorcery, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Over a span of 50 years, the late Fritz Leiber wrote dozens of adventures, set in the fictional city of Lankhmar, featuring the seven-foot-tall barbarian and the diminuitive thief. The stories were recognized with both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him. His parents are devastated.

Enter French Stories for Beginners Vol 2: You will find 10 easy-to-listen-to, engaging, and fun stories that will not only help you to dramatically expand your vocabulary but it gives you the tools to improve your grasp of the French language. Boost your comprehension, grow your vocabulary and spark your imagination with these 10 unconventional French short stories! All stories are written using vocabulary that you could easily use in your day-to-day conversations.

When good fights evil, the battle does not always go as planned. The Crimson Pact anthologies (Volumes 1-5) include a wide variety of standalone tales about the members of the Crimson Pact fighting demons across the multiverse. Now, three acclaimed tales from darkly disturbing author Donald J. Bingle are collected for you to taste and find out if demon-hunting is in your blood.

The new United States in central Germany launches a one-plane Doolittle Raid on Paris, France. The target: their arch-enemy, Cardinal Richelieu. Meanwhile, an ambassador from the Mughal Empire of northern India is being held captive in Austria by the Habsburg dynasty. Mike Stearns decides to send a mercenary company to rescue him, led by two 17th-century mercenary officers: an Englishman and a Irishman, who seem to spend as much time fighting each other as they do the enemy.

A Selection of Short Stories by Leo Tolstoy read by Bart Wolffe.

The Rise is a gleaming residential tower, newly constructed from steel and blackened glass, that stands on some of London’s most prestigious real estate. Looming imposingly over Hyde Park, only multi-millionaires need apply for one of its sumptuous apartments. But when the young night concierge is found murdered in the building’s lobby, the elite residents quickly find their gilded lifestyles under unwelcome police scrutiny.

More than a hundred years into the future, as the US approaches its 400th anniversary, Tomas, a young graduate student, searches for the real identity of one of the cyborgs that maintained American homes. He has been haunted for years by an audio clip of a cyborg named Felipe and is intent on writing Felipe’s biography. In the clip, Felipe can only recite that he was made in America, but Tomas must find out: Where was the Self-made Man really from?

Life has the capacity of great moments and attainment, of lives well lived, fulfilling for ourselves and for those we touch. But for others life is arduous. There is no spark to ignite the curiosity, to explore and achieve a stability and a growth to their lives. Indeed their lives, in their own eyes, become almost meaningless, their sense of themselves subsumed under a myriad of problems, whether real or imagined. Seismic events in a life might crush them; the loss of a loved one for instance. Coping is difficult, support hard to find and isolation abounds.

Improve your Italian skills and grow your vocabulary with these 10 entertaining Italian short stories! The best part of learning a new language is experiencing the culture and diving into activities that will enrich your life and vocabulary. The best way to learn a new language is by reading/listening, and in this Italian book, each captivating story will engage your mind and help you improve your Italian.

1888 was a busy year for Holmes and Watson. If Dr. Watson is to be believed, The Sign of Four, A Scandal in Bohemia, and The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor all took place in this year (I would also argue that The Valley of Fear is set in the same year — ed.). As if that weren’t enough, 1888 is remembered (albeit infamously) as the year that Jack the Ripper unleashed an autumn of terror on the citizens of London. While there are no Holmes vs. the Ripper stories in this volume, the authors of the later stories have all alluded to the atmosphere of terror permeating Holmes’s London at that time.

We are being watched. That this statement no longer shocks is itself shocking. Post-Snowden, we know that the government - everywhere - has been reading our emails, listening to our phone calls, and watching whatever we do on the Internet. The only thing concealed is the nature of our watchers. In Watchlist, some of today's most prominent and promising fiction writers from around the globe respond to, reflect on, and mine for inspiration the surveillance culture in which we live.

Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn's adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.

A shadowy master criminal has been kidnapping experts from the food industry and stealing both food and equipment. The crimes are so unrelated no one in the world had noticed the connections. No one except Albert Smith, that is. He’s got almost nothing to go on, but with every place he visits, he gets just a little closer to the truth. He’s not working alone though, his faithful sidekick, Rex Harrison the former police dog is right there with him. Can the two of them pull off the impossible and find the man Albert chose to dub ‘the Gastrothief’?

दिव्य प्रकाश दुबे की ये 16 कहानियाँ, अलग-अलग शहरों में रहने वाले आम और ख़ास दोनों तरह के लोगों को नए शेड में दिखाने की कोशिश करती हैं। वे लोग, जो अपनी आधी-अधूरी हसरतों के साथ भी पूरे हैं।