Short Stories

Season Two, Volume Two. Three more catastrophic crimes lead the Baker Street Team to distant shores as they struggle to save Lucy’s mother and defeat a relentless foe once and for all.

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…

The monster that is Haunted Reels has returned, and now no one is safe. Featuring twenty-four brand-new, never-before-published stories by a mix of Hollywood legends and rising film-industry stars, Haunted Reels 2 continues the menace its brooding predecessor started, only this time it has a grudge. Beware the murderous vandals, maniacal crackpots, and diabolically possessed contained within this book, for once you let them loose, there’s no telling what they’ll do next.

Electrodomésticos is an elegant yet powerful depiction of the post Spanish Civil War era, where class divisions lay bare those who can afford to eat a decent meal and those who can not. Josu is an inexperienced electrician, tasked with installing an oven in the home of an upper-class Basque couple. He’s completely captivated. But the couple, though they seem to have it all, are in a prison of their own. Mesmerizing in its subtlety and sinister intimations, Electrodomésticos reveals the poverty and loneliness of this era.

In this touching and moving pair of coming-of-age stories, best-selling author Jessica Anya Blau makes it clear that once you step over certain lines, there's no going back.

>In this beautifully imaginative collection, young people attempt to negotiate the often surreal terrain of childhood and adolescence where family, friends, clergy, and teachers often pose a threat instead of providing safe harbor. At the heart of the collection is the relationship between the meek narrator, his best friend alpha-male Clip, and the near-feral Roger - but there are also agoraphobic mothers, gorgeous babysitters from New Zealand, paranoid stoned veterans, and deeply sad older sisters.

Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh - a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger. It's a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and booze-sodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub. Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars.

Lillian opens the door and a man is standing there with a gun. He forces his way into her home and tells her he plans to kill her husband when he gets home. Why? What'd he ever do to this punk? Uh-oh, here comes her husband. Now what?

Paul was reading a newspaper. Catherine was reading a novel. So begins Room on the Sea, André Aciman's scorching and elegiac love-story about a middle-aged man and woman who meet in the bullpen of jury selection and spend a sultry summer’s week trespassing ever further into each other's hearts. What begins as a flirtation quickly evolves into something deeper, something Paul and Catherine must carry on in secret - and with the understanding that anything more than a casual crush is out of the question.

Guilt. The heaviest burden. An old man has for many years borne a weight that runs deeper than survivor’s guilt. He is a survivor, of humanity’s darkest hour, but wouldn’t have lived through it if not for the actions of another. Now he has the opportunity for which he has long yearned: to meet his saviour’s daughter and tell her about her father’s supreme act of selflessness. And maybe, in the telling, one of them will find release.

Kate Chopin’s A Reflection is a reflection on the fortunes of life. It is a meditation on how some people succeed by harnessing their energy effectively while others get left behind.

What if life was a punishment? The Persistence of Reality is a short story that examines the individual's relationship with the persisting collective reality.

The devil wants to tell his side of the story of what happened when he and his fallen angels were kicked out of heaven.

On a dark desert highway, hidden from sight, there is a place that exists just beyond the shadows. A place that calls to the broken, the lost, and the tormented who wander the desolate roads of night. Temptation to leave the world behind presents itself as a beautiful seductress offering a variety of exquisite pleasures, luring you further into the dream. But elegant parties and pretty faces quickly dissolve into the stuff of nightmares as the door closes and the feast begins.

Jimmy is a young man trying to find himself while his friends and his heart pull him in two different directions. And on one fateful night at a hole-in-the-wall bar in Kentucky, Jimmy will make a choice as to where he wants to go and who he wants to be....

From the Booker Prize nominee and New York Times best-selling author of Great Circle, a piercing, irresistible first collection of short stories exquisite in their craft and audacious in their range A love triangle plays out over decades on a Montana dude ranch. A hurdler and a gymnast spend a...

Penelope was a plain, unassuming woman that nobody noticed. Her job was going nowhere. Enter Debbie, her new co-worker at the insurance company where Penelope had gone unnoticed for nearly three years. Debbie's going places in the company, and fast. Why? Because she saved her money and got breast implants. Once Penelope saw what those implants did for Debbie, she decided to have the operation herself. One way or another, she would get noticed. Be careful what you wish for, Penelope. Attention may not be all that it's cracked up to be.

It all started with a simple, yet sneakily difficult challenge from global best-selling author Harlan Coben: Pick a bird of prey, then use it as the inspiration for a brand-new story. The response from some of the best writers on the planet: Game on! The result: Eleven stories that are twisty, scary, surprising and bursting with imagination. An egg worth more than its weight in gold. A mysterious operative known only as Owl. An eagle-watcher who sees more than she should. Even a story that somehow places the Maltese Falcon in a nursing home.

Vanished tells the stories of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen. The characters range from an aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she has to teach, to a young girl who becomes the victim of a cruel prank in a swimming pool, to a television producer who regrets allowing her coworkers into her mother’s bird-filled house to film a show about animal hoarding because it will reveal too much about her family and past. Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character’s life.

In her new collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh delves into the dark heart of contemporary life and life five minutes from now and how easy it is to mix up one with the other. Her stories are post-bird flu, in the middle of medical trials, wondering if our computers are smarter than us, wondering when our jobs are going to be outsourced overseas, wondering if we are who we say we are, and not sure what we'd do to survive the coming zombie plague.