Showing titles in Short Stories

Sinister mushrooms growing in a dank cellar. A family's first glimpse at Martians. A wonderful white vanilla ice-cream summer suit that changes everyone who wears it. All those images and many more are inside this book, 31 of Bradbury's most arresting tales - timeless short fiction that ranges from the farthest reaches of space to the innermost stirrings of the heart.

As anarchy and civil war took grip across the globe, Britain was quarantined. The press was nationalized, and martial law, curfews, and rationing were implemented. It wasn't enough. An evacuation was planned. The inland towns and cities of the United Kingdom were to be evacuated to defensive enclaves being built around the coast and the Scottish Highlands and in the Irish Republic. For George Tull and the other residents of the Waverly-Price Retirement Home, walking to the coast is not an option.

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected audiobook of his darkest stories, read by Juliet Stevenson, Cillian Murphy, Adrian Scarborough, Tamsin Greig, Stephanie Beacham and Andrew Scott. 'There is a pleasure sure in being mad, which none but madmen know.' Our greatest fear is of losing control - of our lives, but, most of all, of ourselves. In these 10 unsettling tales of unexpected madness master storyteller Roald Dahl explores what happens when we let go our sanity.

Raised off the grid by survivalists, Mercy Kilpatrick believed in no greater safeguard than the backwoods of Oregon. Unforgiven by her father for abandoning the fold for the FBI, Mercy still holds to her past convictions. They’re in her blood. They’re her secrets—as guarded as her private survival retreat hidden away in the foothills. In a cabin near her hideaway, Mercy encounters a young girl whose grandmother is dying from multiple knife wounds.

This is an omnibus that features all three volumes of Twelve Days of Christmas Horror in one box set. Including such stories as "'Twas the Night Before Murder", "The Nativity of the Living Dead", "Secret Santa for the Sadistic", "Elf on a Shelf", and "A Christmas Carol: The Aftermath". It's time for your festivities to get frightening.

A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair.

An expedition to Mars goes terribly wrong. A seaside pier collapses. A 30-stone man is confined to his living room. One woman is abandoned on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. Another woman is saved from drowning. Two boys discover a gun in a shoebox. A group of explorers find a cave of unimaginable size deep in the Amazon jungle. A man shoots a stranger in the chest on Christmas Eve.

Robin Brennan has come home to Campion Bay. Now her parents have retired, she's set to become the new landlady of The Campion Bay Guesthouse. Bookings have been as thin as the hand towels, and it doesn't take long for Robin to realise that the place needs a serious makeover. Perhaps throwing herself into the task will help to heal her sadness at the tragic end to her dreams in London. As she gives the guesthouse a new lease of life, Robin encounters old friends and new, including old flame Tim, who'd clearly like to reboot their romance.

Showcasing the best of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories including his well-known classics - as featured in the magnificent three-part, six-hour PBS documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick - this new collection is introduced by award-winning author Tobias Wolff.

Bawdy and exotic, Tales from the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night features the wily, seductive Scheherazade, who saves her own life by telling tales of magical transformation, genies and wishes, flying carpets and fantastical journeys, terror and passion to entertain and appease the brutal King Shahryar.

An imprisoned man is certain that his supposed murder victim is very much alive... a female driver is pursued relentlessly by a menacing figure in another vehicle... a young artist gets the biggest break of her career... a restless beauty manages the perfect birthday celebration... an escaped Iraqi on Saddam Hussein's death list pays an involuntary visit to his homeland... How will they react? How would you? "Twelve Red Herrings" is the third collection of irresistible short stories from master storyteller, Jeffrey Archer.

In these eight stories, Barrett takes us back to the barren backwaters of County Mayo, via Toronto, and illuminates the lives of outcasts, misfits and malcontents with an eye for the abrupt and absurd. A quiet night in the neighbourhood pub is shattered by the arrival of a sword-wielding fugitive. A funeral party teeters on the edge of this world and the next, as ghosts won't simply lay in wake. A shooting sees an everyday call-out lead a policewoman to confront the banality of her own existence.

The following books are included: Paingod and Other Delusions, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream, and From the Land of Fear.

It’s Christmas, and Jenny Checkland is beset with problems. The vicar, who really should know better, has asked to borrow Marilyn the donkey for the nativity play, thereby unleashing chaos on the already chaos-laden Frogmorton Farm. Will Marilyn survive her bath? Will anyone survive Marilyn’s bath? Robbed of her role as the Virgin Mary, what revenge is the angel Gabriel plotting? Why is that sheep so fat? Will Charlie ever get to say his one line? Can Marilyn be prevented from eating the baby Jesus?

This is one of the defining novels of English writer Julian Barnes. An entertaining melange of stories starting with a contemporary account of the launch of Noah's Ark takes us into unexpected areas of human foibles, activities, and tendencies.

For the first time ever, hear Woody Allen’s Mere Anarchy in the author’s own distinctive and hilarious voice. Here, in his first short-story collection since his three classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects, Allen has managed to write a book that answers the most profound questions of human existence.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the highly acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Karenina, which was an Oprah Book Club pick and million-copy bestseller, bring their unmatched talents to The Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, a collection of thirty of Chekhov’s best tales from the major periods of his creative life.

In the Time of Foxes is both compellingly listenable and deeply insightful about the times in which we live, each narrative a compressed novel. With an exhilarating span of people and places, it shows the short-story collection at its most entertaining and rewarding and introduces Jo Lennan as an irresistible new storyteller.

Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture and history. We meet Black and multi-racial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief - all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively.

Although best known for creating the spirited Anne Shirley, L. M. Montgomery had a thriving writing career that included several novels and more than 500 poems and stories. This collection brings together rare pieces originally published between 1900 and 1939 that haven’t been in print since their initial periodicals.