Asian Short Stories

From the bustling streets of America to the quiet mountain towns in rural China, this captivating collection of short stories spans continents and cultures, weaving a tapestry of universal human experiences. Each tale offers a unique glimpse into lives shaped by love, betrayal, and the search for identity. These stories, by turns humorous and poignant, explore the intricate threads that connect us all—the joy of friendship, the pain of betrayal, the challenges of coming of age, and the bittersweet realities of leaving one's homeland. With its rich diversity of settings and emotions, this ...

Tagalog, also known as Filipino, isn’t an easy language to learn. Mostly due to the absolute lack of reading material out there, you can find it quite tough to learn this language spoken by around 24 million people in the Philippines and around the world. But we’re about to change that with Tagalog Short Stories for Beginners! By providing you with 20 easy-to-understand, compelling, and fun stories that will give you the tools that you require to learn the language, get ready to expand your vocabulary and improve your grasp of the wonderful Filipino tongue.

Get ready for a spine-tingling adventure with "AMBW Halloween Nights," a delightful collection of short stories that celebrate the enchanting love between Asian men and Black women during the most bewitching season of the year! Each tale is packed with chills, thrills, and a dash of romance that will have you on the edge of your seat. Join our diverse cast of characters as they navigate haunted houses, mysterious creatures, and magical encounters that defy the ordinary. Whether it’s a spooky date night that turns into a romantic escapade or an unexpected twist that brings them closer, ...

THIS IS A SHORT STORY It's 2003 and Bill Jedburgh, formerly of the Royal Hong Kong Police, is on a scuba diving holiday in Phuket, Thailand with his American buddy Ed Cleveland. After enjoying the nightlife for a few days they head out on a live-aboard to the Mergui Archipelago. But this dive trip is not going to end well.

THIS IS A SHORT STORY It's 2004 and Bill Jedburgh, formerly with the Royal Hong Kong Police but now a gun for hire, is visiting the island of Bohol to assassinate a prominent politician who is coming to visit. But then he is offered a Trifecta, three jobs all rolled into one. Will he be able to pull it off or will the Reliable Man's reputation be tarnished?

THIS IS A SHORT STORY It's 2009 and Bill Jedburgh, formerly of the Royal Hong Kong Police but now a gun for hire, is asked to find a young Danish man who has gone missing in China. When the Reliable Man meets one of his old contacts across the border it appears this might be more than a missing person investigation. In the end somebody will have to pay.

To begin with Roderick Pang was dead. Dead as a door-nail. Bill Jedburgh meets three Ghosts and has to decide what the future might hold for him. His sniper rifles range from the Lee Enfield Enforcer with the Parker-Hale sight, across the Heckler & Koch PSG1 with the Brugget & Thomet optics and finally he gets to use the Barrett M82 with a Leupold sight. You might very well say: Bah, humbug!

THIS IS A SHORT STORY It's 1999 and Bill Jedburgh, formerly with the Royal Hong Kong Police but now a gun for hire, has flown up to Shanghai to sort out a tricky problem involving computers. At first it's a bit confusing but eventually Jedburgh gets his man. There are also four women involved but that's the least you expect when it comes to the Reliable Man.

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance - familial, cultural, emotional, artistic - really means. In a California of the '60s and '70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants.

THIS IS A SHORT STORY It's 1999 and Bill Jedburgh, formerly of the Royal Hong Kong Police but now a gun for hire, visits Kuala Lumpur to untangle a complication in his love life. A chance encounter in the Hard Rock Cafe leads to an unexpected assignment and a slew of dead bodies.

THIS IS A SHORT STORY It’s 1998 and Bill Jedburgh, formerly of the Royal Hong Kong Police and now a gun for hire is on his way to Hua Hin with his new toy: an Accuracy International Arctic Warfare sniper rifle. All he wants to do is put the weapon through its paces and have a relaxing weekend with his girlfriend, but somehow he ends up in a pistol duel. Without his trusty Glock he has to quickly get familiar with the Ruger Mark II.

Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

In the title story of Souvankham Thammavongsa's debut collection, a young girl brings a book home from school and asks her father to help her pronounce a tricky word, a simple exchange with unforgettable consequences. Thammavongsa is a master at homing in on moments like this—moments of exposure, dislocation, and messy feeling that push us right up against the limits of language.

For Jack Cho, a fortysomething gay man, being able to marry someone he loves is so unfamiliar it’s terrifying. Then a wedding invitation from a college friend brings about a collision with those fears--and his own secret history. Jack and his new boyfriend, Caleb, are attending the wedding of Jack’s estranged straight friend Scott. No sooner do the guests start to mingle than questions arise

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, was an Irish writer known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. His book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, comprises two parts, the first being the "Kwaidan Proper" and the second, "Insect-Studies", which consists of an essay each on ants, butterflies and mosquitos. According to the author, most of the folk tales and ghost stories in the first part were translated from old Japanese texts. The themes encompass resurrection, sacrifice, magic, and the realm of dreams.

THIS IS A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED INDIVIDUALLY. Filling in some of the gaps between the full-length novels, this collection of short stories starts in 1987 when Bill Jedburgh is still in the Royal Hong Kong Police and first meets some of the key characters that appear later in the books. The final story is set in 2009 when Jedburgh gets help from an unexpected ally freeing a Danish diplomat who has been arrested in Shenzhen. Along the way we find The Reliable Man tasked to kill the Mayor of Davao (unsuccessfully, since he’s now the President of the Philippines) ...

★A spine-chilling techno-thriller novella. For those who like their minds bent.★ Five went up the mountains. None returned. And it wasn’t the cold or the climb that killed them. At fifteen thousand feet, an army rescue operation finds buried underneath snow dunes five trekkers, dead in their campsite. One of the dead is Indian movie star Kirti Pandit. Another is her boyfriend, and the rest are her entourage. No one can say how they died. It could’ve been due to intense cold, perhaps the sudden snowstorm, or merely altitude sickness. Only, their symptoms were unusual. The snowfall ...

An incident at a TSA security check point sows chaos and rumors, creating a chain of events that impacts twelve young Asian Americans in a crowded and restless airport. As their disrupted journeys crisscross and collide, they encounter fellow travelers—some helpful, some hostile—as they discover the challenges of friendship, the power of courage, the importance of the right word at the right time, and the unexpected significance of a blue Stratocaster electric guitar.

These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.

THIS IS A CHRISTMAS SHORT STORY It’s 2019 and Bill Jedburgh, no longer the Reliable Man but still a gun for hire, has one last assignment to complete before he can eat his Christmas dinner. As he traverses the Swiss alps in search of his quarry, a carol forces him to remember the ghosts of past kills. But will a partridge in a pear tree elude him?