Fiction Literature Short Stories

Prepare to meet the wicked progeny of the master of modern horror. In Lovecraft's Monsters, H. P. Lovecraft's most famous creations--Cthulhu, Shoggoths, Deep Ones, Elder Things, Yog-Sothoth, and more--appear in all their terrifying glory. Each story is a gripping new take on a classic Lovecraftian creature. Contributors include such literary luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Karl Edward Wagner, Elizabeth Bear, and Nick Mamatas.

"One day when Pooh Bear had nothing else to do, he thought he would do something, so he went round to Piglet's house to see what Piglet was doing." Thus begins The House At Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne's wonderful companion volume to Winnie-the-Pooh. You will rediscover Pooh, Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, and all their friends, and be introduced to the irrepressible and very bouncy Tigger.

In Zombies, the absurdity of both life and death are on full display as the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze - electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. Funny, caustic, bizarre, poignant - this story represents everything listeners have come to love and expect from Chuck Palahniuk.

The Cambodian Curse: When an ancient and supposedly cursed Cambodian sculpture disappears from an impenetrable museum, and the carving's owner is killed by an invisible assailant while a witness is a few feet away, historian Jaya Jones and her old nemesis Henry North team up to solve the baffling crime. Additional stories include: "The Hindi Houdini", "The Haunted Room", "The Library Ghost of Tanglewood Inn", "The Curse of Cloud Castle", "Tempest in a Teapot", "A Dark and Stormy Light", "The Shadow of the River", plus the bonus novella Fool's Gold.

Nicole has wanted to own a haunted car her entire teenaged life, and when she finally finds one - a junker of a Chrysler Neon with its own tragic backstory - her best friend, Johnny, has some serious doubts. Would a demon even want to possess a Chrysler Neon? But when the two of them take it for a test drive, Johnny’s doubts begin to fade: The steering wheel burns hot, the car traps Johnny in the back seat, and is Nicole even driving? Or is the car driving itself? They soon find themselves forced to face the potential evil controlling the car, and possibly even themselves.

This classic tale and superb short story by Mark Twain is a funny yet blistering indictment of political hypocrisy. A mysterious stranger is treated badly by the town of Hadleyburg—the town that proclaims itself "the most honest and upright town in the region". Through an ingenious sting operation, the stranger sets out to expose Hadleyburg's leading citizens and reveal their greedy, deceitful natures. Twain's burning wit and insight into political posturing and civic cowardice seem more pertinent than ever.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

Join the Librarian as he does his best to make the post-apocalyptic world a better place by protecting the weak, fighting injustice, squaring off against a group of former renaissance fair workers who have established a kingdom in the Rocky Mountains, and so on. Can one man make a difference in the face of such murderous cannibals and super smart bears? Probably not.

Expect fast-paced action, aliens, and more aliens, planet hopping, a mysterious quest, and a bossy spaceship who likes to meddle. Includes all four books in the Space Gypsy Chronicles.

Hunter S. Thompson's notorious Screwjack is as salacious, unsettling, and brutally lyrical as it has been rumored to be since the private printing in 1991 of 300 fine collectors' copies and 26 leather-bound presentation copies. Only the first of the three pieces included here - "Mescalito", published in Thompson's 1990 collection Songs of the Doomed - has been available to the public, making the audio edition of Screwjack a major publishing event.

American literary icon Kurt Vonnegut enjoys immense popularity - and an equally immense amount of critical praise - for such works as his absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five. A must-have for readers everywhere, Look at the Birdie adds further insight into the author's body of work with a riveting collection of his previously unpublished short fiction.

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories - heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved, and, on the whole, odd. He overturns the stereotypes that corral black male characters and paints a subtle, powerful portrait of each of these unique individuals.

Karen Tei Yamashita has been honored with the American Book Award and Janet Heidinger Kafka Award. A stunning portrait of Asian Americans in 1960s and ’70s San Francisco, I Hotel is a remarkable collection of 10 related novellas. Touching on such topics as Japanese internment camps and the Marcos dictatorship, the book presents readers with characters of rich design.

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the listener does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

Doing Time: For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than "serving a sentence"; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one's humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers' organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide.

Now, for the first time, Herron’s short fiction has been collected into one volume. In Dolphin Junction, devoted fans and future converts alike will find much to amuse, delight, and terrify them. Five stand-alone nerve-racking and thrilling crime fiction stories are complemented by four mystery stories featuring the Oxford wife-and-husband detective team of shrewd Zoë Boehm and hapless Joe Silvermann. The collection also includes a peek into the past of Jackson Lamb, irascible top agent at Slough House.

29 Brand-New Sci-Fi Horror Stories. The future is now, and it's not what we were promised. The optimistic science fiction of old was wrong. Progress is not linear, technology creates as many problems as it solves, and the concept of a better tomorrow has become an abstraction that is in no way guaranteed. When looking at the future now, we no longer ask what is possible, we wonder how we'll cope. Contained within this anthology are 29 never-before-published works by supremely talented authors.

In Erotic Sex Short Stories you will find stories designed to make you hot.

Keeping up-to-date with the most buzzworthy and cutting-edge science fiction requires sifting through countless magazines, e-zines, websites, blogs, original anthologies, single-author collections, and more - a task accomplishable by only the most determined and voracious readers. For everyone else, Night Shade Books is proud to introduce the latest volume of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, collecting the finest that the genre has to offer, from the biggest names in the field to the most exciting new writers.