Short Stories Century

Guy de Maupassant is widely regarded as the father of the modern short story. As his 13 volumes of short stories attest, he was a prolific writer of this form. He had a simple, efficient style of writing and, like Anton Chekhov, found inspiration for his stories in the daily lives of humans, which often reveal our darker nature. His years of service in the Franco-Prussian War provided him with rich material for his work.

There's no end to the things that terrify Homer Feltz: tinfoil, fast food, his shopaholic Aunt Mandy. Only his father, manager of a disastrously bad major-league team, seems to understand him, and offers him any refuge from a world quickly becoming too big, too grown-up, and too crowded with everyday horrors for Homer to manage.

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford wait anxiously for a letter from Russia that may contain information of international importance hidden beneath the stamp. The letter is anticipated by more than just the Beresfords, and they must fight to keep the information from getting into the wrong hands.

With a wide range of themes and styles, ranging from traditional ghost stories to contes cruels, black humor, tales of dark fantasy and surreal nightmare, and perhaps the best story about a ventriloquist and his dummy ever written, there are stories here to suit the tastes of any connoisseur of horror and weird fiction.

Come visit Dr. Alinger in his Museum of Silence, where every breath could be your last.

Showcasing the work of literary giants like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and authors whom listeners may be surprised to learn were "in the life", Black Like Us is the most comprehensive collection of fiction by African American lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers ever published.

As war blazes across Europe, three couples find a love that is powerful enough to overcome all the odds. As war looms, genteel Flora yearns to be more than just an observer. She finds a revolutionary kindred spirit in soldier Geraint - but will their fragile love be crushed before it can start to bloom?

Lost in grief, she can’t find her way back. Despite the tender care Alice Patterson receives from her husband, Paul, and her best friend JayNell, Alice’s grief from an early pregnancy loss consumes her. In this 20th-century love story, Alice’s heartache affects everything and everyone she touches. But if she doesn’t come to terms with her grieving, Alice risks losing her husband, her best friend, and her sanity. Paul tries to understand Alice’s depth of grief while dealing with his own. He seeks advice from JayNell about how to reach Alice and pull her back to him. But their ...

Synopsis - An isolated community in colonial-era America deals with fleeing refugees and the plague of fear that comes with them. After Dinner Conversation is a growing series of short stories across genres to draw out deeper discussions with friends and family. Each story is an accessible example of an abstract ethical or philosophical idea and is accompanied by suggested discussion questions. Podcast discussions of this short story, and others, is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Youtube. ★★★ If you enjoy this story, subscribe via our website to "After Dinner Conversation...

Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry.

Imogene is young and beautiful, kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead, the legendary ghost of the Rosebud Theater. Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with a head full of big ideas and a gift for getting his ass kicked. It's hard to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town. Francis is unhappy, picked on; he doesn't have a life, a hope, a chance. Francis was human once, but that's behind him now.

After he saved her life, a southern white woman falls in love with the black union soldier that saved her. This WWBM historical erotic romance is over 6,000 words and is for mature readers only.

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society. In this volume we offer up a small selection of talents from the literary landscape of the 18th Century and its male authors whose time has now come again.

Millions of readers around the world have relished Jeffrey Archer's short stories. Taking inspiration from his favourite short story writers - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maupassant, H. H. Munro, W. Somerset Maugham, and O. Henry - Jeffrey Archer has written five best-selling collections over the years, and Macmillan are proud to announce the publication of a sixth volume of stories in May 2010.

Nellie’s beliefs about a woman’s place in society are challenged when she must find employment to save her family’s home, and unexpectedly encounters opposition by local businessmen. She is thrilled when Jacob McKenzie agrees to hire her for his furniture shop, but is wary of the stirrings he raises within her heart, feelings she thought long buried. Jacob McKenzie, a woodworker, is determined to make his furniture shop a success. With a painful past and no family nearby, he delves into his work as the one meaningful part of his life. When he meets and hires Nellie for his shop, he ...

Avram Davidson was widely regarded as one of the most outstanding authors of short fantasy fiction in our time. This collection comprises his distinctive historical fantasies - tales of strange Mitteleurpoas, of magic in Victorian England, and on the American frontier. Here are "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire", "Traveller from an Antique Land", and "What Strange Stars and Skies"; here are dragons, cameras, and "The Singular Incident of the Dog on the Beach".

Welcome to six short stories from award-winning storyteller Robert T. Jeschonek. This volume includes six full-length tales for one low price.

A young girl in the 1930s traveling across from L.A. to New York on the 20th Century Limited train to Grand Central Station is abandoned by her drunken father, makes friends with a kindly porter, and then the train has a fateful accident.

By Award-Winning Author Desperate widow Olivia accepts a position as a mail-order bride, yet refuses to accept any male’s proposal. Fighting demons of his own, Sheriff Stark sees a second chance for love. This widower vows to win the widow or die trying…and almost does. Olivia Rose Baker abandons her dying hometown in Massachusetts to become a mail-order bride in male-dominated Seattle, Washington. Her abusive husband died in the Civil War and left Olivia wary of marriage, so she hopes to take a teaching position rather than become a bride. But the man who purchased her ticket to ...

Rose McIlroy poses as a young man for safety in the rough mining fields. Jackson Westin fishes her out of a creek and immediately knows his newspaper readers will love a story of a young man helping his injured father to keep their claim going. But how long can this charade last, especially when Jackson discovers Rose's true identity?