Short Story

The dazzling new book from the winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize: one of the summer's most eagerly anticipated works of fiction. In "Between the Assassinations", Aravind Adiga brings to life a chorus of distinctive Indian voices, all inhabitants in the fictional town of Kittur...His new book sizzles with the same humor, anger, and humanity that characterized "The White Tiger". On India's...

Set in her native southwest Ontario, they include "Royal Beatings", in which a young girl, her father and her stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; "Friend of My Youth", in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and "The Love of a Good Woman", in which, when an old crime...

The short story has been the forte of distinguished New Zealand writers from Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson through to fresh young talents such as Eleanor Catton and Craig Cliff. There could be no better guide to a sampler of their best work than Owen Marshall, who has been called New Zealand's best living writer of short stories. Marshall's indispensible collection features fifty...

The fantastic new collection of stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Shipping News' and 'Brokeback Mountain'. 'Fine Just The Way It Is' marks Annie Proulx's return to the Wyoming of 'Brokeback Mountain' and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. The stories are cast over centuries, and capture the voices and lives of the settlers this sagebrushed and weatherworn...

Taut, brooding and densely atmospheric, these stories show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness.

Eight brilliant stories by a master of the form, author of the classic 'Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam' and 'The Kiss' A contented woman finds herself considering a bizarre sexual invitation that just days before filled her with scorn. A mediocre man is pulled into a strange dance with his stalker. A father gives his daughter a Christmas present with a disturbing history. An ugly sports parent...

A wicked collection of fiction provocateur with a mix of authors and stories across a range of genres - the perfect Christmas book for those who can't wait for the next title from their favourite author.

A collection of macabre short stories. Ian McEwan received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for a previous collection of short stories entitled "First Love, Last Rites".

Pulitzer-winning, scintillating studies in yearning and exile from a Bengali Bostonian woman of immense promise. A couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land and, while he awaits the arrival of his arranged-marriage wife from Bengal, he...

Janet Frame is regarded as one of New Zealand's foremost writers. She wrote prize-winning novels and a three-volume autobiography, numerous short stories and outstanding poetry. An ideal entree to her writing is through her first published book - The Lagoon and Other Stories - and the only collection of her poetry published during her lifetime: The Pocket Mirror. The Lagoon and Other Stories won...

Virginia Woolf claimed that Mansfield's writing was 'The only writing I have ever been jealous of.' Widely considered one of the best short-story writers of her period, Katherine Mansfield is celebrated for her sensitive and subtle treatment of human behaviour. Satirical, psychologically deep, unabashed and candid about sex, pregnancy and social issues, her stories adopted a fresh style and new...

Being a celebrity impersonator, says the Aussie Elton John, is like living your life as a moon. 'We give up identity and become just a reflection of another personality, like the moon having no fire of its own and be just a pale reflection of the sun when it's not there.' This new collection of stories from master short fiction writer Owen Marshall is rich in people exploring their identities and...

Differing interpretations can define and bind us, as New Zealanders have discovered with the Treaty of Waitangi. The starting-off point for this collection of short stories is a piece of text or image that is read differently by different people: be it because of ambiguity, or misapprehension, a problem of translation, or opposing perspectives or cultures. This book is not meant to explore the...

Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policeman's Union, offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful and powerful as his novels. A shy manifesto; an impractical handbook; the true story of a fabulist; an entire life in parts and pieces: Manhood for Amateurs is the first...

In 2009, the Glyndebourne Festival of Opera reaches its 75th year. In commemoration of this event, Jeanette Winterson has brought together some of the best loved and most critically acclaimed authors writing today to pen stories inspired by opera. A foreword from Ralph Fiennes and an introduction by Jeanette Winterson are followed by: Alexander McCall Smith on Cosi Fan Tutte; Ali Smith on...

A beautiful, moving collection of short stories, in many of which Updike revisits the haunts of his childhood from the vantage point of old age. In 'Fiftieth' old friends reconnect at a class reunion, and one of them is left wondering, "What does it mean: the enormity of having been children and now being old, living next to death?" In the story 'The Full Glass', the protagonist...

Award-winning filmmaker and performing artist Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection. In these stories, July gives the most seemingly insignificant moments a sly potency.

Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of six novels, including Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. In Nocturnes, a sublime story cycle, he explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded...

A Frenchman once pointed out to Louis de Bernieres that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe, adding that it was 'an immense lunatic asylum'. Casting his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties and seventies, but plagued by a novelist's inability to stick to the truth, Louis de Bernieres brings us in "Notwithstanding" stories of a vanished England...

"You could look back after a long time and ask, who wanted what from whom?" A man confronts death after an operation, a devout Christian encounters a man who hurt her long ago, a secretary uncovers her boss's secret shame. And in a house in Auckland an elderly woman is writing the last book of her life, one which, she says, contains all of her crimes. How are the characters connected and who is...

Selected and presented by one of Wilde's biggest fans, the book includes a foreword from Stephen Fry, as well as introductions to the stories themselves, explaining why they mean so much to him and why they should mean a lot to you too. llustrated by Nicole Stewart, stunning artwork accompanies each story to give shape to the reader's imagination. Whether you know it or not, the stories in this...

Our Story Begins combines twenty-one of Tobias Wolff's classic stories with ten potent new works, spanning three decades and confirming Wolff's status as a master of the genre. These stories of war, morality, frustration, loneliness and love trace a path through the everyday and the extraordinary, shedding a poignant yet hopeful light on American life and the intricate truths of human nature.

Pounamu Pounamu is classic Ihimaera. First published om 1972, it was immediately endorsed by Maori and Pakeha alike for its original stories that showed how important Maori identity is for all New Zealanders. As Katherine Mansfield did in her first collection In a German Pension (1911), and Janet Frame in The Lagoon (1951), Witi Ihimaera explores in Pounamu Pounamu what it is like to be a New...

Prizes: Selected Short Stories is the most comprehensive selection of Janet Frame's stories ever published, taken from the four different collections released during her lifetime and featuring many of her best stories. Written over four decades, they come from her classic prize-winning collection The Lagoon and Other Stories first published in 1952, right up to the volume You are Now Entering the...

In these pages you can enjoy Christmas dinner with Begbie, and see how warmly Franco greets his sister's boyfriend and the news of their engagement. You will discover, in 'The Rosewell Incident', how aliens addicted to Embassy Regal have Midlothian under surveillance, and plan to install the local casuals as the new governors of Planet Earth. You will not be surprised to read that a televised...

From a young girl's improper visit to an adult neighbour to a family's relief at the lifting of sex abuse charges, from a fasting Christmas Dinner guest to a messy stumble with an urn of ashes, these stories effortlessly mix the menacing and the comic, and handle real-life situations with warmth and subtlety. Relief introduces an astonishingly mature and confident new voice in New Zealand fiction.

The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this dazzling new collection. At its centre are three stories connected into one marvellously rich narrative about Juliet - who escapes from teaching at a girls' school and throws herself into a wild and passionate love match. Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance...

Among the numerous pieces of writing that Katherine Mansfield produced during her short life, there were fifteen stories that were not completed on her death but which she had intended for inclusion in her collection named after one of them, The Dove's Nest. This fourth volume of her stories, reproduced here, was published posthumously in 1923. J.B. Priestley wrote of them: 'the merest beginnings...

Charlotte Grimshaw's collection of interlinked stories, Opportunity, was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Prize, and won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the 2008 Montana Book Award. She has described Opportunity as a single, unified composition, less a series of stories than a novel with a large cast of characters. In Singularity, her powerful new collection, she has...

This is a fine new collection of short stories by the much-loved Patricia Grace, probably never more popular since the great commercial success of the novel Tu. The feast of stories is varied: urban, rural, New Zealand, overseas, tribal, contemporary. An elderly woman, whose husband has died, gathers firewood on the beach while the appliances in her house fall to bits one by one. Willie falls in...

Charting loss, love, and the difficult art of growing up, these stories unfurl with wicked humour and insight. Two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab; a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to 'Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers' (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Insomniacs; Cabin...

Breasts unite women in a way few other things can, and these entertaining stories from some of the world's most popular female authors celebrate bosoms great and small. Explore the dark, sexy underbelly of Paris with Kate Holden, enjoy a fractured fairytale from Meg Rossoff, let Jools Oliver share her warm tales of breastfeeding her babies with a very famous Naked Chef, and laugh at Kathy Lette's...

What if you were told that you could make a fortune just by pushing a button on a box? But pressing this button will simultaneously cause the death of another human being somewhere in the world . . . someone you don't know. Would you still push the button? "Button, Button," Richard Matheson's chilling tale of greed and temptation, is now the basis of "The Box," the new film from the director of...

A complete collection of "Robot" stories from Isaac Asimov

Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these fifteen stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life. Many are set in the author's native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience - from the blackly comic "The Daughters of the Late...

In this collection, Alice Munro takes mainly the lives of women, and brings their hidden desires bubbling to the surface. The love of a good woman is not as pure and virtuous as it seems - as in her title story, it can be needy and murderous.

A boy watches his mother hooked and reeled ashore by a fisherman. A man builds a swing in the backyard to sit between his wife and her lover. A couple gives up their seat on a bus for lovers soon to be parted. A boy sees his mother come to life gliding on roller skates. Lloyd Jones's The Man in the Shed is a haunting collection of stories about family and longing. Jones's extraordinary tales take...

The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories, edited by acclaimed novelist Paula Morris, provides a fascinating snapshot of New Zealand fiction in the early twenty-first century. The 31-story collection includes significant work from our foremost fiction writers - including C. K. Stead, Patricia Grace, Fiona Kidman, Witi Ihimaera, Damien Wilkins, Owen Marshall, Vincent O'Sullivan,...

Here are turnings of all kinds, changes of hearts, nasty surprises, slow awakenings. These elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people.

Through the lens of Kelly Link's vivid imagination, nothing is what it seems, and everything in this collection of short stories deserves a second look. From the multiple award-winning 'The Faery Handbag', in which a teenager's grandmother carries an entire village (or is it a man-eating dog?) in her handbag, to the 'The Wrong Grave,' which tells the story of a 16-year-old boy who digs up the...

Beginning in America, and spilling back over memories and generations to India, Unaccustomed Earth explores the heart of family life and the immigrant experience. Eight luminous stories - longer and richer than any Jhumpa Lahiri has yet written - take us from America to Europe, India and Thailand as they follow new lives forged in the wake of loss.