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Exhalation
by Ted Chiang
In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom," the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will. Including stories being published for the first time as well as some of his rare and classic uncollected work, Exhalation is Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic—revelatory.
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Table for Two: Fictions
by Amor Towles
This collection by Amor Towles is a treat for readers, gathering six short stories set in turn-of-the-millennium New York—covering the male ego, brief encounters, and marital compromise—alongside the novella "Eve in Hollywood." The novella details the L.A. adventures of Evelyn Ross (from Rules of Civility) after she extends her 1938 train ticket instead of returning home. Throughout the book, key moments often hinge on conversations between two characters.
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Dear Life: Stories
by Alice Munro
Alice Munro's brilliant new collection showcases her peerless ability to capture the essence of a life in timeless stories. These tales, mostly set in small Canadian towns around Lake Huron, explore departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and the moment a life is forever altered by chance. The book includes stories about a poet's unplanned journey, a soldier who leaves his fiancée for another woman, and a young woman dealing with a blackmailer. The collection concludes with four "autobiographical in feeling" pieces set during Munro's childhood.
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The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried is a classic work of American literature and a groundbreaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. It depicts the men of Alpha Company, including the character Tim O'Brien, who survived the Vietnam War to become a writer. Taught widely, the book challenges readers' perceptions of fact versus fiction, courage versus fear, and continues to be required reading.
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Night Shift
by Stephen King
A collection of tales to invade and paralyse the mind as the safe light of day is infiltrated by the shadows of the night. As you listen, the clutching fingers of terror brush lightly across the nape of the neck, reach round from behind to clutch and lock themselves, white-knuckled, around the throat. This is the horror of ordinary people and everyday objects that become strangely altered; a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems, where the familiar and the friendly lure and deceive. A world where madness and blind panic become the only reality.
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The Martian Chronicles Deluxe Collector's Edition
by Ray Bradbury
The Martian Chronicles tells the story of humanity’s repeated attempts to colonize the red planet. The first men were few. Most succumbed to a disease they called the Great Loneliness when they saw their home planet dwindle to the size of a fist. They felt they had never been born. Those few that survived found no welcome on Mars. The shape-changing Martians thought they were native lunatics and duly locked them up. But more rockets arrived from Earth, and more, piercing the hallucinations projected by the Martians. People brought their old prejudices with them – and their desires and fantasies, tainted dreams. These were soon inhabited by the strange native beings, with their caged flowers and birds of flame.
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Cathedral: Stories
by Raymond Carver
'Cathedral' is a short story by American author Raymond Carver. It was first published within the eponymous short story collection 'Cathedral' (1983), which was enthusiastically received by critics. The work is widely held as one of the author's finest stories, displaying his mastery in the craftmanship of minimalist narratives, while also endowing it with a finely orchestrated crescendo, so often lacking in simple storylines. The narrator of the story is a husband who is visited by a blind man, friend of his wife, and how he resents the rupture of their domestic routine. The topic of jealousy between the blind man and his wife makes itself salient, as does the alienation over his disability. As the story transitions to its finale, the image of a cathedral takes the stage, facilitating a nexus between both characters, hitherto unexplored.
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Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
by Book Author
Timed for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), activist Alice Wong brings together an urgent and galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people. The anthology, featuring pieces from authors like Harriet McBryde Johnson, Keah Brown, and Haben Girma, highlights the rich complexity, passions, and everyday lives of the one in five people in the U.S. living with a disability. It celebrates disability culture and invites readers to question their own understandings.
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If I Had Two Wings: Stories
by Randall Kenan
In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans. A rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit, If I Had Two Wings is a glory.
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Likes
by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
Likes, the highly anticipated collection by National Book Award finalist Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (author of Madeleine Is Sleeping and Ms. Hempel Chronicles), weaves together the mythic and the modern across nine stories. Ranging from real to unreal, and strange to familiar, the collection explores the full range of contemporary life's contradictions. Through tales of friendship, parenthood, celebrity, race, and class, the stories touch on Waldorf school fairs, aging indie-film stars, the struggles of work, and a twelve-year-old's Instagram posts, ultimately forming an engrossing blend of the otherworldly and the everyday.
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Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.
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Bloodchild and Other Stories
by Octavia E. Butler
Appearing in print for the first time, "Amnesty" is a story of a woman named Noah who works to negotiate the tense and co-dependent relationship between humans and a species of invaders. Also new to this collection is "The Book of Martha" which asks: What would you do if God granted you the ability—and responsibility—to save humanity from itself?
Like all of Octavia Butler’s best writing, these works of the imagination are parables of the contemporary world. She proves constant in her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature’s strongest voices.
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The Lottery and Other Stories: 75th Anniversary Edition
by Shirley Jackson
The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery:" with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
This now classic book revealed Flannery O'Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South. Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in the title story, confronting the murderous Misfit; a neglected four-year-old boy looking for the Kingdom of Christ in the fast-flowing waters of the river; General Sash, about to meet the final enemy.
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Wild Nights!: Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway
by Joyce Carol Oates
In her most original work of prose fiction, Wild Nights!, Joyce Carol Oates audaciously and poignantly reinvents the climactic life events of five American literary icons: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain"), Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. Using subtly nuanced language suggestive of each writer, Oates explores the mysterious and "unknowable self that is 'genius'" by depicting each figure in a belated encounter—such as Poe's encounter with bizarre life-forms or Dickinson's resurrection in the twenty-first century.
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