National Network for Equitable Library Service

Heading Inland is a funny, broody, saucy collection of stories about the kind of people you sometimes meet but might prefer to ignore. Barker creates a wonderfully fantastical and unimaginable world: an unborn baby escapes an unsuitable mother through a secret belly-button zip; a wayward and yet enigmatic man attempts to rescue eels from an East End pie shop; a young woman discusses her fascination in other women's breasts; a boy with his inside organs back to front desperately seeks attention; and a bitter old woman becomes bent on war with a tramp.

"Forget all your fears now. Have a fling this night." Untrustworthy, charming Fussy Joe spins stories and breaks hearts in this rollicking tale set in the "sensational city" of 1960s Lagos. Penguin Modern celebrates fifty new books that embody the pioneering spirit of Penguin Modern Classics, each offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavor.

Bernhard Schlink brings to these seven superbly crafted stories the same sleek concision and moral acuity that made The Reader an international bestseller. His characters-men with importunate appetites and unfortunate habits of deception-are uneasily suspended between the desire for love and the impulse toward flight. A young boy's fascination with an eerily erotic painting gradually leads him into the labyrinth of his family's secrets.

“A haunting, engrossing portrait of two families – one white, one Black – whose lives are woven together and then shattered” (The Washington Post) by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Oil-boom opulence, fear, hate, and lynchings are the backdrop for this riveting novel about one of the worst incidents of violence in American history. Althea Whiteside, an oil-wildcatter’s high-strung white wife, and her enigmatic Black maid, Graceful, share a complex connection during the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush.

Facing the Music, Larry Brown's first book, was originally published in 1988 to wide critical acclaim. As the St. Petersburg Times review pointed out, the central theme of these ten stories "is the ageless collision of man with woman, woman with man-with the frequent introduction of that other familiar couple, drinking and violence. Most often ugly, love is nevertheless graceful, however desperate the situation." There's some glare from the brutally bright light Larry Brown shines on his subjects.

Gene Wolfe, whose tetralogy The Book of the New Sun was the most acclaimed science fiction work of the 1980s, offered his second collection of short fiction in 1990 to universal acclaim. This is a hefty volume of over 30 unforgettable stories in a variety of genres - SF, fantasy, horror, mainstream - many of them offering variations on themes and situations found in folklore and fairy tales, and including two stories, "The Cat" and "The Map," which are set in the universe of his New Sun novels.

The essential collection of beloved ghost stories, compiled by the editor who helped define the genre—including stories from award-winning, bestselling authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Seanan McGuire, and Paul Tremblay. Everyone loves a good ghost story, especially Ellen Datlow—the most lauded editor in short works of supernatural suspense and dark fantasy. The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories is her definitive collection of ghost stories.

Recognized throughout the world for his brilliance as a novelist and playwright, Yukio Mishima is also noted as a master of the short story in his native Japan, where the form is practiced as a major art. Nine of Yukio Mishima's finest stories were selected by Mishima himself for translation in this book; they represent his extraordinary ability to depict a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. Often his characters are sophisticated modern Japanese who turn out to be not so liberated from the past as they had thought.

A hilarious collection of overlapping stories that explores the dark zone between artistic ambition and its achievement by the author of Early Work. Bookended by the misadventures of Leslie, an aspiring writer who moves from New York to Missoula, Montana, hoping to shake off lingering depression, this story collection follows young people pushed hard against—and often crashing into—their limits as not only would-be Tolstoys but also functioning, feeling human beings.

Narrated in the first person, this short story is one episode in the life of a Russian labour-camp inmate. Written by Varlam Shalamov after his own experiences at a gulag, it describes the apathy of prisoners as they steadily approach death, the assuredness of betrayal and duplicity, and the constant craving for material satisfaction to lessen the empty, scorched feeling inside. When an old acquaintance lays out an escape plan, that satisfaction is offered in the form of condensed milk: a sweet, delicious extravagance—a small element of joy in the midst of impending death.