National Network for Equitable Library Service

"Larry Brown writes like a force of nature." -Pat Conroy. Larry Brown caught the rapt attention of readers and critics with the 1988 publication of Facing the Music, his prize-winning first collection of stories. The following year, his first novel, Dirty Work, won national acclaim as a work of uncompromising power and honesty. Big Bad Love, his third book, collects ten new stories. Dealing with sex, with drink, with fear, with all kinds of bad luck and obsession, these stories are unflinching and not for the fainthearted.

Welcome to the Dark. We are all familiar with tropes of the horror genre: slasher and victims, demon and the possessed. Bloody screams, haunted visions, and the peddler of wares we aren't sure we can trust. In this young adult horror anthology, fans of Jordan Peele, Lovecraft Country, and Horror Noire will get a little bit of everything they love—and a lot of what they fear—through a twisted blend of horror lenses, from the thoughtful to the terrifying.

This collection of stories, arguably Sylvia Townsend Warner's most luminous, was first published in 1966 and includes "A Love Match," hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a supreme example of her technique." The story follows Celia and Justin Tizard, sister and war-scarred brother, whose uncommon closeness becomes the talk of a small English village. Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most talented and well-respected British authors of the twentieth century. Today she is shamefully under-read.

With his disarmingly simple style and complex imagination, Ray Bradbury has seized the minds of American readers for decades. This collection showcases thirty-two of Bradbury's most famous tales in which he lays bare the depths of the human soul. The thrilling title story, *A Sound of Thunder*, tells of a hunter sent on safari—sixty million years in the past. But all it takes is one wrong step in the prehistoric jungle to stamp out the life of a delicate and harmless butterfly—and possibly something else much closer to home...

This new edition of Brian Aldiss's classic anthology brings together a diverse selection of science fiction spanning over sixty years, from Isaac Asimov's 'Nightfall', first published in 1941, to the 2006 story 'Friends in Need' by Eliza Blair. Including authors such as Clifford Simak, Harry Harrison, Bruce Sterling, A. E. Van Vogt and Brian Aldiss himself, these stories portray struggles against machines, epic journeys, genetic experiments, time travellers and alien races.

A masterful collection of short fiction from one of America's greats. The centerpiece of the collection, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," tells the story of a family road trip that takes a dark turn when they cross paths with an escaped murderer. Including other great stories like "A Stroke of Good Fortune" and "A Circle in the Fire," O'Connor's gift for mesmerizing prose makes this a must-read. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. Brian Aldiss, who died in 2017, was best known for his science fiction - and in particular for a short story optioned by Stanley Kubrick, which would, under the direction of Steven Spielberg, become the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Aldiss’s first book was published by Faber in 1955. This brief, late trilogy contains much of his lively humour, one improbable invention, and a pervasive sense of loneliness and longing.

In an age of minimalists, Eileen Pollack is a writer of rare generosity. The women and men in The Rabbi in the Attic are complex, vivid people to whom something happens. Their stories take place in small towns in the Catskills, a laboratory of mutant mice in nowhere Tennessee, the backwoods of New Hampshire, the "City of Five Smells" in America's heartland—worlds rendered with such love and intensity that the simplest objects seem magical. Many of the narrators look back on their pasts. But don't expect to be lulled by nostalgia. Expect to laugh. To be jolted.

A collection of short stories from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of classic American southern literature. Combining stories set in the rural south, Eudora Welty’s own special province, and stories with a European locale, which give a wider range to her fiction, The Bride of Innisfallen demonstrates the remarkable talent of one of the finest short story writers of our time.

First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan's finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the period's fascination with the strange and the grotesque. They were also the inspiration for Mizoguchi Kenji's brilliant 1953 film Ugetsu. The title Ugetsu monogatari (literally "rain-moon tales") alludes to the belief that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with a lingering moon.