National Network for Equitable Library Service

This collection of short stories of the Mississippi Delta by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author is “a work of art” (The New York Times Book Review). Here in Morgana, Mississippi, the young dream of other places; the old can tell you every name on every stone in the cemetery on the town’s edge; and cuckolded husbands and love-starved piano teachers share the same paths. It’s also where one neighbor has disappeared on the horizon, slipping away into local legend.

Enter a world of magic and myth, where foxes fall in love and robots build their own dragons. In The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales, New York Times bestselling author Yoon Ha Lee crafts together short and moving stories of love, adventure, magic, and nature. With poetic language and intricate world building, readers will be whisked away to a different adventure with every new story. Full of fascinating creatures and LGBT+ romances, this flash fiction collection combines the classic with the contemporary in Yoon’s captivating style.

If you know London primarily through novels like White Fang, these stories will provide a new perspective. Full of intriguing characters and snippets of pidgin, they also highlight London's concern with social issues.

Something Special was previously unpublished except in a 1950s anthology and in Japan, and rediscovered after her death. It is the only short story that Iris Murdoch ever wrote for publication. Set in Dublin, against the vividly recognisable backdrop of the writer's native city in the late fifties, Something Special is the story of Yvonne, an ordinary, bold young Irish woman who believes there's more to life than marriage to Sam, the respectable young man who's courting her.

Winner of the Shorts Award for Americana Fiction A debut collection of genre-bending short histories and novellas spanning 16th- through early 20th-century. Through a historian's lens and folkloric storytelling, the pieces in Shoot the Horses First revel in the nuances, brutality, mythology, and tiny victories of our historical past. A launderer takes us inside the linens of the richest families in early Baltimore. A child on the Orphan Train has his teeth inspected like a horse. Civil War soldiers experience PTSD.

Tales that take you behind the scenes of a powerful New York law firm, from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Partners. Ambition, jealousy, desire, hatred, deceit—they’re all there inside the Wall Street law offices of Tower, Tilney & Webb, the setting for these interwoven stories set in the 1960s from Louis Auchincloss, who practiced law while also writing acclaimed and bestselling fiction. Senior partner Clitus Tilney is not about to let a detestable, hard-drinking partner make a mockery of all he’s worked for. Harry Reilley is a clerk who pines for Tilney’s daughter.

From the brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker, the short stories in 'Love Your Enemies' present a loving depiction of the beautiful, the grotesque and the utterly bizarre in the lives of overlooked suburban Britons. Layla Carter, 16, from North London, is utterly overwhelmed by her plus-size nose.

Two hundred and twenty tales from medieval Japan-tales that welcome us into a fabulous faraway world populated by saints, scoundrels, ghosts, magical healers, and a vast assortment of deities and demons. Stories of miracles, visions of hell, jokes, fables, and legends, these tales reflect the Japanese civilization. They ably balance the lyrical and the dramatic, the ribald and the profound, offering a window into a long-vanished culture. With black-and-white illustrations throughout. Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library.

With the precision of a surgeon, Peter Stamm cuts to the heart of the fragile and revealing moments of everyday life. They are bankers, students, mothers, or retirees. They live in New York City or somewhere in Switzerland, they work in London or Riga, they cross paths in a Fado bar in Lisbon. They breathe the banal routine of daily life. It is to these ordinary people that Peter Stamm grants center stage in his latest collection of short stories. Henry, a cowherd turned stuntman, crisscrosses the country, dreaming of meeting a woman.

'The Kreutzer Sonata' is the self-lacerating confession of a man consumed by sexual jealousy and eaten up by shame and eventually driven to murder his wife. The story caused a sensation when it first appeared and Tolstoy's wife was appalled that he had drawn on their own experiences together to create a scathing indictment of marriage. 'The Devil', centring on a young man torn between his passion for a peasant girl and his respectable life with his loving wife, also illustrates the impossibility of pure love.