American Short Fiction

“CHILLING HISTORICAL HORROR” “Wildly imaginative” A delicious mix of history, horror, and love. Three early American gothic tales, including America’s last witch trial in 1730, the birth of the Jersey Devil in 1735, and the true origin of the Headless Horseman in 1776. In 1730 Ben Franklin published a story about a witch trial in Mount Holly, in The Pennsylvania Gazette. But did he tell the complete story, or was it a coverup of more sinister and frightening events? Emmet, an aspiring reporter, takes his first assignment for Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette and travels to New ...

About Found All I’ve ever cared about was being the type of man that God has called me to be, and having a woman in my life who will love me unconditionally. Then I Found her. She’s the prettiest woman I’ve ever laid eyes on, and the fact that she has those two darling little girls is enough to make me stake claim on all three of them. Now, she thinks her full-figured body, and the nut she used to be married to is enough to run me away. What she doesn’t understand is I love me a woman who I have to use every ounce of my strength to hold onto and I’m trained and equipped for any ...

Electronic Gags presents a chilling portrait of a dystopian United States ruled by a tyrant. After a military coup, the United States of America becomes an autocracy. To tighten his grip on power, President Brandon Ward, the megalomaniac at the helm of military dictatorship, introduces a new surveillance system that can monitor people’s offline conversations. Privacy is dead. Freddie’s life changes when the government arrests his best friend, Michael, for attending an opposition meeting. Michael’s mother accuses Freddie of betraying her son. Against all odds, Freddie must prove his ...

No nation has ever achieved the literary diversity of America. From nativist humor to immigrant triumph, Americans have recorded their visions and hopes better than anyone

Here are 10 unabridged stories by the greatest American authors. These treasured stories from the most influential authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries were selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic oral qualities.

There's a sayin' that if you come from my part of town, that you're from around the way. Around the Way Girls 4 is a look at the life of some street-smart women who think they have the world in the palm of their hands but are about to find out that things aren't always what they seem.

Queen is a young woman living by her own rules. But she has things that she would like to change. One is her circumstances and the other is her relationship with her abusive boyfriend Ness. She thinks that she will never be able to fully be rid of him, until she meets Logan. Logan introduces her to a world that she always knew she was meant for. Even though the way there isn't exactly legal. Queen learns the game quickly and starts to live up to her given name. "Careful how you play your cards when you have a queen in your hand."- Queen

The transporting stories in this year’s The Best American Mystery and Suspense are populated by those who exist on the fringe of our society and want more than what life has dealt them: A haunted veteran turned career criminal is on the run. An injured fighter turned bouncer seeks vengeance for his lost love. An assassin on his last job finds himself questioning his life choices and breaks all the rules to understand his final victim.

Queen Torah- had delivered only stillborn princes to her husband. She decides that she will choose a lady for her husband to have sons with. Their children will be legitimized by the council. Only after any children she gives him. Her plan does not go as she thought it to. Leaving animosity and hostility in it’s wake. King Jerrold- wants no parts of his wife’s plan. He has never had an affair and would not start now. But, he loves his wife and seeks to make her happy. So he goes along with it. Finding that he is beginning to have a care for the lady chosen by his wife, he is left to ...

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance - familial, cultural, emotional, artistic - really means. In a California of the '60s and '70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants.

The 1925 New York edition of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time trails readers through the years before, during, and after World War I. The collection’s first two stories, “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” introduce Hemingway’s semiautobiographical character Nick Adams as a child. In total, seven stories portray the young man’s coming of age. All fourteen, including interspersed vignettes, embody the themes that Hemingway would return to throughout his career: alienation, grief, loss, and separation, as well as the regenerative powers of nature.

Said Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as “a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain”. His new collection of stories are set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to fans of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles - a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction - even as they are battered by the larger, often invisible, economic and political forces of American society.

A striking mosaic of prose, poetry, and dramatic dialogue, Jean Toomer’s Cane has come to be considered a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. Structured as a series of vignettes ripe with longing, passion, violence, and revenge, the haunting novel gives a powerful voice to the interior lives of African Americans in the rural South and urban North. Championed for its unsparing honesty and psychological insight by such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou, Cane shines as a beacon to generations of African-American writers.

We have gathered between these pages. To bring you stories of love, murder, deception, and redemption. Untethered by a single plot but molded as one in pen. With seeds planted in EyeCU Reading & Chatting's weekly writing challenges, and nurtured with inspiration from its founder Ebony Evans, our creativity blossomed. We present this bouquet!

Welcome back to Mill Ridge for a special holiday treat! A woman hiding her beauty - An ex-ranger hiding his flaws - Can these two misfits find the spirit of Christmas this holiday or will they run in the opposite direction? Erin Steel knows the people of Mill Ridge can't stand her and she's not complaining. As the former representative from the Teachers Association, she knows moving to Mill Ridge will enable her to live her life in solitude. Hiding her beauty is one thing, but when a man with an eye patch draws her out of her shell, she is determined to avoid him at all costs. Former Texas ...

In a town struggling to survive, can love bring two people together? At the tender age of eight, Christmas Macy’s life takes a dramatic turn when her parents suddenly die. She’s forced to live in an orphanage near Denver, Colorado, with a woman who doesn’t take kindly to children, and most definitely not to Christmas. Now in her twenties, Christmas is heartbroken. The place she’s called home for over fourteen years is being stripped away, along with her best friend. She travels to the drought-ridden town, not knowing what her future holds. Being told over and over she’s unworthy ...

In the American Civil War that began in 1861 the War was seemingly fought to end Slavery. A War for Good. The result a win for the good guys but a society that still bears fractures from this seminal period. The stories in this volume show the true scars that are endured as a riven Nations authors try to explain and reconcile.

This is the second collection of short stories relating to the fictional sea-sprayed Canadian village of Avonlea. Anne Shirley appears in a few, but most concern other characters from the Anne Shirley series, including Diana Barry and members of the Meredith and Blair families. Published in 1920, these tales of hidden hopes and cherished dreams are sure to enchant fans of Anne of Green Gables.

In her debut collection of short stories, Islands of Decolonial Love, renowned writer and activist Leanne Simpson vividly explores the lives of contemporary Indigenous Peoples and communities, especially those of her own Nishnaabeg nation. Found on reserves, in cities and small towns, in bars and curling rinks, canoes and community centres, doctors offices and pickup trucks, Simpson's characters confront the often heartbreaking challenge of pairing the desire to live loving and observant lives with a constant struggle to simply survive....

“If her mother ever finds out what I want to do to her daughter, she’s going to kill me. Crazy Religious Mom from Carrie style.” I have a can’t say no problem. I can’t say no to a beautiful face, a banging body and a pretty smile. And when that body is attached to a girl like Neisha? Resisting temptation is damn near impossible. Neisha is the full package: Thick, beautiful, young… 18… And ready to learn. She and her mom stay right next door to me. Her mom is an over the top religious zealous bigot who is on the main line with Jesus DAILY. The last thing I need to be thinking ...