Anthology World Literature

Around the world each night, parents tell stories to children as they put them to bed. Margaret Read MacDonald - a folklorist, storyteller, and children's librarian - uses bedtime tales in the daytime to end her story hours on a calm note. Here, with accompaniment on dulcimer and autoharp by musician Richard Scholtz, she includes seven of her favorites from around the world.

Compiled by celebrated author and journalist Benjamin Law, Growing Up Queer in Australia assembles voices from across the spectrum of LGBTIQA+ identity. Spanning diverse places, eras, genders, ethnicities and experiences, these are the stories of growing up queer in Australia. For better or worse, sooner or later, life conspires to reveal you to yourself, and this is growing up.

Sex. Money. International terrorism. And, of course, the ultimate question- Can a compact backswing save the world? A clubhouseful of acclaimed authors pass the baton (or at least the six-iron) to creat an ensemble tour de force of suspense, romance, and hilarity on the links. Golf is not a team sport. But who says fiction can't be? Get ready....

In this debut collection of stories, Zev Good takes the listener into a world he knows and illuminates so well: the middle-class American South. These stories, populated with mothers and children, friends and lovers, the living and the dying, reveal the intricate and tenuous bonds that unite us all.

In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill’s Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South. A woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy’s mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living.

A scandal ended the careers of the Wilder Sisters, the country rock band. But Lexi Wilder is okay with that. She's been on the road since roughly forever, so she's going to enjoy the break. There's nothing quite like the beautiful sandy beaches of Monterey Bay to soothe a woman's soul. Luke Wyatt never wanted to trade fame and fortune for the only woman he's ever loved. Now that he's finished a punishing national tour, he's headed back to his hometown of Whistle Cove for the quiet, the beaches, the inspiration, and the girl. But Lexi hasn't forgiven him for choosing fame over her…

The stories in this anthology range from quietly strange to ambitiously speculative. Humans transform into cosmic energy or sentient algae. A man wakes up in a new body in a world with continents cut out, months absent from the calendar year, and souls misplaced. Students at a high school regularly vanish without a trace. A woman descends into the depths of the ocean and encounters all-knowing creatures who may have the answers to her deepest questions.

A story from the renowned tales of "Xiccarph": Before Tiglari, many brave souls had the same noble dream of scaling and crossing through the forbidding palace of Maal Dweb. So far, none who attempted this feat has ever returned or have been seen again. But Tiglari, the jungle hunter skilled in destroying dangerous beasts, was undeterred by the hideous odds that lay before him!

Ted Hughes wrote a series of stories for children from the early 1960s through until 1995 about how the world, and the creatures in it, came into being. Meet the Polar Bear whose obsession with her snowy white fur is so great that she can live only in a landscape surrounded by her own reflection; the Whale, growing in God's garden beside the carrots; King Leo, who began life because God was hungry for his sausages; poor Parrot's painful defeat in the marriage song contest at the wedding of Man and Woman; and Sparrow's heroic battle against the bird-swallowing Black Hole.

This book collects a magnificent set of works by Russian classical authors: Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov. Each original story, springing from a common creative heritage, delivers a glimpse of the immortal Russian Soul and has influenced modern literary trends. These stories are interesting to their core and will bring pleasure to readers. Get ready to immerse yourself within these immortal works that have long been counted among the best of classic world literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky.

This collection brings together stories by Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, Wilkie Collins and Marcel Proust, with forays into the supernatural and the comedic by Sabine Baring-Gould and Saki. Be them funny or moving, all stories are beautifully read by Harriet Walter (Atonement, Netflix’s The Crown), Juliet Stevenson (Bend it Like Beckham, The Enfield Haunting), Barbara Leigh-Hunt (Pride and Prejudice, Billy Elliot) and Rosalind Ayres (Titanic, Outnumbered).

A recently separated woman fills a huge terrarium with rare flowers to establish control over a small world and attempt to heal her broken heart. A competitive swimmer negotiates over which days she will fulfill her wifely duties, and which days she will keep for herself. A peach farmer wonders if her orchard will survive a drought. And generations of a family in South Carolina struggle with fidelity and their cruel past, some clinging to old ways and others painfully carving new paths.

It's 1942. With the Nazi party at the height of its power, the occupying army empties Poland's towns and cities of their Jewish populations. As neighbor turns on neighbor and survival often demands unthinkable choices, Poland becomes a moral quagmire - a place of shifting truths and blinding ambiguities.

A story from the renowned tales of "Xiccarph": The sorcerer Maal Dweb approached the flower women with caution, for he knew that they were vampires. These half-woman, half-flower monsters were as venomous as they were beautiful. His presence was now detected. Could their hypnotic singing lure yet another victim, or would Maal Dweb's own magic save him from the wailing power of the enchanting flower women?

A gripping collection of over 50 of the greatest short stories written by great British writers. 1."The Missing Years" by Barry Pain, 2. "His Brother's Keeper" by W. W. Jacobs, 3. "A Madman's Manuscript" by Charles Dickens, 4. "The House of Cobwebs" by Barry Pain, 5. "Old Fags" by Stacy Aumonier, 6. "A Long-Ago Affair" by John Galsworthy, 7. "August Heat" by W. F. Harvey, 8. "The Dabblers" by W. F. Harvey, 9. "Rose Rose" by Barry Pain

In this moving collection of short stories and essays, Gordon Lee Johnson (Cupeño/Cahuilla) cements his voice not only as a wry commentator on American Indian reservation life but also as a master of fiction writing. In Johnson’s stories, all of which are set on the fictional San Ignacio reservation in Southern California, we meet unforgettable characters like Plato Pena, the Stanford-bound geek who reads Kahlil Gibran during intertribal softball games; hardboiled investigator Roddy Foo; and Etta, whose motto is “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise”.

Forgotten tales of fantasy that range from Fairy Tale to Surrealism; stories that defy description.

I hadn't seen Nick since high school, the day he broke my brother's nose. I bumped into him while trapped in Las Vegas with no way to get home. Maybe this was my second chance...My life was all planned out. I left my sensible house every day in my sensible clothes and went to my sensible job. Until, some crazy targeted me, and it all went up in smoke.

Accompanied by interpretations of their significance by noted historian Richard D. Heffner and journalist Alexander Heffner, this book includes important documents such as the complete text of the Declaration of Independence.

The first person in her traditional Mexican American family to graduate from high school, Katia is entering adulthood at a time of turbulent change. Across the nation young people are fighting for civil and women’s rights and protesting the Vietnam War and brutal dictatorships in South America. Like so many of her generation, Katia wants to make the world a better place, and is determined to follow her own path.