Short Stories Century

Unable to have children, spinster, Clementine Crowell, has immersed herself in the noble calling of placing street orphans in happy homes. After ten years riding the rails as an agent for the Gotham Foundling Asylum Society, Clementine is disheartened by evidence that many of the children she’s helped place are little more than slave labor. On a stopover in Nebraska, she’s pushed over the edge when farmers, Rollie Everhart and Boyd Hammond, get into a fistfight over who will get the older, stronger boy. Rollie came for an orphan boy to help him work his beleaguered farm. He needs help, ...

New York City, 1890 Olga Schoon’s father has big plans for her life. Soon, she will be married. In fact, he has found her the perfect match. Olga, however, has no time for love. New York City’s garment factory workers deserve safe and fair working conditions, and as the daughter of one of the city’s most successful factory owners, she is determined to help the cause. Can she navigate her father’s strict expectations while still pursuing her calling? And what happens when her growing feelings for a handsome business associate threaten to destroy everything she’s been striving for? ...

Guy de Maupassant is widely regarded as the father of the modern short story. As his 13 volumes of short stories attest, he was a prolific writer of this form. He had a simple, efficient style of writing and, like Anton Chekhov, found inspiration for his stories in the daily lives of humans, which often reveal our darker nature. His years of service in the Franco-Prussian War provided him with rich material for his work.

Le sentiment de l'exil, l'étrangeté au monde, la mélancolie, que Clarice Lispector exprimait dans les lettres à ses sœurs écrites de Berne où elle résidait dans les années 1940, sont la matière même de ses œuvres et se retrouvent dans les nouvelles lues par Fanny Ardant. "Ce qui était arrivé à Ana avant d'avoir un foyer était à jamais hors de sa portée: une exaltation perturbée qui si souvent s'était confondue avec un bonheur insoutenable."

The 39 short stories in this book will blow you away. Starting with a ghost story by Rabindranath Tagore, Indias most famous writer, and ending with a fable by Kanishk Tharoor, a writer who has come of age in the 21st century, these literary masterpieces showcase the extraordinary range and diversity of our storytelling tradition.

This is a story from the Classic Women's Short Stories collection.

With a wide range of themes and styles, ranging from traditional ghost stories to contes cruels, black humor, tales of dark fantasy and surreal nightmare, and perhaps the best story about a ventriloquist and his dummy ever written, there are stories here to suit the tastes of any connoisseur of horror and weird fiction.

Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine's leading public intellectual, is called upon to make sense of the unthinkable reality of our times. In this breathtaking short story collection, she turns the concept of truth over in her hands like a beautifully crafted pair of gloves. From the triumph of the Orange Revolution, which marked the start of the twenty-first century, to domestic victories in matchmaking, sibling rivalry, and even tennis, Zabuzhko - manages to shock the listener by juxtaposing things as they are.

Lost in grief, she can’t find her way back. Despite the tender care Alice Patterson receives from her husband, Paul, and her best friend JayNell, Alice’s grief from an early pregnancy loss consumes her. In this 20th-century love story, Alice’s heartache affects everything and everyone she touches. But if she doesn’t come to terms with her grieving, Alice risks losing her husband, her best friend, and her sanity. Paul tries to understand Alice’s depth of grief while dealing with his own. He seeks advice from JayNell about how to reach Alice and pull her back to him. But their ...

Showcasing the work of literary giants like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and authors whom listeners may be surprised to learn were "in the life", Black Like Us is the most comprehensive collection of fiction by African American lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers ever published.

As war blazes across Europe, three couples find a love that is powerful enough to overcome all the odds. As war looms, genteel Flora yearns to be more than just an observer. She finds a revolutionary kindred spirit in soldier Geraint - but will their fragile love be crushed before it can start to bloom?

Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry.

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society. In this volume we offer up a small selection of talents from the literary landscape of the 18th Century and its male authors whose time has now come again.

Millions of readers around the world have relished Jeffrey Archer's short stories. Taking inspiration from his favourite short story writers - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maupassant, H. H. Munro, W. Somerset Maugham, and O. Henry - Jeffrey Archer has written five best-selling collections over the years, and Macmillan are proud to announce the publication of a sixth volume of stories in May 2010.

Nellie’s beliefs about a woman’s place in society are challenged when she must find employment to save her family’s home, and unexpectedly encounters opposition by local businessmen. She is thrilled when Jacob McKenzie agrees to hire her for his furniture shop, but is wary of the stirrings he raises within her heart, feelings she thought long buried. Jacob McKenzie, a woodworker, is determined to make his furniture shop a success. With a painful past and no family nearby, he delves into his work as the one meaningful part of his life. When he meets and hires Nellie for his shop, he ...

It's Christmas Eve, 1867. Abigail Caldwell anxiously awaits the return of her husband, Dr. David Caldwell, who left that morning to deliver a baby far from the outskirts of town. A snowstorm threatens his safety as he attempts to return home for his first family Christmas. "Christmastide" is a short story that follows the main characters of "The Healing Year". It can be read as a stand-alone story or in concert with the novel, set in Virginia after the Civil War.

Avram Davidson was widely regarded as one of the most outstanding authors of short fantasy fiction in our time. This collection comprises his distinctive historical fantasies - tales of strange Mitteleurpoas, of magic in Victorian England, and on the American frontier. Here are "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire", "Traveller from an Antique Land", and "What Strange Stars and Skies"; here are dragons, cameras, and "The Singular Incident of the Dog on the Beach".

Mister Tidwell is a scholarly Oxford professor snatched out of his bookish world and pressed into service aboard Lord Nelson’s legendary British fleet - in the position of schoolmaster. Such is the life of the land-loving, seafaring Mister Tidwell, Gunner. Thrust into service at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, Tidwell soon finds himself directly in the line of fire and way out of his depth. Fate has cast him into a terrible and terrifying spot - alone on deck to face the fearsome approach of a French man-o’-war.

After he saved her life, a southern white woman falls in love with the black union soldier that saved her. This WWBM historical erotic romance is over 6,000 words and is for mature readers only.

A young girl in the 1930s traveling across from L.A. to New York on the 20th Century Limited train to Grand Central Station is abandoned by her drunken father, makes friends with a kindly porter, and then the train has a fateful accident.