No Presents, Please: Mumbai Stories by Jayant Kaikani

$27.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories

Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, Jayant Kaikini is one of India's most celebrated short-story writers. For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry, as well as Lorrie Moore and George Saunders, here are stories on the pathos and comedy of small-town migrants struggling to build a life in the big city, with the dream world of Bollywood never far away. Jayant Kaikini's gaze takes in the people in the corners of Mumbai -- a bus driver who, denied vacation time, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit's end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution. In this metropolis, those who seek find epiphanies in dark movie theaters, the jostle of local trains, and even in roadside keychains and lost thermos flasks. Here, in the shade of an unfinished overpass, a factory-worker and her boyfriend browse wedding invitations bearing wealthy couples' affectations -- 'no presents please' -- and look once more at what they own. Translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, these resonant stories, recently awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, take us to photo framers, flower markets, and Irani cafes, revealing a city trading in fantasies while its strivers, eating once a day and sleeping ten to a room, hold secret ambitions close. ...Show more

Why Visit America (Short Stories) by Matthew Baker

$29.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories

Whatever the neighbours insisted would be worth keeping a body for, he always responded that he would still prefer to live as data. A young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition from an analogue body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child o her own o from a go vernment-run childcare facility. The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the United States. So they decide to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbour- America. The stories in Matthew Baker's collection portray a world within touching distance of our own. This is an America riven by dilemmas confronting so many of us o from old age to consumerism, drugs to internet culture o turned on its head by one of the most darkly innovative and defiantly strange voices of the moment. ...Show more

Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford

$29.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories

A landmark new collection of stories from Richard Ford that showcases his brilliance, sensitivity, and trademark wit. In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss. "Displaced" returns us to a young man's Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator's sorrow after his father's death.  "Driving Up" follows an American woman's late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life.  "The Run of Yourself," a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife's death.  And "Nothing to Declare" follows a man and a woman's chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what's left of love for them. Typically rich with Ford's emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers. ...Show more

Face the Music: A collection of horror stories

$32.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

$19.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FICTION PRIZE 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2018 'Brilliantly inventive and blazingly smart' Garth Greenwell'Impossible, imperfect, unforgettable' Roxane Gay'A wild thing ... covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence o f fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi' New York Times In her provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the mysterious green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague spreads across the earth. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery about a store's dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted house guest. A dark, shimmering slice into womanhood, Her Body and Other Parties is wicked and exquisite. ...Show more

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

$19.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories

From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, Radicalized is four urgent SF novellas of America's present and future within one book Told through one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our generation, Radicalized is a timely collection consisting of four SF novellas connected by social, techn ological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future. Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper. In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims. Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer. The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community. ...Show more

The House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories by Yasunari Kawabata

$31.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories | Series: Vintage International Ser.

Three surreal, erotically charged stories from Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata.   In the three long tales in this collection, Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. Piercing examinations of sexuality and human psychology--and w orks of remarkable subtlety and beauty--these stories showcase one of the twentieth century's great writers--in any language--at his very best. ...Show more

A Couple of Things Before the End: Stories by Sean O'Beirne

$27.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories

This brilliant collection mixes the storytelling originality of George Saunders and Lydia Davis with a sensibility all its own, taking the reader on an extraordinary tour of old and new Australia - and into a very frightening future. A woman on a passenger ship in 1958 gets involved with a young, wild Barry Humphries. A man looks back to the 1970s, and his time as a member of Australia's least competent scout troop. In 1988, a teenage boy recalls his sexual initiation, out on the tanbark. In 2015, two sisters text in Kmart about how to manage their irascible, isolated mum. Then, in the near future, a racist demagogue - a kind of Australian Trump - talks to the press the day after his electoral triumph. And as the cities heat up and lose their water, a lady from one of the 'better suburbs' makes every effort to get her family into a gated community. This is Australia, in all its glories and its foibles - and its insularity and fear. These stories are a reflection of where we are now, and where we may be headed. Bitingly satirical, outstandingly original and written in a remarkable range of voices, A Couple of Things Before the End is a stand-out fiction debut of 2020. ...Show more

Women with Men by Richard Ford

$19.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories | Reading Level: very good

The landscape of "Women with Men" ranges from the northern plains of Montana to the streets of Paris and the suburbs of Chicago. The tragedies that stalk the characters are unfolded with an indelible wit and clarity. So merciless is Ford's lingering gaze upon human, mostly male, weakness, so understandi ng his eye for the unravelling threads of human love, that this collection of novellas seems only to broaden the reputation and the following of one of the outstanding writers of our time. ...Show more

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

$14.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories | Series: RC

"Raymond Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power'. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style." ...Show more

Fly Already: Stories by Etgar Keret

$27.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

From a "genius" (New York Times) storyteller: a new, subversive, hilarious, heart-breaking collection. "There is sweetheartedness and wisdom and eloquence and transcendence in his stories because these virtues exist in abundance in Etgar himself... I am very happy that Etgar and his work are in the worl d, making things better." --George Saunders There's no one like Etgar Keret. His stories take place at the crossroads of the fantastical, searing, and hilarious. His characters grapple with parenthood and family, war and games, marijuana and cake, memory and love. These stories never go to the expected place, but always surprise, entertain, and move... In "Arctic Lizard," a young boy narrates a post-apocalyptic version of the world where a youth army wages an unending war, rewarded by collecting prizes. A father tries to shield his son from the inevitable in "Fly Already." In "One Gram Short," a guy just wants to get a joint to impress a girl and ends up down a rabbit hole of chaos and heartache. And in the masterpiece "Pineapple Crush," two unlikely people connect through an evening smoke down by the beach, only to have one of them imagine a much deeper relationship. The thread that weaves these pieces together is our inability to communicate, to see so little of the world around us and to understand each other even less. Yet somehow, in these pages, through Etgar's deep love for humanity and our hapless existence, a bright light shines through and our universal connection to each other sparks alive. ...Show more

Pursuit: The Balvenie Stories Collection by Alex Preston (ed.)

$27.99 AUD

Category: Short Stories

What is it to pursue a goal, to strive for an ideal, to follow a dream? These are the questions explored by The Balvenie in this unique collection compiled by award-winning novelist Alex Preston. The stories - from some of the brightest and most exciting voices writing today - tell of determination, en deavour and perseverance against the odds. They range across wildly different contexts and cultures, from the epic to the intimate, in fiction and non-fiction, illustrating and illuminating the outer limits of human character and achievement. With contributions from Max Porter, Kamila Shamsie, Daisy Johnson, Eley Williams, Michael Donkor, David Szalay, Yan Ge and many more. ...Show more