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Short Stories

Friday Black

Friday Black

Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame
$14.99

Bryn says: If you like Childish Gambino's "This is America," you'll love "Friday Black." Using fantastical elements and fierce humor, these stories confront the painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day. You'll see that the truth is what's most disturbing.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal, and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it’s like to be young and black in America.

From the start of this extraordinary debut, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s writing will grab you, haunt you, enrage and invigorate you. By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, Adjei-Brenyah reveals the violence, injustice, and painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day in this country.

These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In “The Finkelstein Five,” Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unforgettable reckoning of the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In “Zimmer Land,” we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And “Friday Black” and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceMan” show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.

Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.

Old Babes in the Wood

Old Babes in the Wood

Atwood, Margaret
$30.00
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, a dazzling collection of short stories that look deeply into the heart of family relationships, marriage, loss and memory, and what it means to spend a life together

"If you consider yourself an Atwood fan and have only read her novels: Get your act together. You've been missing out." --The New York Times Book Review, Rebecca Makkai, best-selling author of The Great Believers

Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the most visionary and canonical authors in the world. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories--some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine--explore the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood's characteristic insight, wit and intellect.

The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; "Impatient Griselda" explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and "My Evil Mother" touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love--and what comes after.

Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.

Ship Fever

Ship Fever

Barrett, Andrea
$16.95
The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In Ship Fever, the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. In The English Pupil, Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. And in The Littoral Zone, two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material (Boston Globe).
That Old Country Music

That Old Country Music

Barry, Kevin
$16.95
ONE OF BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR - LIBRARY JOURNAL

A collection of short stories of rural Ireland in the classic Irish mode: full of love (and sex), melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today--from the author of the wildly acclaimed Night Boat to Tangier.


With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today.
State We're In: Maine Stories

State We're In: Maine Stories

Beattie, Ann
$15.00
"Ann Beattie at her most magnificent...Her first new collection in ten years...These tales explore the range of emotional states the author is famous for: longing, disaffection, ambivalence, love, regret. It's nice to hear her voice again" (People).

"A peerless, contemplative page-turner" (Vanity Fair), The State We're In is about how we live in the places we have chosen--or been chosen by. It's about the stories we tell our families, our friends, and ourselves, the truths we may or may not see, how our affinities unite or repel us, and where we look for love.

Many of these stories are set in Maine, but The State We're In is about more than geographical location. Some characters have arrived in Maine by accident, others are trying to escape. The collection is woven around Jocelyn, a wry, disaffected teenager living with her aunt and uncle while attending summer school. As in life, the narratives of other characters interrupt Jocelyn's, sometimes challenging, sometimes embellishing her view.

"Ann Beattie slips into a short story as flawlessly as Audrey Hepburn wore a Givenchy gown: an iconic presentation, each line and fold falling into place but allowing room for surprise" (O, The Oprah Magazine). "Splendid...memorable...every page...fitted out with the blessed finery of hypnotic storytelling" (The Washington Post), these stories describe a state of mind, a manner of being. The State We're In explores, through women's voices, the unexpected moments and glancing epiphanies of daily life.

Print + Palm

Print + Palm

Bookstore1Sarasota
$7.95
The teen publishers of Bookstore1Sarasota made a zine! Issue one is all about nature.

On Cats

Bukowski, Charles
$16.99
Medusa's Ankles

Medusa's Ankles

Byatt, A. S.
$18.00
A ravishing, luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt, "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights" (The New York Times Book Review). With an introduction by David Mitchell, best-selling author of Cloud Atlas

Includes the story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye"--the basis for the George Miller film Three Thousand Years of Longing starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton

Mirrors shatter at the hairdresser's when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess, honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real.

Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets, and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and color. From ancient myth to a British candy factory, from a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, from a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace, Byatt transports her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary--even beyond the gloss of the fantastical--to places rich and strange and wholly unforgettable.

Roxanne says: The Djinn in the Nightengale's Eyes inspired a recent major motion picture with a premise that's deliciously fun.  Gillian Perholt, a middle aged author, is gifted a genie who grants her three wishes.  Her choices are marvelous, and reading the story was like entering a fantastical world, all while grounded in Perholt’s real world intellectual lifestyle.  The title story, Medusa's Ankles, is a love-hate fantasy any female ever has had about a beauty salon.   


Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Stories

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Stories

Carver, Raymond
$16.95

With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time.

[Carver's stories] can ... be counted among the masterpieces of American Literature. --The New York Times Book Review

One of the great short story writers of our time--of any time. --The Philadelhpia Inquirer

The whole collection is a knock out. Few wriers can match Raymond Carver's entiwining style and language. --The Dallas Morning News

Dona Cleanwell Leaves Home

Dona Cleanwell Leaves Home

Castillo, Ana
$27.99

"Ana Castillo is an American treasure. Fearless, compassionate, and flat-out brilliant--she is the writer we need as we navigate the challenges of our ever-changing world."--Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

"Ana Castillo is de primera storyteller."--award-winning author Julia Alvarez

Literary legend Ana Castillo explores the secrets that are kept within households and the women they impact the most in this breakout collection that cements her place as a leading voice in feminist fiction.

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.

As she considers moving to California to join La Causa, Mexican American activist Cesar Chavez's movement to improve the working conditions of migrant farmer workers, Katia receives an unexpected gift from her father: a plane ticket to Mexico City. Bring back your mother, he says, tell her, her children need her. And so Katia joins this cause, to get Tina back to Chicago. But it won't be easy. Katia must learn to navigate a liberated version of her mother in a new country where she is now hawking supposedly superior cleaning products, called Donna Clean Well.

Katia is but one of the voices introduced in this dazzling collection of short fiction from revered writer Ana Castillo. Spanning from Chicago to Mexico to New Mexico, the stories in Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home illuminate a chorus of people whose stories will leave you breathless.