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Short Stories
A dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall trilogy.
In the wake of Hilary Mantel's brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, Learning to Talk is a collection of loosely autobiographical stories that locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Absorbing and evocative, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village "scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues." For the young narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In "King Billy Is a Gentleman," the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. "Curved Is the Line of Beauty" is a story of friendship, faith and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In "Third Floor Rising, " she watches, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity. With a deceptively light touch, Mantel illuminates the poignant experiences of childhood that leave each of us forever changed. "A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat...Mantel's narrators never tell everything they know, and that's why they're worth listening to, carefully." --USA Today "Her short stories always recognize other potential realities...Even the most straightforward of Mantel's tales retain a faintly otherworldly air." --The Washington PostLONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE STORY PRIZE
Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date
In these stories, the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. A recent widower and his adult son ferry to a craggy Scottish island in search of puffins. An actress who plays a children's game-show villainess ushers in the New Year with her deadbeat half brother. A mother, pining for her children, feasts on loaves of challah to fill the void. A new couple navigates a tightrope walk toward love. And on a trip to a Texas water park with their son, two fathers each confront a personal fear.
With sentences that crackle and spark and showcase her trademark wit, McCracken traces how our closely held desires--for intimacy, atonement, comfort--bloom and wither against the indifferent passing of time. Her characters embark on journeys that leave them indelibly changed--and so do her readers. The Souvenir Museum showcases the talents of one of our finest contemporary writers as she tenderly takes the pulse of our collective and individual lives.
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE STORY PRIZE
Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date
In these stories, the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. A recent widower and his adult son ferry to a craggy Scottish island in search of puffins. An actress who plays a children's game-show villainess ushers in the New Year with her deadbeat half brother. A mother, pining for her children, feasts on loaves of challah to fill the void. A new couple navigates a tightrope walk toward love. And on a trip to a Texas water park with their son, two fathers each confront a personal fear.
With sentences that crackle and spark and showcase her trademark wit, McCracken traces how our closely held desires--for intimacy, atonement, comfort--bloom and wither against the indifferent passing of time. Her characters embark on journeys that leave them indelibly changed--and so do her readers. The Souvenir Museum showcases the talents of one of our finest contemporary writers as she tenderly takes the pulse of our collective and individual lives.
Bryn says: McCracken is a magician. There's something extraordinary and strange in just about every sentence in this collection.
A gripping, enigmatic collection of linked short stories about the reverberations of a serial killer's crimes in the lives of everyday people.
In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims' families, but its impact travels even further: into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
An enchanting short story from Madeline Miller that boldly reimagines the myth of Galatea and Pygmalion, now in hardcover for the first time
**A small hardcover edition featuring a new afterword by Madeline Miller**
In ancient Greece, a skilled marble sculptor has been blessed by a goddess who has given his masterpiece--the most beautiful woman the town has ever seen--the gift of life. After marrying her, he expects Galatea to please him, to be obedience and humility personified. But she has desires of her own and yearns for independence.
In a desperate bid by her obsessive husband to keep her under control, Galatea is locked away under the constant supervision of doctors and nurses. But with a daughter to rescue, she is determined to break free, whatever the cost . . .
The first Picador edition of Rebecca Miller's debut book "remind[s] us that good material is everywhere" (The Washington Post).
The vibrantly fresh and lustrous stories in Miller's collection explore the multifaceted lives of women in seven arresting portraits. Modern and diverse, these women of different classes and ages struggle with sexuality, fate, motherhood, infidelity, desperation, and an overriding will to survive.
"A gorgeous debut" (Lauren Groff) from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all.
A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another.
A thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter--whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family's church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father's ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.
Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth, announcing the arrival of a bright new literary star.
Bryn says: This debut from a Florida author who is on course to become a literary legend. The deep female characters (ranging from pre-teens to twenty-somethings to grandparents) who populate this book are perched on the edge of something big, but you'll find no overreaching for epiphanic clarity here. Just gorgeous prose, seamless structure, and sentences that are so honest they'll give you chills.
Written in Cho Nam-joo's signature razor-sharp prose, Miss Kim Knows follows eight women as they confront how gender shapes and orders their lives. A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman is gaslit. A woman is discriminated against at work. A woman grows old. A woman becomes famous. A woman is hated, and loved, and then hated again. As with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, these microcosmic stories prove eerily relatable under Cho Nam-joo's precise, unveiled gaze, offering another captivating read from an essential voice in fiction.
"There is mischief and glee to be found in these pages, along with the kind of laughter that sets two women over 50 rolling in snow with tears streaming down their frozen cheeks and the aurora borealis dancing above them." --Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian
A bold and haunting debut story collection that follows various characters as they navigate the day-to-day perils of Jim Crow racism from Diane Oliver, a missing figure in the canon of twentieth-century African American literature, with an introduction by Tayari Jones
A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and 60s America. In this first and only collection by a masterful storyteller finally taking her rightful place in the canon, Oliver's insightful stories reverberate into the present day.
There's the nightmarish "The Closet on the Top Floor" in which Winifred, the first Black student at her newly integrated college, starts to physically disappear; "Mint Juleps not Served Here" where a couple living deep in a forest with their son go to bloody lengths to protect him; "Spiders Cry without Tears," in which a couple, Meg and Walt, are confronted by prejudices and strains of interracial and extramarital love; and the high tension titular story that follows a nervous older sister the night before her little brother is set to desegregate his school.
These are incisive and intimate portraits of African American families in everyday moments of anxiety and crisis that look at how they use agency to navigate their predicaments. As much a social and historical document as it is a taut, engrossing collection, Neighbors is an exceptional literary feat from a crucial once-lost figure of letters.