A chance encounter prompts an ageing professor to regret a lifetime of wasted opportunities; a beautiful wife tests her husband by making herself hideous; for the love of a girl, a boy turns himself into a violoncello... In these seven short stories Dan Rhodes lays bare the pain and enchantment of love. . For more options...

From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.. For more options...

Set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come At Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. For more options...

A remarkable collection of short stories set in Wyoming from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Shipping News' and 'Brokeback Mountain'. 'Bad Dirt' is filled with the vivid and willful characters for which Proulx has become known. For more options...

This 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of 15 stories evokes the ordeals of the Vietnamese people in the Vietnam War. Old or young, humble or arrogant, puzzled or proud, these are the characters for whom the absurdities of American popular culture and memories of war uneasily coexist.. For more options...

This is a selection of deliciously spooky short stories from the Japanese master of suspense, the acclaimed author of "Ring". The first story in the collection has been filmed as "Dark Water", starring Jennifer Connelly. For more options...

In her remarkable stories of seemingly ordinary people living extraordinary lives Miranda July reveals how a single moment can change everything. Whether writing about a middle-aged woman's obsession with Prince William or an aging factory worker who has never been in love, the result is startling, tender and sexy by turns.Miranda July is a brilliant new voice in fiction. For more options...

Rudyard Kipling is undoubtedly among the great short story writers in the English language. This collection opens with "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows," the first story Kipling published as a young journalist in India, and ends with an acknowledged masterpiece, "The Gardener," written 50 years later in the aftermath of the Great War. For more options...

Death in Venice" is a story of obsession. Gustave von Aschenbach is a successful but ageing writer who travels to Venice for a holiday. For more options...

'I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.' Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was not the only writer to admire Mansfield's work: Thomas Hardy, D. For more options...

Always attuned to the moment of epiphany, these twelve stories are profound, intimate observations of men and women whose lives ache with possibility - each story a dramatisation of the instant in a life that exposes it all: love and the lack of love, hope and the lack of hope. These men and women are perfectly ordinary people - whose marriages founder; who sit on their own in a cinema watching a film with no soundtrack; and, who risk sex in a hotel with an anonymous stranger. For more options...

Ali Smith finds that the modern landscape still suggests the other-worldly creatures she used to read about in folk tales. Niall Griffiths laments the clumsy tributes to Dylan Thomas that cover every available surface in Laugharne. For more options...

A young man accompanies his cousin to the hospital to check an unusual hearing complaint and recalls a story of a woman put to sleep by tiny flies crawling inside her ear; a mirror appears out of nowhere and a nightwatchman is unnerved as his reflection tries to take control of him; a couple's relationship is unbalanced after dining exclusively on exquisite crab while on holiday; a man follows instructions on the back of a postcard to apply for a job, but an unknown password stands between him and his mysterious employer. In each one of these stories, Murakami sidesteps the real and sprints for the surreal. For more options...

In these ten stories, Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West - and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. A refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter, an unhappy girlfriend and a stolen Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck. For more options...

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A collection of short stories including subjects as diverse as memories, marriage, insects and ghosts. A.S. For more options...