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  Hawks - & Other Stories

  Peter Hollywood

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  With Hawks, Peter Hollywood has crafted a gripping collection of stories which reflects the changing face of Northern Ireland. While Northern Ireland is in the process of a gradual transformation into another place, despite the glitz on the surface, it is yet to arrive. Haunted by the collective memory of moments shared, it could embrace a bright future, or retain the darker colours of its past In clear, elegant and sombre prose, though never beyond humour, emotion and feeling, Hollywood charts the movements towards this new world with gusto.

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  Twenty Grand - And Other Tales...

  Rebecca Curtis

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  In this dazzling literary debut, Rebecca Curtis displays the gifts that make her one of the most talented writers of her generation. Her characters—young women struggling to find happiness, love, success, security, and adventure—wait tables, run away from home, fall for married men, betray their friends, and find themselves betrayed as well.In "Hungry Self," a young waitress descends into the basement of a seemingly ordinary Chinese restaurant; in "Twenty Grand," a young wife tries to recover her lost fortune; in "Monsters," one family's paranoia leads to a sacrifice; and in "The Witches," an innocent swim on prom night proves more dangerous than anyone could have imagined. With elegant prose and a wicked sense of humor, these stories reveal Curtis's provocative and uncompromising view of life, one that makes her writing so poignant and irresistible.

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  Hope and Other Stories

  Laura Hird

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  A “bloody, believable and intoxicating” collection of short stories by the acclaimed author of Born Free (The Herald, UK).   Laura Hird became one of the most exciting new voices in Scottish literature with her Whitbread Award-shortlisted debut novel, Born Free. Known for pitch-perfect characters dealing with the despair and dysfunction of contemporary life, Hird continues to mine this trademark territory in Hope and Other Urban Tales. Set in the low-rent areas of Edinburgh, Hird’s slices of reality are gritty, bleak and often darkly funny. Yet the possibility of hope, always just out of reach, unifies this collection, conveying that just as circumstances can reveal the morally obscure darkness in ‘good’ people, so can seemingly irredeemable characters harbor well-hidden pockets of humanity.“Hird reminds one of an early Ian McEwan or Iain Banks, deeply unsettling, deathly comic and peculiarly tender.”—Sunday Times, UK“Hird controls her material brilliantly. If you like your fiction with razor blades secreted in the soup, then get this, pronto.”—Scotsman, UK

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  Pure Hollywood - And Other Stories

  Christine Schutt

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  “Long and short stories from one of our most distinctive prose stylists,” the author of the National Book Award finalist, Florida: A Novel (New York, “The Best Books of the Year So Far”). Hailed by George Saunders as “a truly gifted writer,” with Pure Hollywood & Other Stories, Pulitzer Prize finalist and O Henry Prize winner Christine Schutt returns to the short story form that launched her acclaimed career and her inimitable style that John Ashbery once described as “pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and even eerily beautiful.”  In 11 captivating tales, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion, to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love, to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story in Pure Hollywood is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn love and hurt.   In league with JD Salinger, Katherine Mansfield and Guy De Maupassant, in Pure Hollywood Schutt gives us sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives, infused with her signature observation and surprise. Timeless, incisive, and precise, these tales are a rush of blood to the head, portals through which we open our eyes and see the world anew.   “Schutt’s haunting yet lyrical words linger long after the final page.”—Los Angeles Times “Think Gatsby with a twist of Didion.”—BBC.com “Schutt writes stories that don’t have an ounce of melodrama in them—they feel unusually alive and honest—and few writers capture bereavement with Schutt’s precision and elegance.”—Oprah.com

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  Slinkies 2020 - Short fiction...

  Sophie Overett, Harry Goddard,...

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  Spineless Wonders Audio is pleased to present five new short Australian stories written by authors under 30 and narrated by professional actors. You’ll hear about a levitating housemate, a lost child, a zombie in the make-up department, a haunted tree and a deadly workplace.

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  Wailing Well

  M. R. James

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  Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), who wrote as M. R. James, was an English author, medieval scholar and provost of King's College, Cambridge, and of Eton College.He is best known for his outstanding ghost stories. James reinvented the ghost story for the modern audience by moving away from Gothic elements and using realistic contemporary settings. His protagonists and plots often reflected his own antiquarian interests. Accordingly he is known as the originator of the 'antiquarian ghost story'.'Wailing Well' is the story of a group of boy scouts camping somewhere on the downs in the south of England who are warned not to go into a particular field which contains a single clump of trees. A local shepherd relates a strange story about the place, which he refers to as Wailing Well. He claims to have seen four skeletal figures walking through the field, three women and one man, all walking towards the clump of trees where the well is. One of the young scouts determines to investigate for himself....

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