Other books that might interest you

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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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  The Disgruntled Soccer Terrorist

  Martin Lundqvist

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  A short story about the call centre operator Emily Holmes who chooses to try to stop the disgruntled terrorist Eric Barnes, to deal with her boredom. But why is Eric angry, and will he succeed to end the soccer refereeing career of the infamous Marvin Lundgren?

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  Russian Short Story The - Volume...

  Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol

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  The Russian novel has a reputation that is immense, both in narrative and in length.  Unquestionably though the ideas, themes and characters make many novels rightly revered as world class, as icons of literature. 
   
  Perhaps an easier way to enjoy a wider selection of the Russian heritage, with its varied and glorious literary talents, is with the short story.  These gems sparkle and beguile the mind with their characters and narrative, exploring facets of society and the human condition that more Western authors somehow find more difficult to navigate, or to explore, explain and relate to.   
   
  The Russian short story is, in many respects, in a genre of its own.  It is at its captivating best whether it’s an exploration of real-life experiences, through fantasy and fables and on to total absurdity. 
   
  In a land so vast it is unsurprising that it is a world almost unto itself. Cultures and landscapes of differing hues are packed together bound only by the wilful bonds and force of Empire. 
   
  The stories in this collection traverse the decades where one might be a serf under an absolute monarch, and the reality of that was pretty near to slavery, into an emancipation of sorts in the fields, or towns under the despotic will of landowners and the rich into the upheavals of Empire and then the overthrow of the ruling class and its replacement by the communists, who promised equality for all and delivered a society where the down-trodden remained the lowest yet vital cog of the state machine and its will.  
   
  Whilst Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Chekhov are a given in any Russian collection we also explore and include Andreyev, Korolenko, Turgenev, Blavatsky and many others to create a world rich and dense across a sprawling landscape of diverse people, riddled with the class and unfairness in perhaps some of the most turbulent times that Russia has ever experienced. 
   
  01 - The Russian Short Story - Volume 1 - An Introduction 
  02 - The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin 
  03 - The Stationmaster by Alexander Pushkin 
  04 - The Blizzard by Alexander Pushkin 
  05 - The Coffin Maker by Alexander Pushkin 
  06 - The Shot by Alexander Pushkin 
  07 - St Johns Eve by Nikolai Gogol 
  08 - The Cloak by Nikolai Gogol also known as 'The Overcoat' 
  09 - Old Fashioned Landowners by Nikolai Gogol 
  10 - The Nose by Nikolai Gogol

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  The Coffin Maker

  Alexander Pushkin

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  Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) leads the great names of Russian literature. After completing his education, Pushkin devoted himself to the pleasures of society, alongside his writing.In 1820 he was banished to the Caucasus for writing and promoting liberal views. Deprived of his social life, Pushkin devoted himself to his writing and bequeathed to the world some of the greatest poetry and stories ever written.He met his death in a duel in 1837.The Coffin Maker tells the story of Adrian Prokhoroff, a funeral director who, in a drunken rage, shouts out an invitation to all his customers to a party at his house...and unleashes a scene of grisly horror.

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  Spanking Naughty Girls 2 - Kate...

  Peter Michaels

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  Kate Anderson gets spanked for punishment and for pleasure 
  Kate Anderson is a spoiled rich girl with superficial friends and nothing driving her life except a constant round of parties and pleasure. She knows she is in trouble and her life is going nowhere but she can’t seem to shake it off until she meets James Jackson, an older man who takes her in hand and helps her change her attitude and her activities. James spanks her for being a naughty girl and she knows she needs it. She is spanked often in the first week to change her attitude, especially when she is caught breaking the rules again. Later, once her life is beginning to turn around, she asks James to give her a funishment spanking as a reward.

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  Thirst

  Ken Kalfus

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  This acclaimed short story collection “veers between whimsical postmodern playfulness and a darker realism [with] sophisticated comic flare” (Publishers Weekly). 
   
  Distinguished by black comedy and an international perspective, Ken Kalfus’ stories demonstrate the author’s chameleon-like ability to change mode, manner, and voice. They often concern the abrupt dislocation of people bumping into different cultures, be they real, hallucinated, dreamed, or desired. 
   
  Kalfus’ characters — which include an endless line of refugees fleeing Sarajevo with no particular destination; an Irish au pair plagued by her own psychosexual fears in a Paris science museum; and an entirely fictitious baseball league — are constantly thumping their heads against a shifting reality. These sympathetic portraits of human beings caught in the tectonic cultural shifts that disrupt our lives are frequently hilarious, consistently touching, and powerfully creative. 
   
  “A book for people who piss and moan about the unpromising future of American fiction.” —David Foster Wallace

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