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  Seconds of Pleasure - Stories

  Neil LaBute

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  Stories from the award-winning director and playwright. “Labute’s smart, edgy offering delivers pleasures well beyond the time frame his title suggests.”—Booklist 
   
  In Seconds of Pleasure, Neil LaBute brings to the page his cutting humor and compelling take on the shadowy terrain of the human heart. Best known for his controversial plays and films, his short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Playboy. Seductive and provocative, each potent and pithy tale in Seconds of Pleasure finds men and women exploiting—or at the mercy of—the hidden fault lines that separate them: In “Time Share,” a woman leaves her family at their vacation home after discovering her husband in a compromising situation; a middle-aged man obsesses over a scab on the calf of a pretty young girl in “Boo-Boo”; and a vain Hollywood actor gets his comeuppance in “Soft Target.” LaBute infuses Seconds of Pleasure with his trademark wit and black humor and unleashes his imagination in stories that offer unflinching insight into our very human shortcomings and impure urges with shocking candor. 
   
  “LaBute’s usual sleazy suspects are prepared to risk family, love, career, and freedom for the momentary satisfaction of their sometimes brutal desires. It will end badly, we know, and that’s what makes each dark tale as irresistible as good gossip. Fallibility and weakness, LaBute has demonstrated once again, have their own allure.”—Black Book 
   
  “Seconds captures in print both the nuanced rhythms of contemporary speech and the pitfalls of dark I-Me-Mine gratification.”—LA Weekly 
   
  “LaBute is a master at crafting shocking situations and nasty characters.”—Publishers Weekly

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  Sentimental Exorcisms

  David Derry

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  A former lover becomes an uninvited houseguest in Ted and Marjory’s quiet abode, adversely affecting investigations into the history of the semicolon. A judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy. A market analyst’s visit to a stripper goes awry, leading to a compulsory leave from work and an intervention from loved ones. An English lit undergraduate finds himself besieged by increasingly urgent voyeuristic desires, and soon finds himself pressed to the glass, firm in his belief that the only way to exorcise his demon is to identify its essential objectives and achieve them. Meanwhile, poor Tim Pine must face his coprophobia in a most public and lamentable office misadventure.
   
  
   
  Sentimental Exorcisms is a collection of tragicomic satire, latter-day Victorian collisions of Nabokov and Proust. The men in these long short stories have grand designs and petty fears, or modest designs and grand fears. Desires, scapegoats, idylls and obtrusive egos: the golden calves they can’t quite bear to kill. With their ramparts crumbling around them, each mounts an exuberant defence in a vacuum of self-absorption.
   
  
   
  'Derry specializes in the most delightfully self-unaware characters. These are delicious portrayals of delusion.' – Uptown
   
  'Derry's cohort of misanthropic, sexual-repressed anti-heroes possesses a spooky ability to get under your skin.' – Prairie Fire
   
  'Arrestingly witty.' – Vue Magazine

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  Silent Refrain

  K. MacCabe

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  The war is now a storm long past, but the scars still linger, and they are deep. Sophia Trotsky has arrived to give an interview for a documentary on The Great War, where the memories hit as hard as the battles. However, the courage to face the memories once more comes from a chance encounter with a reflection of the tattered soul within.

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  A Little Talk About Mobs

  O. Henry

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  O. Henry holds in American literature exceptional place as a master of the genre of the short story. William Sydney Porter (O. Henry's real name) is the author of bright, brilliant novels which are worldwide popular. The years and decades are passing by, but readers' love to O. Henry is not exhausted.  "A Little Talk About Mobs" is included in the short story collection, called "Waifs and Strays", published in 1910. In the story a New Yorker, motorman Jerry and policeman Mike share their collision experiences with the angry mob. They talk that the crowd, ready to lynch anyone caused her displeasure, in fact, could not do harm to a cat. The essence of the phenomenon in the fact that a man, disappearing into a crowd, loses his force. One man can resist a thousand, but a thousand is powerless against the one, because crowd is the headless monster. We believe that the author wanted to convey the idea that you should not go with the flow in the mainstream. Having your mind - use it.A SmartTouch Media production.

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  The Night the New Jesus Fell to...

  Ron Rash

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  Ten humorous, interconnected short stories following three narrators as they learn lessons about life in the North Carolina foothills. 
   
  The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth was originally released in 1994 and was the first published book from acclaimed writer Ron Rash. This twentieth anniversary edition takes us back to where it all began with ten linked short stories, framed like a novel, introducing us to a trio of memorable narrators—Tracy, Randy, and Vincent—making their way against the hardscrabble backdrop of the North Carolina foothills. With a comedic touch that may surprise readers familiar only with Rash’s later, darker fiction, these earnest tales reveal the hard lessons of good whiskey, bad marriages, weak foundations, familial legacies, questionable religious observances, and the dubious merits of possum breeding, as well as the hard-won reconciliations with self, others, and home that can only be garnered in good time.  
   
  The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth shows us the promising beginnings of a master storyteller honing his craft and contributing from the start to the fine traditions of southern fiction and lore. This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction from the author and a contextualizing preface from series editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer, director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies. 
   
  “The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth celebrates storytelling as art and necessity. Like the best Southern writers, Ron Rash gives us funny without cornpone, irony without mockery, charm without sentimentality.” —Marianne Gingher 
   
  “This book of stories, shaped like a novel, is an impressive debut, both humorous and insightful. Ron Rash has the eye and ear of a very fine storyteller.” —Clyde Edgerton 
   
  “He has given us real writing and real stories, the kinds of tales we hear and repeat, and which return to us in our sleeping and waking dreams.” —Max Childers, Creative Loafing 
   
  “A substantial contribution to recent Southern fiction.” —Gil Allen, The Georgia Review 
   
  “Wonderfully crafted entertainment in the finest tradition of today’s Southern writers.” —Southern Book Trade

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  Bran Mak Morn - The Last King

  Robert E. Howard

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  From Robert E. Howard's fertile imagination sprang some of fiction's greatest heroes, including Conan the Cimmerian, King Kull, and Solomon Kane. But of all Howard's characters, none embodied his creator's brooding temperament more than Bran Mak Morn, the last king of a doomed race.In ages past, the Picts ruled all of Europe. But the descendants of those proud conquerors have sunk into barbarism...all save one: Bran Mak Morn, whose bloodline remains unbroken. Threatened by the Celts and the Romans, the Pictish tribes rally under his banner to fight for their very survival, while Bran fights to restore the glory of his race.This collection gathers together all of Howard's published stories featuring Bran Mak Morn: "Men of the Shadows," "Kings of the Night," "A Song of the Race," "Worms of the Earth," "The Dark Man," and "The Lost Race."

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