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  The Tower of the Antilles -...

  Achy Obejas

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  PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist: A “superb story collection” about America and Cuba, escape and return, and history and hope (Los Angeles Times). 
   
  Longlisted for The Story Prize 
   
  One of Electric Literature’s Best Short Story Collections of the Year 
   
  In “Superman,” several possible story lines emerge about a 1950s Havana sex-show superstar who disappeared as soon as the revolution triumphed. “North/South” portrays a migrant family trying to cope with separation and the eventual disintegration of blood ties. “The Cola of Oblivion” follows a young woman who returns to Cuba and inadvertently uncorks a history of accommodation and betrayal among the family members who stayed behind during the revolution. And in the title story, an interrogation reveals a series of fantasies about escape and a history of futility. 
   
  The Cubans in Achy Obejas’ story collection are haunted by islands: the island they fled, the island they’ve created, the island they were taken to or forced from, the island they long for, the island they return to, and the island that can never be home again. 
   
  “[A] memorable short fiction collection.” —Publishers Weekly 
   
  “By turns searing and subtly magical . . . Obejas’ plots are ambushing, her characters startling, her metaphors fresh, her humor caustic, and her compassion potent in these intricate and haunting stories of displacement, loss, stoicism, and realization.” —Booklist 
   
  “Obejas writes with gentleness, without flashy wording or gimmicks, about people trying to figure out where they belong.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

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  The Ice Palace - Author of the...

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
   
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
   
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
   
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. 
   
  One of Fitzgerald’s short story gems is ‘The Ice Palace’. A Southern girl wants ‘to live where things happen on a grand scale’.  She is engaged to a Yankee but on their visit to The Ice Palace attraction life reveals a very different destiny for her.

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  The Ugliest House in the World -...

  Peter Ho Davies

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  Short stories from the author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself—“a writer to behold with real pleasure” (Gish Jen).   In tales that travel from Coventry to Kuala Lumpur, from the past to the present, and from hilarity to tragedy, American bandits herd ostriches in Patagonia, British soldiers confront Zulus in Natal, and John Wayne leads the way for local revolutionaries in Southeast Asia.   These are stories in which small lives are affected by consequential events. In “A Union,” a prolonged strike at a Welsh slate quarry plays mystifying tricks of time on a couple expecting a baby. In “The Silver Screen,” ragtag rebels join a communist revolution with all the flair of the Keystone Kops. In the heartbreaking title story, a rural community in North Wales copes with the accidental death of a child and learns the reaches of guilt. With its deep vein of humanism and pointed humor, this collection was a winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys and PEN/Macmillan Awards, and includes two entries that were selected for The Best American Short Stories.   “A quiet clarity and an all-encompassing empathy that is without borders.” —Elle   “Astounding . . . Peter Ho Davies has left a unique, definitive footprint in the soil of contemporary short fiction.” —The Washington Post

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  The Best American Humorous...

  Alexander Jessup

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  Eighteen short stories by famous and little known authors compassing the period 1839 - 1914. The editor's very extensive introduction is omitted from this Librivox audio book. (Summary by David Wales)

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  Whilomville Stories

  Stephen Crane

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  This collection consists of thirteen stories. The stories are set in the mythical town of Whilomville used by Stephen Crane for many of his best stories.  They appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine between 1899 and 1900.  The writing is crisp, the stories are poignant and funny (usually) and always tell us something about our quirky human nature.   - Summary by Phil chenevert

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  The Black Dog

  Stephen Crane

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  Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a prolific American poet, novelist, and short story writer. He is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation.'The Black Dog' is a supernatural tale of a group of travellers who seek shelter in a remote cabin where an old man lies dying. They hear from the man's nephew of a local tale that when death arrives, it is preceded by the appearance of a ghostly black dog which howls outside the house.

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