Other books that might interest you

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  Walking on Cowrie Shells - Stories

  Nana Nkweti

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  In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti's virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story "It Takes a Village, Some Say," Nkweti skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In "The Devil Is a Liar," a pregnant pastor's wife struggles with the collision of western Christianity and her mother's traditional Cameroonian belief system as she worries about her unborn child. 
   
   
   
  In other stories, Nkweti vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa, and in a mermaid tale about a Mami Wata who forgoes her power by remaining faithful to a fisherman she loves. In between these two ends of the spectrum there's everything from an aspiring graphic novelist at a comic con to a murder investigation driven by statistics to a story organized by the changing hairstyles of the main character. 
   
   
   
  A dazzling, inventive debut, Walking on Cowrie Shells announces the arrival of a superlative new voice.

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  The Trade Wind

  Morgan Robertson

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  Morgan Andrew Robertson (1861-1915) was a popular American author of short stories and novels who claimed to have been the inventor of the periscope.'The Trade Wind' is the strange and unsettling story of a ship where all the crew are mysteriously struck blind after a night of drinking rum in the tropics...a condition called moon blindness, for which there is no available cure.Having lost their sight, the men must work out how to sail, navigate and negotiate bad weather at sea. But strange occurences on board suggest that not all is as it seems....

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  The Sleep of Baby Filbertson -...

  James Leo Herlihy

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  This short story collection by the acclaimed author of Midnight Cowboy explores the desperate lives of outsiders with unflinching insight.   In his first collection of short fiction, James Leo Herlihy examines the experiences of alienation and isolation while elevating the oddities and quirks that make up human nature. These seven tales tackle the anxieties of fragile people and get to the heart of a world inhabited by perennial outsiders. Agoraphobic Daisy Filbertson and her teenage son Rudy, both addicted to sleeping pills, find themselves frantically running from city to city fueled by Daisy’s manic paranoia. A lonely mother looking to start her life over finds a new father for her daughter on an Army base. An immigrant from Uruguay writes letters to his Mamacita while he tries to find himself in the US. And a staunch Baptist has her world challenged when she meets a handsome artist.

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  Dating Cupid

  Eve Langlais

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  Roxanne knows where she’d like to shove Cupid’s arrow. 
   
  Tired of cheating men and false promises of love, Roxanne launches a campaign against Cupid’s Dating Service. But it’s hard to smear a company when you’ve got the hots for the owner. 
   
  Maverick Eros is more than the CEO of hottest dating service around, he’s Cupid himself. However, forget the media images of a chubby diapered cherub because the god of love is actually six feet plus of yummy, muscled male. 
   
  When they meet, sparks fly–the lusty kind–but they both know from experience, love hurts. In the end though, they’ll learn that love will have its way, with or without the aid of Cupid’s arrow.

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  Over the Border

  Morgan Robertson

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  Morgan Andrew Robertson (1861-1915) was a popular American author of short stories and novels and claimed to be the inventor of the periscope.'Over the Border' is a fascinating tale about hypnosis and mesmerism. The narrator lost much of his memory for many years after leaving his former life as a sailor. One night he visits a theatre where a hypnotist is performing. On his way home on the tram, he hears two doctors discussing a case at the hospital - a man with amnesia. One doctor recommends hypnosis as therapy to try to access the lost memories.The narrator is inspired to track down the hypnotist from the theatre and see whether he can help him recover his lost past...but the results of the mesmerism are quite beyond anybody's expectations.

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  The Cop and the Anthem

  O. Henry

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  "The Cop and the Anthem" is a December 1904 short story by the United States author O. Henry. It includes several of the classic elements of an O. Henry story, including a setting in New York City, an empathetic look at the state of mind of a member of an underprivileged class, and an ironic ending. "The Cop and the Anthem" has only one character who is given a name, the protagonist "Soapy." It is made clear that Soapy is homeless, one of the underclass men and women who flocked to New York City during the earliest years of the twentieth century. The short story's narrative is set in an unstated day in late fall. Soapy faces the urgent necessity of finding some sort of shelter for the winter. He is psychologically experienced in thinking of Blackwell's Island, the local jail, as a de facto winter homeless shelter, and the narrative shows him developing a series of tactics intended to encourage the police to classify him as a criminal and arrest him.

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