Casual Labor: A Book of Short Stories

The 10 best short story collections

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Some of the best short stories contain unexpected moments of felicity on which the plot pivots. And so it was that, just as I was compiling this list, I received a giant package containing this doorstep of a book. It might be the most comprehensive collection of short stories… ever, featuring an all-star cast including Angela Carter, Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl and more, selected by David Miller, a literary agent and author.

Topics Short stories The 10 best Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading? The Indian jungle is full of dangers and he must fight to survive; the tiger, Shere Khan, has sworn to kill him, the sinister monkey residents of the Cold Lairs wish to kidnap him, and his home is threatened by the Cobra and the Red Dog. Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. Carefully crafted over 15 years, they explore unbounded sexualities, a vision of the fluidity of the person, and politics — from the deaths of black people at the hands of the police, to the deep shifts that signal the subtle changes in the nature of capitalism and much more.

These stories may sometimes tickle, sometimes shock; but will always engage both the intellect and the heart. These meticulously crafted, deeply disquieting stories by Joyce Carol Oates confront the dangers that surround us, and the dangers that lurk within. A precocious eleven-year-old girl, in thrall to the mysterious black sheep of the family, climbs into his sky-blue Chevy for a drive into the unknown… A university transfer student becomes increasingly obsessed with the murder of a female classmate, placing her own sense of self in peril… A recent widow fantasizes about transforming into a great flying predator, unerring and pitiless in the hunt… A trusting group of bird-watchers is borne to a remote part of the globe, and to a harrowing fate….

MatchUp takes the never-before-seen bestseller pairings of FaceOff and adds a delicious new twist: Box, and Nelson DeMille. Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover — or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere.

It includes stories by Daisy Johnson and James Kelman, among others.

Razor-sharp and lightning-fast, this standalone short story from the 1 international bestselling author Karin Slaughter will leave you breathless. Now a lawyer herself, Charlie has made it her mission to defend those with no one else to turn to. So when Flora Faulkner, a motherless teen, begs for help, Charlie is reminded of her own past, and is powerless to say no.

In he published Knots for the first time. The collection includes very concise stories as well as longer reads. They range from the surreal to the oddly mundane, and prod the discomforts of mental, sexual, and familial bonds. A young man is born with an uncuttable umbilical cord and spends his life physically tethered to his mother; a tipsy uncle makes an uncomfortable toast with unforeseeable repercussions, and a dissatisfied deer yearns to be seen.

Sarah Hall is one of the most skillful young British authors. The author of The Wolf Border and the Man Booker Prize finalist is releasing in June a collection of nine short stories that are both disturbing and dazzling. In Madame Zero , Sarah Hall uses her piercing insight to plumb the depth of the female experience and the human soul. This anthology is the first volume of an annual collection that recognizes outstanding fiction debuts published in a print or online literary magazine.

The dozen winning stories take place in South Carolina and in South Korea, on a farm in the eighteenth century and among the cubicles of a computer-engineering firm in the present day. They narrate ancient themes with current urgency: Feel free to share this visual on your site Creative Commons license. Interested in lists like this?

Make sure to get free updates by RSS or email. Founder of Ebook Friendly. Ebook enthusiast, technology geek, and self-published short story author. Info Posts Twitter Blog Mail. Compare what you expect from the Fire tablet you plan to buy with the first thoughts of someone who has just received…. Are you looking for best ways to enhance your new iPad? Do you want to turn the iPad into a fully-fledged laptop? Checking out the Prime Day landing page is not the only way to explore the best deals available exclusively for Prime members. Check out our recommendations for microSD memory cards, screen protectors, Bluetooth keyboards, tablet pillows, charging stations, and more….

15 Short Story Collections Perfect for the On-the-Go Reader

I do adore the Pretenders, who absolutely rocked. I was never into Journey, though they put on a great show, doing what they do, playing their many recognizable hits. I guess I bought Hysteria by Def Leppard when I was in high school—we all did—and banged my head to their mostly alike-sounding songs until I discovered REM, the Pixies, and other, better bands soon after. But it was fun. People—beautiful, tan, affluent-looking people—were having a good time, smoking the shit out of pot, sporting leis and shark hats, and dancing in the aisles.

That I left smiling? From three stories, I confidently proclaim this: Sachdeva is eclectic as all hell, as one story was about this blind poet, a buddy of Galileo, who is pushed into writing an epic poem by a couple of angels. Sachdeva nailed them both, though, as I enjoyed each of them quite a bit. I was hooked right away, to say the least, a neat convention that Sachdeva uses slyly and confidently.

The story proceeds in two timelines, the women going to see their families in the frontstory, the tale of the kidnapping in the back. When they get there, Promise suggests the two spend a night on the town before visiting their folks. Sachdeva even addresses these questions later in the story, via a short breaking of the fourth wall, and again, keeps us reading to find this out.

By the way, I got a real sense of Camus here, Promise wanting to disco instead of going home, kind of like The Stranger going for a dip despite Mother died today.

The women do indeed hit a local club that night, but not before getting a free luxury hotel room, apparently by willing it to happen, by assuaging the clerk to do it. Later, the ladies need some money and simply walk up to a man by the pool and ask him for it, watching as he reaches into his wallet and hands them his billfold. Promise and Abike and all the girls in their school are violently removed, their teacher shot in the face, and carted off to a camp yes, like the Chibok girls in Nigeria.

There, the girls are programmed to pray, to obey, to be well behaved, conservative Muslims, under the threat of death—any girl who falls out of line is literally beaten to death in front of the others. Several weeks in, government soldiers come to rescue the girls, but the kidnappers, using the girls as human shields, kill all the soldiers. They then move camp, but not before making their detainees pile and burn the dead.

On the way out, the surviving girls are paired with their abductors and married, followed by being raped, over and over again, into even deeper submission. She has a nice visit for a couple of days—of course, the reunion scenes are touching and well done—but after that, Promise gathers up Abike and heads back to from where they came, promising her parents to soon return. Not to mention the whole mind control thing.

What a fucking story. What a great writer. I predict this will end up being one of the best books of , on a lot of those year-end lists.

Coming at you on another beautiful but hot day in Southwest Missouri. I have been enjoying the freedom of the house to myself this week—this whole month, in fact. My kids are in summer school and the Karen is at work at the paper, and since my class this summer is online, I have from about nine until three every day to do what I want. This month, though, I have a home base. And today, after a couple of hours of piddling around the house, doing chores and finding excuses to lie down on the couch, I got dressed and went to my office again.

So I went there, leaving the aloneness. I have a big desk and my office computer has twice the screen that the laptap has that I use at home. So, even with time to be alone, in my own abode, I found myself wondering off. As a coddled and overprotected kid, I remember that step being important for me, how I relished it, looked forward to it. Not that I had anything particular planned, but it was another rung up the maturity ladder. They gave me a key. I was growing up, and as the accidental youngest of seven kids, that meant a lot.

Sure, one time I watched the turn the corner down the street, ran to a pack of firecrackers I had stashed, then blew them off behind the garage. And before long, the masturbation started, so then …. Overall, though, I came to associate being alone, in my house, with being an adult. The funny thing is I have some leftover fireworks from the Fourth.

And regarding masturbation, …. Soon, I found out this plan might have been a mistake, as most of the six stories in the book are interconnected, using the same characters and following a pretty consistent timeline.

No going backwards now. The titular island is an island off the northwest coast of Ireland, the edge of Europe, Wall proclaims, the latest island the father has taken refuge upon. We now know that, in short, this family has a lot of baggage. The story, and this collection, are more than these people and their tragic circumstances, however. Wall is a true master of the image, of the sentence, and putting one into the other.

His striking descriptions of the island, of all the settings of his stories, is truly remarkable. As is his style, a sprawling, free sort of narration that follows Grace in and around her head, lavishly detailing her hopes and fears, stopping sparsely for quick lines of unquotation-marked dialogue. Wall seems as much of a poet as he is a fiction writer, his words placing me on his islands, with his characters, at a level so few writers can muster.

So I can find new writers, read more books, and learn something from people who write differently than I do.

JUST ARRIVED

Wall checks all three boxes today, a fine way to spend my day alone, on my own island. We were pretty sure it would work out fine, and lo and behold, it did. I read the first hunk of stories from this book while sitting by the fire at our camp, right before my aforementioned conversation with that raccoon after which, I promptly went to bed, as the critter requested I go into the tent so he and his buddies could tear through our garbage.

She tells the tale of her father, Ricky, who at nineteen falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Rosario, and in drunken longing, has her name tattooed on his biceps, embellished with squigglies at no extra charge by the Chinatown artist. There Isabel spies the Rosario tattoo for the first time. Isabel is not only jealous, but is furious, and almost ends their courtship. Ricky saves their relationship by agreeing to never appear before her without a shirt and to always make love with the lights out.

Before long, the couple marries and the narrator is born. For a while, the little family seems pretty happy. One day, when our narrator is nine, Ricky is walking from the bedroom to the bathroom, his shirt off, and he runs into Isabel, exposing her to his Rosario tattoo.

This incites all kinds of bad juju. She is so heartbroken and angry, she leaves Ricky and the narrator, forcing our hero to care for herself and her regretful but loving father. I like that perspective, the earnestness and affinity that style of narration offers the story. Up to this point in the book, the stories had all been told from the vantage point of young Filipino women, women who seemed to be living in the shadows of more beautiful, glamorous women, usually a sister or a cousin.

In some cases, this proved true, while in others, it tragically did not. Back at you again on this Friday. Yesterday I posted a pic of all the books I recently received by requesting review copies, adding to my pile of must-reads. Later in the day I received a shipment of books I ordered from the Google, another nice stack:. I know I have six weeks left and can accomplish a whole lot in six weeks, but just as the days are getting shorter now instead of longer, I feel like the summer is slipping away in a similar fashion. Must make progress on novel.

Must not squander three months away from teaching.

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