Essential Stories
10 best books like Essential Stories (V.S. Pritchett): The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Fancies and Goodnights, Baaa, Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas, What Becomes, Collected Stories, The Pilgrim Hawk, Collected Stories, Last Tales, Nervous People and Other Satires
| Author | Isaac Bashevis Singer |
| ISBN | 0374517886 |
The forty-seven stories in this collection, selected by Singer himself out of nearly one hundred and fifty, range from the publication of his now-classic first collection, Gimpel the Fool, in 1957, until 1981. They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern...
| Author | John Collier |
| ISBN | 1590170512 |
John Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are works of rare wit, curious insight, and scary implication. They stand out as one of the pinnacles in the critically neglected but perennially popular tradition of weird writing that includes E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Dickens as well as more recent masters...
| Author | David Macaulay |
| ISBN | 0395395887 |
where humans have gone extinct, sheep begin to take our places.
Sadly, for them, they adopt all our nasty habits - even the really DIRTY stuff like banking and politics!
(How this is all accomplished without opposable thumbs is anyone's guess . . .)
As you might imagine,...
Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas
| Author | Arthur Schnitzler |
| ISBN | 1566635063 |
These artful new translations of nine of Arthur Schnitzler's most important stories and novellas including "Dream Story," on which Stanley Kubrick based his widely acclaimed film Eyes Wide Shut-reinforce the Viennese author's remarkable achievement as literary modernist, depth psychologist,...
| Author | A.L. Kennedy |
| ISBN | 0224077872 |
..... of the broken hearted? Who had love that's now departed. And that is the theme of A.L. Kennedy's latest collection of short stories. Bleak, perhaps. But then you don't read A.L. Kennedy unless you can take her unflinching, precise, unsettling, razor sharp dissection of the pain that makes us human....
| Author | Frank O'Connor |
| ISBN | 0394710487 |
The definitive collection of short stories by a master of the form and one of Ireland’s most celebrated authors
This indispensable volume contains the best of Frank O’Connor’s short fiction. From “Guests of the Nation” to “The Mad Lomasneys” to “First Confession” to...
| Author | Glenway Wescott |
| ISBN | 0940322560 |
This powerful short novel describes the events of a single afternoon. Alwyn Towers, an American expatriate and sometime novelist, is staying with a friend outside of Paris, when a well-heeled, itinerant Irish couple drops in—with Lucy, their trained hawk, a restless, sullen, disturbingly totemic...
| Author | Saul Bellow |
| ISBN | 0140292896 |
Saul Bellow's Collected Stories, handpicked by the author, display the depth of character and acumen of the Nobel laureate's narrative powers. While he has garnered acclaim as a novelist, Bellow's shorter works prove equally strong. Primarily set in a sepia-toned Chicago, characters (mostly men)...
| Author | Isak Dinesen |
| ISBN | 0679736409 |
Last Tales is a collection of twelve of the last tales that Isak Dinesen wrote before her death in 1962. They include seven tales from Albondocani, a projected novel that was never completed; "The Caryatids," an unfinished Gothic tale of a couple bedeviled by an old letter and a gypsy's spell; and three...
| Author | Mikhail Zoshchenko |
| ISBN | 0253201926 |
Typical targets of Zoshchenko's satire are the Soviet bureaucracy, crowded conditions in communal apartments, marital infidelities and the rapid turnover in marriage partners, and "the petty-bourgeois mode of life, with its adulterous episodes, lying, and similar nonsense." His devices are...
Sunstroke: Selected Stories
| Author | Ivan Bunin |
| ISBN | 1566634261 |
"The Gentleman from San Francisco" is easily the best known of Ivan Bunin's stories and has achieved the stature of a masterpiece. But Bunin's other stories are not to be missed. In Sunstroke, Graham Hettlinger has selected the "Gentleman" and twenty-four other stories and translated them afresh—several...
| Author | Ingeborg Bachmann |
| ISBN | 0841910693 |
This is collection of the stories written by a distinguished Austrian author who died in 1973. Reading these stories entails abandoning the terms of one's own comfort. The author's relentless vision demands that readers allows themselves to be hypnotised, taken over by her repetitive cadences and...
| Author | Felisberto Hernández |
| ISBN | 0941419541 |
Inhabited by rich, eccentric characters and full of strange and surprising landscapes, this collection of short stories deeply influenced a generation of magical realists.If I hadn't read the stories of Felisberto Hernandez in 1950, I would not be the writer I am today. Because he taught me that the...
| Author | Peter Taylor |
| ISBN | 0312146957 |
From the grand master of the American short story, these fourteen tales of domestic life in the South during the thirties and forties explore that extraordinary world of manners, expectations and unspoken understanding. The reader is drawn as if by magnetic force into a world rendered in breathtaking,...
| Author | Christian TeBordo |
| ISBN | 0977199290 |
In brilliantly strange stories that explode the boundaries of short fiction, Christian TeBordo locates the awe in the awful possibilities we could have never imagined. A girl masters the art of forgetting among kidney thieves. A motivational speaker skins his best friend to impress his wife. A man...
| Author | John McGahern |
| ISBN | 0679744010 |
This is the first set of short stories I've read by McGahern. Most were excellent. One dragged ("Peaches"), one was extremely disturbing ("Lavin") but many others left you wanting more, like a good short story should.
While McGahern was a great writer in general, I love the way the guy wrote about...
| Author | David Constantine |
| ISBN | 1771960175 |
Featuring the story adapted into the Academy Award nominated film, 45 YEARS.
The first American publication by one of the greatest living fiction masters, In Another Country spans David Constantine's remarkable thirty-year career. Known for their pristine emotional clarity, their spare...
| Author | Maeve Brennan |
| ISBN | 1582431191 |
Reading Maeve Brennan is like watching a master jeweler construct a ticking watch from an array of tiny, inanimate parts. -Linda Barrett Osborne, New York Times Book ReviewSo good that I kept putting the book down to savor a description or perfect phrase, to hug myself with malicious joy, and to put off...
Selected Short Stories of John O'Hara
“John O’Hara’s fiction,” wrote Lionel Trilling, “is preeminent for its social verisimilitude.” Made famous by his bestselling novels, including BUtterfield 8 and Appointment in Samarra, O’Hara (1905–1970) also wrote some of the finest short fiction of the twentieth century.
First...
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
| Author | David Gates |
| ISBN | 0385351534 |
These eleven stories, along with a masterful novella, mark the triumphant return of David Gates, whom New York magazine anointed “a true heir to both Raymond Carver and John Cheever.”
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is populated by characters, young or old or neither, who are well educated,...
| Author | Gyula Krúdy |
| ISBN | 0141193034 |
Life is a Dream (1931) is Gyula Krudy's magical collection of ten short stories. Creating a world where editors shoot themselves after a hard day's brunching, men attend duels incognito and lovers fall out over salad dressing, Life is a Dream is a comic, nostalgic, romantic and erotic glimpse into the...
| Author | Sławomir Mrożek |
| ISBN | 0394620534 |
Slawomir Mrożek grew up in Kraków during World War II. He became a member of the Polish United Workers' Party during the reign of Stalinism in the People's Republic of Poland and made his living (you call this living?!!) as a political journalist.
The Elephant - Mr. Mrożek's...
English Fairy Tales and Legends
| Author | Rosalind Kerven |
| ISBN | 1905400659 |
The stories that many children grown up with are very international—for example Snow White is German, Cinderella is French, and Aladdin is Arabian. Folk tales and legends are an intrinsic part of English national culture—so which are the fairy tales from England? Rosalind Kerven presents...
