George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he...
It is 1964: Bert Cousins, the deputy District Attorney, shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited, bottle of gin in hand. As the cops of Los Angeles drink, talk and dance into the June afternoon, he notices a heart-stoppingly...
A city in ten chapters.
Every city is made of stories: stories that intersect and diverge, stories of the commonplace and the strange, of love and crime, of ghosts and monsters.
In this city an asylum seeker struggles to begin a new life,...
"'He ascended, eyes riveted, nailed to the steps leading up to the top of the pyramid of the sun. How many human hearts he wondered had been plucked from bodies there to feed the dying light of the sun and create an obsession with royal...
In the waning years of the Soviet Union, a sad young Finnish woman boards a train in Moscow. Bound for Mongolia, she’s trying to put as much space as possible between her and a broken relationship. Wanting to be alone, she chooses an empty...
Augusto Monterroso is widely known for short stories characterized by brilliant satire and wit. Yet behind scathing allusions to the weaknesses and defects of the artistic and intellectual worlds, they show his generous and expansive sense of...
Martha Wells is a New York Times best-selling author of 23 works of science fiction and fantasy. This story is a prequel to The Murderbot Diaries, her Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning novella series.
A short story of Murderbot originating from a...
On an ordinary day at a girl's school, two students are reported missing. The subsequent search involves the neighboring widower Old Mr. Rock and his granddaughter and her fiance, and uncovers the hidden lusts, ambitions, suspicions and...