The tragicomedy of a young man in NYC, struggling with the reality of his mother's death, alienation and the seductive pull of drugs.
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All messed up and no place to go. It's six a.m., the party's over and reality is threatening to intervene in...
Chief Bromden, half American-Indian, whom the authorities believe is deaf and dumb, tells the story of a mental institution ruled by Big Nurse on behalf of the all-powerful Combine. Into this terrifying grey world comes McMurphy, a brawling...
Cloud atlas is a cleverly written book consisting of six seperate, but connecting stories set across six different periods in time. Each story has been chopped in two and symmetrically placed in the book so you don’t discover the conclusion to...
Cat’s Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the...
Next to the powers of heaven and hell, we are nothing. “So this was just one gigantic, cosmic war between light and dark magic. And we were only a small part of it, a tiny dot in the gods’ empire. It was no wonder that they saw us as...
In seventh-century China, during the great Tang dynasty, a young girl from the humble Wu clan entered the imperial gynaecium, which housed ten thousand concubines. Inside the Forbidden City, she witnessed seductions, plots, murders, and brazen...
One of the supreme masterpieces of Romantic fiction and Scottish literature, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a terrifying tale of murder and amorality, and of one man's descent into madness and despair. James Hogg's...
Best-selling, award-winning, pop culture powerhouse Roxane Gay guest edits this year’s Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction.
“I am looking for the artful way any given story is...
Enter — if you can bear it — the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least.
"Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons...
Claudius has survived the murderous intrigues of his predecessors to become, reluctantly, Emperor of Rome. Here he recounts his surprisingly successful reign: how he cultivates the loyalty of the army and the common people to repair the damage...