Short Stories & Anthologies Audiobooks

From Patricia Engel, whose novel Infinite Country was a New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick, comes an exquisite collection of ten haunting, award-winning short stories set across the Americas and linked by themes of migration, sacrifice, and moral compromise. Two Colombian expats meet as strangers on the rainy streets of New York City, both burdened with traumatic pasts. In Cuba, a woman discovers her deceased brother’s bones have been stolen, and the love of her life returns from Ecuador for a one-night visit. A cash-strapped couple hustles in Miami, to life-altering ends. The Faraway World is a collection of arresting stories from the New York Times bestselling author of Infinite Country, Patricia Engel, “a gifted storyteller whose writing shines even in the darkest corners” (The Washington Post). Intimate and panoramic, these stories bring to life the liminality of regret, the vibrancy of community, and the epic deeds and quiet moments of love.

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and series editor Heidi Pitlor. Andrew Sean Greer, “an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy” (Washington Post), selects twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.  Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by #1 New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Jess Walter and series editor Steph Cha.  New York Times bestselling author and “superb storyteller” (Boston Globe), Jess Walter flexes his genre chops and selects twenty short stories that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

A new creation by the author of Severance, Bliss Montage crashes through our carefully built mirages. What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end? In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive. These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

An electric collection of new short stories from the inimitable, bestselling writer of Talk to Me and Outside Looking In In the title story of Walk Between the Raindrops, a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In “Thirteen Days,” passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And “Hyena” begins simply: “That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit—it was there and it came for him.” A virtuoso of the short form, T.C. Boyle returns with an inventive, uproarious, and masterfully told collection of short stories characterized by biting satire, resonant wit, and a boundless, irrepressible imagination. 

"If I Survive You is a collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level. There are no limits to where Jonathan Escoffery will go." —Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House "Torian Brackett's skillful narration fully embodies the family at the center of this moving audiobook."- AudioFile Magazine (Earphones Award Winner) "If I Survive You, the debut of rising star Jonathan Escoffery (Macmillan Audio, 8 hours and 45 minutes), is read by Torian Brackett, whose voice is the ideal instrument for this dazzling collection of linked stories, moving fluidly in and out of Jamaican patois, using first-, second-, and third-person narration to show different angles on brothers Delano and Trelawny, their cousin Cukie, their families, their schoolmates, their employers, and their girlfriends."- Kirkus A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller. In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on first through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper—himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica—Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net. Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and white supremacy. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In nine stories that span the globe, What We Fed to the Manticore takes readers inside the minds of a full cast of animal narrators to understand the triumphs, heartbreaks, and complexities of the creatures that share our world. Through nine emotionally vivid stories, all narrated from animal perspectives, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s debut collection explores themes of environmentalism, conservation, identity, belonging, loss, and family with resounding heart and deep tenderness. In Kolluri’s pages, a faithful hound mourns the loss of the endangered rhino he swore to protect. Vultures seek meaning as they attend to the antelope that perished in Central Asia. A beloved donkey’s loyalty to a zookeeper in Gaza is put to the ultimate test. And a wounded pigeon in Delhi finds an unlikely friend. In striking, immersive detail against the backdrop of an ever-changing international landscape, What We Fed to the Manticore speaks to the fears and joys of the creatures we share our world with, and ultimately places the reader under the rich canopy of the tree of life.

An anthology of original horror stories edited by Bram Stoker Award® winners Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason that showcases authors from historically excluded backgrounds telling terrifying tales of what it means to be, or merely to seem, “other” Offering new stories from some of the biggest names in horror as well as some of the hottest up-and-coming talents, Other Terrors will provide the ultimate reading experience for horror fans who want to examine fear of “the other.” Be they of a different culture, a different background, a different sexual orientation or gender identity, a different belief system, or a different skin color, some people simply aren’t part of the community’s majority—and are perceived as scary. Humans are almost instinctively inclined to fear what’s different, and there are a multitude of individuals who have spent far too long on the outside looking in. And the thing about the outside is . . . it’s much larger than you think. In Other Terrors, horror writers from a multitude of underrepresented backgrounds have created stories of everyday people, places, and things where something shifts, striking a deeper, much more primal, chord of fear. Are our eyes playing tricks on us, or is there something truly sinister lurking under the surface of what we thought we knew? And who among us is really the other, after all? CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: Tananarive Due, Jennifer McMahon, S.A. Cosby, Stephen Graham Jones, Alma Katsu, Michael Thomas Ford, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Christina Sng, Denise Dumars, Usman T. Malik, Annie Neugebauer, Gabino Iglesias, Hailey Piper, Nathan Carson, Shanna Heath, Tracy Cross, Linda D. Addison, Maxwell I. Gold, Larissa Glasser, Eugen Bacon, Holly Lyn Walrath, Jonathan Lees, M. E. Bronstein, Michael Hanson

For fans of Phil Klay, Kevin Powers, and Tim O'Brien: Dramatic, powerful, authentic short stories of soldiers fighting a "forever war," in combat and back home. Combat takes a different toll on each soldier; so does coming home. All the Ruined Men by Bill Glose comprises linked stories that show veterans struggling for normalcy as they grapple with flashbacks, injuries (both physical and psychological), damaged relationships, loss of faith, and loss of memory. Beginning in 2003, All the Ruined Men spans ten years, from the confident beginning of America’s “forever war” to the confusion and disillusionment that followed. As a former paratrooper and Gulf War veteran, author Bill Glose is closely bound to these stories. Drawing from his own experiences and military knowledge, Glose presents a cast of complex and sympathetic characters: young men who embraced what seemed like a war of just cause, who trained and fought and lived and died together, and who have returned to families, wives, children, civilian life, and an America that has lost its way. Unforgettable, moving, filled with moments of anguish, doubt, love, hope, and other emotions, All the Ruined Men is a singular debut collection. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press.

Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs. A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance, Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction.

“A knockout short story collection...Each one of these 10 dizzyingly immersive stories offers up a heady and visceral portrait of what ails us, from isolation and self-doubt, to unrequited love and regret over what might have been, to what it means to be (and to be considered) an American." -- San Francisco Chronicle Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories. Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly endless access to knowledge, and little actual power. Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who “reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it” (Paris Review).

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes—for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous—as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places. We all live like we’re famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don’t want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during “the year of my reinvention” finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams. Funny, poignant, and redemptive, this collection of short fiction offers a dazzling range of voices, backdrops, and situations. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch, once again “solidifying his place in the contemporary canon as one of our most gifted builders of fictional worlds” (Esquire).

"The multiple performances in this audiobook are uniformly adept, providing listeners the disarming experience of adults unflinchingly looking back at childhood." -AudioFile on Learning to Talk Learning to Talk is a dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy. With a new foreword by Hilary Mantel. In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In “King Billy Is A Gentleman,” the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. “Curved Is the Line of Beauty" is a story of friendship, faith, and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In “Third Floor Rising," she watches, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity. With a deceptively light touch, Mantel illuminates the poignant experiences of childhood that leave each of us forever changed. “A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat...Mantel’s narrators never tell everything they know, and that’s why they’re worth listening to, carefully.” —USA Today “Her short stories always recognize other potential realities...Even the most straightforward of Mantel’s tales retain a faintly otherworldly air.” —The Washington Post A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.

“Raw and searching...Taddeo returns with more ruthless explorations of the feminine mystique.” —Entertainment Weekly, “The Best New Books of the Month” * “Provocative.” —Los Angeles Times From the #1 New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Three Women and “our most eloquent and faithful chronicler of human desire” (Esquire), comes an electrifying collection of nine fearless and ferocious short stories. Behind anonymous screens, an army of cool and beautiful girls manage the dating service Ghost Lover, a forwarding system for text messages that promises to spare you the anguish of trying to stay composed while communicating with your crush. At a star-studded political fundraiser in a Los Angeles mansion, a trio of women compete to win the heart of the slick guest of honor. In a tense hospital waiting room, an inseparable pair of hard-partying friends crash into life’s responsibilities, but the magic of their glory days comes alive again at the moment they least expect it. In these nine riveting stories—which include two Pushcart Prize winners and a finalist for the National Magazine Award—Lisa Taddeo brings to life the fever of obsession, the blindness of love, and the mania of grief. Featuring Taddeo’s arresting prose that continues to thrill her legions of fans, Ghost Lover dares you to look away.

Meet Finn. From all appearances he’s just a regular Irish kid, living in an Irish city, but he’s exceptional in one way: He’s wildly unlucky. He was dropped at birth and nearly ripped in two by a lightning strike. Never mind the cherry bomb that blew off one of his toes when he was five or that fall from the monkey bars at age seven that left him with a broken arm. His grandmother promises his fortunes will change, that God owes him, but what are the chances of that when the author of his fate is legendary storyteller Stephen King, the undisputed master of the macabre, eerie, and plain terrifying? King sets the scene: Finn is nineteen, walking home alone at night after necking with his girlfriend. He’s exhilarated and aching with what it means to be young and alive. Then bam: Another kid who’s dressed suspiciously like him, who, in fact, looks a lot like him, runs smack into him. This is weird enough, but moments later, while he’s still rubbing a scraped elbow, a van pulls up and two men jump out and grab him. A hood is thrown over his head, there’s a needle in his arm, and he’s out. He wakes in a cell, the captive of men who think he’s got answers to give them about a briefcase full of plans, about blueprints and some bomb factory, and they are willing to go to great—and painful—lengths to get what they want from him. It’s got to be a case of mistaken identity, or is something far more sinister going on? And far more absurd? As the young man tries to save his skin, he travels through existential and psychological crises that are a signature of King’s stories. No one knows monsters—imagines monsters—like the creator of It, The Outsider, Pet Sematary, and countless other mind-bending and timeless bestsellers, but in Finn he targets a peculiarly twenty-first-century monster: men so consumed by spy and war games that they twist reality to suit their purposes. As darkly funny as it is deeply unsettling, this latest story from King pokes some serious fun at “the luck of the Irish”—or in fact counting on any kind of luck when the machinations of a few bullies and madmen can so easily and tragically upend the lives of the innocent.

The Trouble with Happiness is a short-story collection from Tove Ditlevsen, the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, never before translated in English A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife’s beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of marriage and family life in mid-century Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence, and despair, as women and men struggle to escape from the roles assigned to them and dream of becoming free and happy—without ever truly understanding what that might mean. Tove Ditlevsen is one of Denmark’s most famous and beloved writers, and her autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy was hailed as a masterpiece on re-publication in English, lauded for its wry humor, limpid prose, and powerful honesty. The poignant and understated stories in The Trouble with Happiness, written in the 1950s and 1960s and never before translated into English, offer readers a new chance to encounter the quietly devastating work of this essential twentieth-century writer.

In these over-busy, stress-rich days, what sounds better than a stay at a high-end spa, complete with a much-needed change of scenery, in a warmer, gentler spot? The heroine of this latest story from beloved bestselling author Lauren Groff is offered just that: a few all-expenses-paid days of pampering at an Arizona retreat, far from the colorless cold of late winter in her hometown of Boston. Soon she’s squinting into desert sunlight, a kind of all-encompassing brightness she’s not known in years. But relaxing is harder than it seems for Groff’s narrator, who, like so many of her unforgettable characters, is thrillingly complex and conflicted. A novelist, she’s been invited to the retreat to bring an air of intellectual sophistication—but only because a “far more famous writer” canceled at the last minute. She hasn’t had a full night’s sleep or written with any enthusiasm in months and is fresh from a breakup. Arriving with her guard up, she quickly becomes ill at ease with the wastefulness-in-the-name-of-luxury she sees around her, the complacency of the other guests—so wealthy she can barely relate to them or them to her—and the New Age spirituality on the overpriced spa menu. And yet something starts working on her. Maybe it’s the jarring beauty of the desert, the response to the reading she gives from her latest book, or even those New Age treatments she’s so suspicious of. Despite herself, her cynicism begins to soften. And as it does so, she becomes overwhelmed by what she feels—and we are drawn into the existential and psychological terrain that Groff maps with such uncanny skill, providing piercing insight after insight into what it means to live among the twenty-first century’s environmental and socioeconomic crises. In Junket, as with her recent internationally celebrated novel Matrix, she conjures a woman at a crossroads who, rather than surrender to desolation, finds renewed courage and strength via her art, a path to a creative vision all her own, confirming once again that this three-time National Book Award finalist is a master of both the sublime and the subversive.

The critically acclaimed author of The Rib King returns with an eagerly anticipated collection of interlocking short stories including the title story written exclusively for this volume, that explore relationships between friends, family and strangers in a Black neighborhood over fifteen years The twelve gripping tales In The Last Suspicious Holdout, the new story collection by award-winning author Ladee Hubbard, deftly chronicle poignant moments in the lives of an African American community located in a “sliver of southern suburbia.” Spanning from 1992 to 2007, the stories represent a period during which the Black middle-class expanded while stories of "welfare Queens," "crack babies," and "super predators" abounded in the media. In “False Cognates,” a formerly incarcerated attorney struggles with raising the tuition to keep his troubled son in an elite private school. In “There He Go,” a young girl whose mother moves constantly clings to a picture of the grandfather she doesn’t know but invents stories of his greatness. Characters spotlighted in one story reappear in another, providing a stunning testament to the enduring resilience of Black people as they navigate the “post-racial” period The Last Suspicious Holdout so vividly portrays.

From an award-winning team of authors, editors, and translators comes a groundbreaking short story collection that explores the expanse of Chinese science fiction and fantasy. In The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, you can dine at a restaurant at the end of the universe, cultivate to immortality in the high mountains, watch roses perform Shakespeare, or arrive at the island of the gods on the backs of giant fish to ensure that the world can bloom. Written, edited, and translated by a female and nonbinary team, these stories have never before been published in English and represent both the richly complicated past and the vivid future of Chinese science fiction and fantasy. Time travel to a winter's day on the West Lake, explore the very boundaries of death itself, and meet old gods and new heroes in this stunning new collection.

It’s been a long, long couple of years. A global pandemic, an economic crisis, racial and political strife brought to the boiling point, the climate not far behind. As we nervously embark on yet another uncertain trip around the sun, we wonder: How’s everyone doing? Ten of America’s finest writers tell us in This Is Life. Drawing on their wisdom and lived experience, they share bold, occasionally comic, occasionally biting insights on the past two years and offer possible ways forward, both for the country and for us as individuals. They articulate the anxiety of these inarguably lousy times yet also remind us that there remain plenty of reasons to be hopeful despite it all. In this collection: NPR’s Weekend Edition host Scott Simon on the hard-won lessons that will inform our lives going forward National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow Jacqueline Woodson on savoring today to better cope with tomorrow’s perils Climate activist Bill McKibben on a reimagined infrastructure that could finally save the planet New York Times bestselling author and national security expert Garrett M. Graff on the precarious fate of American democracy National Book Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado on the impulse to love harder in the face of calamity Bethany McLean, bestselling author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, on where to go now that the free-market economy has failed us Kiese Laymon, author of the bestselling memoir Heavy, on the poisonous influence of nonstop news Former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens on the bridge-building power of sports R. Eric Thomas, playwright and bestselling author of Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, on the thrill and anxiety of reconnecting with people in person Bonnie Tsui, author of the 2020 bestseller Why We Swim, on how to find joy in the smallest of life’s moments Candid and empathetic, timely and timeless, This Is Life is a much-needed literary compass for navigating 2022 and beyond.

*A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Book of the Year* From John Edgar Wideman, a modern “master of language” (The New York Times Book Review), comes a stunning story collection that spans a range of topics from Michael Jordan to Emmett Till, from childhood memories to the final day in a prison cell. In Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone, his sixth collection of stories, John Edgar Wideman imbues with energy and life the concerns that have consistently infused his fiction and nonfiction. How does it feel to grow up in America, a nation that—despite knowing better, despite its own laws, despite experiencing for hundreds of years the deadly perils and heartbreak of racial division—encourages (sometimes unwittingly, but often on purpose) its citizens to see themselves as colored or white, as inferior or superior. Never content merely to tell a story, Wideman seeks once again to create language that delivers passages like jazz solos, and virtuosic manipulations of time to entangle past and present. The story “Separation” begins with a boy afraid to stand alone beside his grandfather’s coffin, then wends its way back and forth from Pittsburgh to ancient Sumer. “Atlanta Murders” starts with two chickens crossing a road and becomes a dark riff, contemplating “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” James Baldwin’s report on the 1979–1981 child murders in Atlanta, Georgia. Comprised of fictions of the highest caliber and relevancy by a writer whose imagination and intellect “prove his continued vitality...with vigor and soul” (Entertainment Weekly), Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone will entrance and surprise committed Wideman fans and newcomers alike.

In a daring and fierce debut work of fiction—the likes of which comes along once in a generation—Virginia’s landscapes, emblems, and Thomas Jefferson’s historic plantation set the stage for a cast of unforgettable characters fighting for their right to exist in America. A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America. Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation. In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse.” United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable collection that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction. "A group of talented narrators deliver these short stories set in Virginia, which focus on the lives of African Americans." --AudioFile Earphone Award Winner A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company

Margaret Atwood needs little introduction. If you don’t know her from her fifty-plus books and many awards and bestsellers, including her MaddAddam Trilogy, Alias Grace, and especially The Handmaid’s Tale, you’ll know her from that visionary and canonical novel’s adaptation into the Emmy-winning Hulu television series. At eighty-one, Atwood is more current and influential than ever, and with more than two million followers on Twitter, she’s achieved a kind of cool generally reserved for rock stars. (Bob Dylan’s got nothing on her.) In her Scribd Original story Two Scorched Men, Atwood takes a personal turn and returns to characters and places drawn from her own life. Her unnamed narrator pays tribute in fictional form to two men Atwood knew during the years she and her partner, Graeme Gibson, spent in Provence: John, a hotheaded Irishman who served in the Royal Navy during World War II and barely survived the deadly battles in the South Pacific; and François, a wry and affable Frenchman, who was once an operative in the French Resistance and led a life shaped by tragedy. As Atwood writes here, both men knew “I would someday relate their lives for them. Why did they want this? Why does anyone? We resist the notion that we’ll become mere handfuls of dust, so we wish to become words instead. Breath in the mouths of others.” Breathed into rich and dimensional life in these pages is the exquisite yet vaguely haunted house that the narrator and her husband, Tig, rented from John; the adjacent ancient forest and its allures and dangers; the rough country roads walked and retraced in dreams; the bloody history of the south of France, including the atrocities visited on medieval heretics and, centuries later, the guerrilla fighters who murdered Germans in an effort to free France from occupation. But at the center of the story is the touching friendship between John and François: how they indulge each other’s eccentricities and forgive each other their faults and psychic scars. With great precision and affection are their voices inhabited: John’s uproarious rants at human foolishness, his boasts about his playboy days as an advertising man, and a tempestuousness that so clearly covers for wounds that may never heal. By contrast, François is given to teasing misdirections and wordplay in the name of fun and a love of the absurd that draws everyone in. Tig, the husband of the narrator and a character so often featured in Atwood’s stories, speaks here as well. Practical, he’s a voice of reason and anchors the story’s narrator, much as John and François anchor one another in the world. In these enduring and endearing relationships, so much of Atwood’s art and wisdom are on display: how ably she balances life’s inevitable injuries with beauty and humor, the pain of loss with the curative powers of the imagination. What better time in Atwood’s creative life—in fact, in our collective lives post a global pandemic—to accept that none of us gets out of life unscathed, that we are all mortal, perfectly imperfect, but that there is solace in friendship and laughter in remembering? Indelible detail by detail, sentence by sentence, Atwood is instructing her reader on resilience. We do what we can for each other, she tells us here, and thank goodness for that.

Marked by a sure grasp of unusual subject matter and unfurling in gorgeous prose, the stories in You Should Pity Us Instead explore some of our toughest dilemmas: the cost of Middle East strife at its most intimate level, the likelihood of God considered in day to day terms, the moral stakes of family obligations, and the inescapable fact of mortality. Also, fundamentally, love in its many guises--family, romantic, friendship--each ensnared by rigorous demands and responsibilities. In the scary and heartbreaking "All theSons of Cain," an Israeli woman sneaks into Gaza to reclaim her captive son from militants. In the title story, two families--one Atheist, the other Christian--confront the limits of their beliefs. "Goldene Medene" takes us to 19th century Ellis Island, where a doctor evaluates immigrants and, in blue chalk, marks his life-changing verdicts on their backs. Amy Gustine exhibits anextraordinary generosity toward her characters, instilling them with a thriving, vivid presence. You Should Pity Us Instead presents an artist of dynamic and capacious vision, one who can delineate the heart's most strenuous knots, and one capable of inhabiting most any life, no matter how disparate or obscure.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE’S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK  WINNER OF THE FERRO-GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBTQ FICTION Named a Best Book of the Year by: New York Times * NPR * Washington Post * LA Times * Kirkus Reviews * New York Public Library * Chicago Public Library * Harper’s Bazaar * TIME * Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air * Boston Globe* The Atlantic A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life—immersive and comic, yet unsparing—that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family. A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle’s snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a “safe space” app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter. The stories in Afterparties, “powered by So’s skill with the telling detail, are like beams of wry, affectionate light, falling from different directions on a complicated, struggling, beloved American community” (George Saunders).

Eleven women confront dramas both everyday and outlandish in Caitlin Horrocks' This Is Not Your City. In stories as darkly comic as they are unflinching, people isolated by geography, emotion, or circumstance cut imperfect paths to peace—they have no other choice. A Russian mail-order bride in Finland is rendered silent by her dislocation and loss of language, the mother of a severely disabled boy writes him postcards he'll never read on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates, and an Iowa actuary wanders among the reincarnations of those she's known in her 127 lives. Horrocks' women find no simple escapes, and their acts of faith and acts of imagination in making do are as shrewd as they are surprising.

“A story so funny and alive with the moment. Orgy is rich with the absurdity of the world and ripe with the reality of our collective longing. Kaitlyn Greenidge has once again written something you won’t forget. Brilliant and sexy and aware and exactly what you need.” — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of FRIDAY BLACK “If sex is your chosen way for you to know yourself and others, what happens when a pandemic comes—and you discover it is as essential to your survival as a vaccine? Maybe more so? Sharp, affectionate, bawdy fun, a story as wise as a new best friend found on a spring night at an orgy. And Kaitlyn Greenidge continues to expand her literary terrain with this playful, masterful new work.” — Alexander Chee, author of HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL Novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of one of The New York Times’ most anticipated books of 2021, Libertie, and We Love You, Charlie Freeman, has been hailed as a “literary force to be reckoned with” (Buzzfeed). In her forthcoming Scribd Original, Orgy, she draws on the audacity that so often defines her work, imagining a day in the life of a young woman starved for connection and adventure in a city shut down by the COVID pandemic. Nessa knows she’s a hot mess. She’s strong and impulsive and won’t apologize for it. She moved to Brooklyn from Baltimore to study nursing—or that was the plan. Instead she used the money her mom’s church group raised for her schooling to rent her first place in Brooklyn. Twenty years later and she has zero regrets: She loves her apartment even if the ceiling sags and the heat won’t shut off, even if her chronically uptight cousin Laurie lives with her now, and even if being stuck in it during the pandemic is slowly robbing Nessa of what makes her feel most like her: desire, skin on skin, finding the secret parts of a lover’s body. When she’s invited to a party downtown, she knows she shouldn’t go but can’t resist. The invite’s subject line billed it as an “orgy,” thrown by some furries she knows. She outfits herself accordingly—pig nose and tail, black leotard, and fetchingly torn stockings—and, despite the disapproval of her cousin and the white boy who’s been camping in her cousin’s bed, she puts on her protective mask and walks out into a city transformed. It may be a lovely summer night, but she can’t help but see all that she and those around her have been missing during quarantine. At the party, she keeps confronting vestiges of her younger self, someone people noticed and who noticed others in reply: men, women, Black and white, gay and straight, nonbinaries, you name it—Nessa could see their beauty and reached to touch it. Now she feels like a ghost. Who and what she encounters next will make her confront how far she’s willing to go to feel like herself again, to encounter the desire that made the city feel real—and sometimes tantalizingly surreal—for her, and seize that rare and “pure glory of having a body and being alive.” Orgy is a provocative, unforgettable, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny take on lust and longing in the time of corona, from one of the most exciting writers working today.

The stories in Elegy on Kinderklavier explore the profound loss and intricate effects of war on lives that have been suddenly misaligned. A diplomat navigates a hostile political climate and an arranged marriage in an Israeli settlement on a newly discovered planet; a small town in Kansas shuns the army recruiter who signed up its boys as troops are deployed to Iraq, falling in helicopters and on grenades; a family dissolves around mental illness and a child’s body overtaken by cancer. The moment a soldier steps on an explosive device is painfully reproduced, nanosecond by nanosecond. Arna Bontemps Hemenway’s stories feel pulled out of time and place, and the suffering of his characters seem at once otherworldly and stunningly familiar. Elegy on Kinderklavier is a disquieting exploration of what it is to lose and be lost.

Brand-new stories by: T. Jefferson Parker, Janet Fitch, Eric Beetner, Kelly Shire, Tod Goldberg, Michael Craft, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Rob Roberge, J.D. Horn, Eduardo Santiago, Rob Bowman, Chris J. Bahnsen, Ken Layne, and Alex Espinoza. From the introduction by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: The best noir writers make us feel the heat of the sun, the touch of a lover. Setting can be gritty but can also be sublime, no longer relegated to urban locales and seedy hotel rooms but also mansions and swimming pools. Hence, Palm Springs, which may seem like an odd setting for a collection of dark short stories—it’s so sunny and bright here. The quality of light is unlike anywhere else, and with an average of three hundred sunny days a year, what could go wrong? . . . The stories in this collection come on like the wicked dust storms common to the area. More than half are by writers who live here full-time; all have homes in Southern California. They know this place in ways visitors and outsiders never will. These are not stories you’ll read in the glossy coffee-table books that feature Palm Springs’s good life. There is indeed a lush life to be found here, but for the characters in these stories, it’s often just out of reach.

In this warm and moving anthology, a group of bestselling authors and writers pay tribute to legendary, larger-than-life New York Times bestselling author Dorothea Benton Frank and her literary legacy. Inspired by the title Dorothea Benton Frank planned for her next book—Reunion Beach—these close friends and colleagues channeled their creativity, admiration, and grief into stories and poems that celebrate this remarkable woman and her abiding love for the Lowcountry of her native South Carolina—a land of beauty, history, charm, and Gullah magic she so brilliantly brought to life in her acclaimed novels.  From Elin Hilderbrand, #1 New York Times bestselling author, a sequel to Summer of ’69. From Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author, comes a heartwarming, humorous interview from the hereafter with Pat Conroy and Dorothea Benton Frank, two beloved icons of Southern literature. From Patti Callahan, bestselling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis and Surviving Savannah, comes The Bridemaids, a story about a trip to the South Carolina beach. From Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author, Mother and Child Reunion, a heartwarming story set under the warm South Carolina sun. Reunion Beach also features letters, short stories, poems, and essays from: Mary Norris, New York Times bestselling author and staff writer for The New Yorker Cassandra King Conroy, bestselling and award-winning author of Tell Me A Story Nathalie Dupree, James Beard Award-winning cookbook author Marjory Wentworth, former Poet Laureate of South Carolina Gervais Hagerty, author of In Polite Company Jacqueline Bouvier Lee, Peter Frank, Victoria Peluso, and William Frank Infused with Dorothea Benton Frank’s remarkable spirit, Reunion Beach is a literary homage and beautiful keepsake that keeps this dearly missed writer’s flame burning bright. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.