This collection is a treasury of short fiction by great writers of the past two centuries. As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this anthology.

At 84, John T. Finnegan has written his first novel, and what a story! This beautiful and intensely personal narrative will tug at your heartstrings. Finnegan's book contains passages about his childhood, World War II, his marriage, and his experiences and battles with the Railroad Union. In his chapter titled Angel, he regales good times and bad in a local bar, baring his soul about his life and what he's learned along the way. From 1935 to the present, Finnegan touches on his life's ups and downs with grace and humor. Commenting on sensitive subjects such as the civil rights movement, rocky relationships, Catholicism, Union antics and rules, the sadness and joy of raising children, and alcoholism, Finnegan pulls no punches. With brutal honesty and the wisdom that comes from living through harsh times, Everyman's Story is not for the faint of heart. It is a gripping, candid and a wonderfully written slice-of-life account that baby boomers and the Greatest Generation will recognize and deeply appreciate. John T. Finnegan has written a three-act musical with eight original songs and four original dance numbers; two children's stories; one short story; and a how-to tennis book titled My Serve. He lives with his wife, Celeste, in Southern California. Publisher's website: http: //www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/EverymansStory.htm

The Golden City of Prague has long been an intellectual centre of the western world. The writers collected here range from the early nineteenth century to the present and include both Prague natives and visitors from elsewhere. Here are stories, legends, and scenes from the city's past and present, from the Jewish fable of the golem, a creature conjured from clay, to tales of German and Soviet invasions. The international array of writers ranges from Franz Kafka to Ivan Klima to Bruce Chatwin, and includes the award-winning British playwright Tom Stoppard and former American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, both of whom have Czech roots. Covering the city's venerable Jewish heritage, the glamour of the belle-epoque period, World War II, Communist rule, the Prague Spring, the Velvet Revolution, and beyond, Prague Stories weaves a remarkable selection of fiction and nonfiction into a literary portrait of a fascinating city

Now, in the appealing and collectible Pocket Classics format, an anthology of beloved, classic detective stories—riveting and irresistibly addictive tales of crimes and those who unravel them. Beginning with modern masters such as Sara Paretsky, Ruth Rendell, and Ian Rankin, this collection works its way back through the golden age of the 1920s and ’30s to the genre’s source in Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. The famous detectives who stalk these pages range from the brilliant and eccentric (Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin) to the deceptively unlikely (G. K. Chesterton’s humble priest, Father Brown; and Agatha Christie’s tweedy spinster, Miss Marple); from the tough-guy private eyes created by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to accidental bystanders, such as the perceptive neighbors in Susan Glaspell’s haunting “A Jury of Her Peers.” From classic whodunits featuring Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret to Jorge Luis Borges’s postmodern tribute to Poe in “Death and the Compass,” the stories in this volume will tantalize, perplex, and amaze.

Contains a selection of Kipling's short stories.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013 Carried Away is a dazzling selection of stories–seventeen favorites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. With an Introduction by Margaret Atwood. Alice Munro has been repeatedly hailed as one of our greatest living writers, a reputation that has been growing for years. The stories brought together here span a quarter century, drawn from some of her earliest books, The Beggar Maid and The Moons of Jupiter, through her recent best-selling collection, Runaway. Here are such favorites as “Royal Beatings” in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; “Friend of My Youth” in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and “The Albanian Virgin," a romantic tale of capture and escape in Central Europe that may or may not be true but that nevertheless comforts the hearer, who is on a desperate adventure of her own. Munro’s incomparable empathy for her characters, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction. Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn’t know change her life forever, Munro’s unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold.

This book was written with all possible simplicity. It tells the story of Israel and of Israel’s writings: the two run naturally together. That story expands and deepens as it flows on, and perhaps the account of it here given changes stye in like proportion. But simplicity and brevity have been aimed at throughout. - From the Preface