This first collection of fiction by Anjana Appachana provides stories that are beautifully written, the characters carefully and respectfully drawn. All the stories are set in India, but the people in them seem somehow displaced within their own society -- a society in transition, but a transition that does not come fast enough to help them.

The Stories In This Collection Are Set In The Early Eighties, And Anjana Appachana Wonderfully Captures The Raw, Vibrant Energy And Optimism Of A Time When We Drank Chai For Thirty Paise, And Twenty Thousand Rupees Spent On &Lsquo;Gifts&Rsquo; For The Boy&Rsquo;S Side Was An Enormous Amount Of Money For Middle-Class Indians. Her Characters Strain For A Place Beyond The Boundaries Of A Prescribed Way Of Life In Urban Middle India: A Hapless College Student Gets Gated A Few Days Before Her Appointment For An Abortion; A Disgruntled Clerk Philosophises Gloomily About His Place In The Scheme Of Things; A Young Girl, Against All Odds, Decides To Keep Her Sister&Rsquo;S Deep, Dark Secret. By Turns Warm, Gullible, Arrogant And Bigoted, Appachana&Rsquo;S Characters Live Their Lives Amid Contradictions And Double Standards, Superstitions And Impossible Dreams, But Ultimately Usurp Their Familiar Landscape And Imbue It With An Idiosyncratic Vision.

The title story about a boy who tries to get even with a girl who humiliated him at school by using the mysterious online store "Curses, Inc." is followed by nine short stories about magic, witches, and ghosts.

Bestselling author Alice Hoffman tears a page from history and melds it with mysticism to create a spellbinding, highly acclaimed tale about the persecution of Jewish people during the sixteenth century. Estrella is a Marrano: During the time of the Spanish Inquisition, she is one of a community of Spanish Jews living double lives as Catholics. And she is living in a house of secrets, raised by a family who practices underground the ancient and mysterious way of wisdom known as kabbalah. When Estrella discovers her family's true identity--and her family's secrets are made public--she confronts a world she's never imagined, where new love burns and where friendship ends in flame and ash, where trust is all but vanquished and betrayal has tragic and bitter consequences. Winner of numerous "best book" citations and infused with the rich context of history and faith, Incantation is a transcendent journey of discovery and loss, rebirth and remembrance that Newbery Award-winning author Lois Lowry described as "Magical and spellbinding...Painful and exquisitely beautiful."

Yoruba legend and culture were the source of much of Amos Tutuola's writing and the stories collected here are no exception. They feature characters from folklore, archetypal figures from Yoruba society, supernatural or magical happenings, acute human observation and often a moral point. Their very titles - from 'The Duckling Brothers and their Disobedient Sister' to 'Don't Pay Bad for Bad' - are evocative of a unique blend of tradition and imagination, which belongs to the same universal culture as Aesop and the Brothers Grimm.

Presents ten short stories about magic spells, enchantments and curses and their consequences.