There once was ... a woman who loved her husband's cock so much that she began taking it to work in her lunchbox. a man who made films without a camera, which transfixed his estranged daughter. a couple who administered electric shocks to each other, to be reminded of what love is. a world where you wake up one day and notice that, one by one, people are turning blue Startling, wry, beguiling and emotionally charged - the stories in Modern Times might be reminiscent of Lydia Davis, Angela Carter and Daisy Johnson, but they are also unlike anything you've read before.

This anthology is in many was a ‘best of the best’, containing gems from thirty-four of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo. Above all, as you will discover, it satisfies Samuel Butler's anarchic pleasure principle: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I daresay I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all ...'

The ability to construct a nuanced narrative or complex character in the constrained form of the short story has sometimes been seen as the ultimate test of an author's creativity. Yet during the time when the short story was at its most popular - the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - even the greatest writers followed strict generic conventions that were far from subtle. This expanded and updated translation of Florence Goyet's influential La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: Description d'un genre à son apogée (Paris, 1993) is the only study to focus exclusively on this classic period across different continents. Ranging through French, English, Italian, Russian and Japanese writing - particularly the stories of Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Giovanni Verga, Anton Chekhov and Akutagawa Ry?nosuke - Goyet shows that these authors were able to create brilliant and successful short stories using the very simple 'tools of brevity' of that period. In this challenging and far-reaching study, Goyet looks at classic short stories in the context in which they were read at the time: cheap newspapers and higher-end periodicals. She demonstrates that, despite the apparent intention of these stories to question bourgeois ideals, they mostly affirmed the prejudices of their readers. In doing so, her book forces us to re-think our preconceptions about this 'forgotten' genre.

Short Stories of Our Time is a selection of 13 short stories by contemporary authors, all with 20th Century urban settings. The stories have been chosen to appeal to students who are impatient with the classics but respond to stories which illuminate the reality they know.

This volume offers a survey of American short fiction in 59 tales that combine classic works with 'different, unexpected gems', which invite readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Authors include: Amy Tan, Alice Adams, David Leavitt and Tim O'Brien.

This is the annotated edition including the rare biographical essay by Edwin E. Slosson called "H. G. Wells - A Major Prophet Of His Time". H. G. Wells was an avid writer of short fiction and literally all of what he wrote is included in this well-formatted volume. From the contents: The Chronic Argonauts In The Modern Vein The Triumphs Of A Taxidermist The Stolen Bacillus The Hammerpond Park Burglary The Jilting Of Jane The Diamond Maker The Flowering Of The Strange Orchid In The Avu Observatory Through A Window The Treasure In The Forest The Lord Of The Dynamos Aepyornis Island A Deal In Ostriches The Flying Man The Temptation Of Harringay The Moth The Remarkable Case Of Davidson's Eyes A Catastrophe Le Mari Terrible Pollock And The Porroh Man The Obliterated Man The Cone The Argonauts Of The Air The Bulla A Slip Under The Microscope Under The Knife The Red Room The Plattner Story The Story Of The Late Mr. Elvesham The Rajah's Treasure In The Abyss The Lost Inheritance The Apple The Purple Pileus The Sea Raiders The Crystal Egg ... and many more ...

'Rich. . . eclectic. . . a feast' Telegraph This landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end of the twentieth century. Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society, their powerful voices resonating through regional landscapes, private passions and dramatic political events. This wide-ranging selection curated by Jhumpa Lahiri includes well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello alongside many captivating new discoveries. More than a third of the stories featured in this volume have been translated into English for the first time, several of them by Lahiri herself.