Three short stories that share a common theme: the search for lost loved ones. In Strange Shores, a schoolteacher hits upon a drastic method of attempting to escape the sadness of his existence in this world. Joy or despair may be found in Alfonso’s Looking Glass. A bereaved husband is willing to risk one to find the other. In A Matter of Perspective, an unlikely pair traverse a post-apocalyptic landscape where violence and death are constant companions. Three genres. Three tales. One theme.

From the Pulitzer Finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases Karen Russell’s extraordinary, irresistible gifts of language and imagination. Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In“Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors,” two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void—yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.

Heart of Darkness is a short and vividly brutal account of colonial enterprise that has as much in common with the jaded Evelyn Waugh of Black Mischief as it does with any of Conrad's direct contemporaries in the late nineteenth century. It is accompanied in this volume by the tales with which it has been published since 1902, the autobiographical short story "Youth," and the less personal but more substantial tale of an old man's fall from fortune, "The End of the Tether." Though these stories differ considerably in style and content from his later novels, much of his reputation rests upon the words contained in this volume.

When the old fisherman saw an eerie blue light begin to flash in a downstairs window of the deserted beach house, he started to run. Footsteps began to follow him-he heard them crunching in the sand... Ghosts and smugglers at the shore, a brother and sister alone on a terrifying trip to freedom on the underground railroad, a courageous boy in a devastating fire, a horse that spends the night in a guest room-these are but a few of the characters brought to life in this charming collection of exciting short stories about New Jersey. These tales could all be true. They are based on either fact or legend, and they are located all over the state-from its southernmost tip at Cape May, to Johnsonburg and Morristown in the north, and many points in-between. You've probably been to some of these places yourself. Maybe one of these stories happened right where you live...

Reproduction of the original: By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories by Louis Becke