Showing results for "Birds" in Short Stories

From the opening story, "Willing" - about a second-rate movie actress in her 30s who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being - Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time. 

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA 'How long he fought with them in the darkness he could not tell, but at last the beating of the wings about him lessened and then withdrew . . .' A classic of alienation and horror, The Birds was immortalised by Hitchcock in his celebrated film. The five...

As part of Counterpoint's celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry comes this reissue of his 1986 classic, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership. Those stories include "Thicker Than Liquor," "Where Did They Go?," "It Wasn't Me," "The Boundary," "That Distant Land," and the titular "The Wild Birds." Spanning more than three decades, from 1930 to 1967, these wonderful stories follow Wheeler Catlett, and reintroduce listeners to the beloved people who live in Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky.

A rare cold snap grips the South, and a lonely new bishop—quarantined with the measles—watches a brilliant red cardinal plead for help outside his window. Across the way, brave little Gwinie phones from the orphanage, and a simple request for birdseed sparks a quiet cascade of charity. As...

In these tense, macabre stories, bodies fall from the sky, perfect nails conceal grisly secrets and violence pulses behind gleaming façades. From hellish visions to obsessive relationships, acclaimed author Agustina Bazterrica takes us to the dark heart of human desires and fears. Shocking, brutal, yet glinting with sharp humour, "Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird" is a breathtaking dive into human monstrousness from a master of contemporary horror.

In this chilling reimagining of Hitchcock’s classic, a group of friends set out on a cross-country trip, only to unknowingly trigger a relentless avian nightmare. Raquel, Robert, Karen, and David are thrown into chaos as the skies turn deadly, forcing them to confront a terrifying truth: not everything is what it seems, and their actions carry consequences far worse than they imagined. As the body count rises, one long-dismissed conspiracy theory proves horrifyingly real in this suspenseful, blood-soaked tale of reckoning.

From best-selling contemporary author, Hannah Lee Kidder, Little Birds is a collection of glimpses into some of the darkest corners of our lives – the lies we tell ourselves, the ways we hurt others, the painful truths we pretend to face. From single-line microfictions to full narratives, each story is a raw, unflinchingly human experience.

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.

Con la publicación de Cadáver exquisito (Premio Clarín Novela 2017), Agustina Bazterrica logró dos cosas al mismo tiempo: consagrarse como una de las escritoras argentinas más leídas y respetadas en todo el mundo, y transformar el libro en un clásico instantáneo. Esa distopía acerca de un mundo casi inhumano, que no cesa de cuestionar nuestro modo de vida actual y que dispara toda clase de preguntas acerca de lo contemporáneo, tiene historia. La autora lleva muchos años escribiendo relatos y cuentos breves, que hoy Alfaguara reedita en este volumen.

A $10,000 diamond ring and a prima dona add up to murder and a frame for California.

A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka - published to commemorate the centenary of his death *Chosen as a 2024 highlight in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, New Statesman, Esquire and the New European* Franz...

Jay Bird Luck is a collection of short stories shaped by childhood, chance, and the moments that quietly stay with us. Many of these tales are set in small southern towns, where creeks, backroads, snd ordinary afternoons give rise to humor, heartache and unexpected insight. Others drift into otherworldly places, bending reality just enough to surprise, amuse, and provoke reflexion.

An “astonishing debut collection, by a writer reminiscent of such greats as Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, and even Chekhov” (Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants), focusing on women navigating relationships with humans, animals, and the natural world. Exploring the way our choices and...

A powerful, eerily unsettling story collection from a major international literary star. Unearthly and unexpected, the stories in Mouthful of Birds burrow their way into your psyche and don't let go. Samanta Schweblin haunts and mesmerizes in this extraordinary, masterful collection. Schweblin's...

An NPR Best Book of 2023 A collection of twenty dark, wildly imaginative short stories from the author of the award-winning TikTok sensation Tender Is the Flesh. From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of twenty brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears...

A Collection of Spellware Fantasy Short Stories. Welcome to Spellware Fantasy, a new literary genre developed by author Brett Vogeler for The Songbird Saga. This is not fantasy awkwardly borrowing technology, but a true and profound fusion. In this world, witchcraft meets code, a haunted house is an evolving AI, and a digital ghost is a literal consciousness woven from both ancestral magic and digital data. Spellware Fantasy is where the grimoire and the hard drive rest on the same shelf, focusing on the intimate, powerful magic of healing, connection, and repair.

From the moment Riley moves into the house by the river, she can feel it—something is wrong. The birds perch outside her window, black-feathered and unblinking. Every night, they whisper things in hushed human like voices. Her mother offers no answers. The town feels off-kilter. Whispers follow her through the halls at school. Only Anna seems to understand, and even she is keeping secrets. As sleep evades her and the nights stretch on, Riley finds herself caught in something she cannot name. The birds are always watching. And they are not alone.

The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America's newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area.  The past memories of war and its aftermath; of murder, arrest, re-education camps, and new economic zones; of escape and shipwreck and atrocity are ever present in these wise and compassionate stories. 

In this collection - ranging from stories of love found and lost to tales of the supernatural - Ghosh masterfully traces the inscrutable ways of the human heart. The reigning queen of Bombay cinema allows a younger leading man to fall in love with her to spite her husband. A schoolmaster’s ravishing wife joins him in the small town where he works, inspires him to build a garden for her and sets about wrecking his life.

In this moving collection of short stories and essays, Gordon Lee Johnson (Cupeño/Cahuilla) cements his voice not only as a wry commentator on American Indian reservation life but also as a master of fiction writing. In Johnson’s stories, all of which are set on the fictional San Ignacio reservation in Southern California, we meet unforgettable characters like Plato Pena, the Stanford-bound geek who reads Kahlil Gibran during intertribal softball games; hardboiled investigator Roddy Foo; and Etta, whose motto is “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise”.