Showing results for "The Stranger" in Short Stories

Dive into the wondrous world of The Stranger Times with this carefully curated selection of short stories from C.K. McDonnell. Drawn from the award-winning The Stranger Times podcast, they are collected in print for the first time, along with the new novella ‘The Raven’. Experience the magical underworld of Manchester (and beyond) with stories featuring lovelorn trolls, blood-thirsty books and a constipated dog who may’ve accidentally consumed a portal to another dimension.

This year's festival welcomed the wrong guest. In Cedar Hill, Massachusetts, life is quiet and uneventful. Unless it's Halloween. Known as Salem's Sister, Cedar Hill has become a Halloween destination thanks to its annual Harvest Festival.

Something is moving beneath the house.At first, it sounds like an animal. Then the floor starts to rise.What follows is a fast, darkly funny descent into panic as one ordinary man, his wife, and an increasingly nervous town discover that something has been living beneath them all along.Theyre...

From the twice CWA Dagger shortlisted author of The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas come 12 never-before-published stories to transport you to the macabre world of inexplicable phenomena. With returning characters from the Essex Witch Museum series and a weirdly wonderful tale for each day of Christmas, these spooky stories are the perfect companion for long, dark winter nights.

What if the person you love finally returned home… but something about her felt quietly, disturbingly different? In "The Stranger", tension doesn’t explode—it builds. A reunion meant to be warm and joyful slowly turns uncertain… then uneasy… then quietly haunting. Small details begin to matter. Silences stretch too long. Emotions shift in ways that can’t quite be explained. With her signature psychological precision, Katherine Mansfield draws you into an intimate moment where love, perception, and reality begin to blur.

"The Hanging Stranger" is a science fiction short story by American writer Philip K. Dick, originally published in December 1953 in the magazine Science Fiction Adventures. The protagonist, Ed Loyce, is a store owner who is disturbed when he sees a stranger hanging from a lamppost, but finds that other people consider the apparent lynching unremarkable.

The average person will spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime - unless it kills them first. Or throws them through time, converts them to a soul-sucking, dimension-hopping sorcerer, or simply obliterates them at a sub-atomic level. In the 18 stories that follow, half-orc bounty hunters merge with NAFTA regulations and aliens take much-needed coffee breaks. Do elves file TPS reports? Can a robot have a work-spouse? Add love, regret, friendship, the inevitable sternly worded HR email, and an arsenal of guns, death rays, explosives, necromancy, and...Santa Claus.

One of Mark Twain’s classic tales, a small band of boys in a medieval village make friends with a very real angel whose name is Satan. He assures the boys that he’s not The Satan, but his nephew. He looks like a boy of their own age, but his magical powers and unusual perspectives on morals and mankind leave the boys amazed and bewildered. Mark Twain never finished this story to his own satisfaction. In 1916, his biographer and friend Albert Bigelow Paine, with fellow author Frederick Duneka, added an evil astrologer and devised an ending, and published the version presented here.

In this collection, 15 writers try to find answers to how we can truly know each other; on the way, they find psychedelic worms, supernatural roommates, new dimensions and the deeply rooted question of how to know even ourselves.

The author of outstanding travel books, autobiographical works and novels, including the classic "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "Mark Twain" (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) is regarded by many as America's finest humorist and a major writer of short stories. The four selections in this volume span his entire writing career and are among his best-known stories.

The Stranger is a 1921 short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in the London Mercury in January 1921, and later reprinted in The Garden Party and Other Stories. In Auckland, Mr. Hammond is waiting for his wife, back from Europe. After talking to some other people waiting at the harbour, she lands in but takes her time, leading him to wonder if she was sick during the voyage - she was not.

Two handsome young guys pick each other up over coffee one Saturday morning and begin playing a game of pretending each other is the perfect fun Mr. Wonderful...as they explore Central Park and the Met Museum and each other’s fantasies of romance. 

Stranger in Town includes 15 short stories of humanity, frailty, displacement, and kindness, including ones like: A little boy befriends a mystical Chinese woman; a dying man reflects on his final days while at Carnegie Hall; a woman is mistakenly invited to a stranger’s wedding; a Turkish couple experiences apartment living in New York; a conflicted doctor falls in love with an out-of-town-visitor; a young man has an airport encounter with a prisoner in transit.

From EDGAR-AWARD WINNING author Erika Krouse, a VISCERAL, DAZZLING collection of stories set across the globe about characters desperate for salvation “Comparative audiobook newbies Baker and Ewer already know how to aurally enhance Krouse’s marvelously provocative fiction debut...

In the heat of a blind-date photo shoot, my obsession for her ignites. After we part ways, her image carves a path through my thoughts, leading me to dark places. Disguised by a mask, I cater to her every desire as I play the part of a stranger, but the secrets I harbor threaten to shatter the illicit passion we've found. Then she catches the eye of someone else, casting a sinister veil over our connection. I morph into her protector, even though it means she might end up hating me in the end.

Award-winning writer Paul Theroux tells four exhilarating stories of desire in which nothing is as it seems in The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro. A young American walks into Sicily's Palazzo d'Oro during the '60s. Penniless, but swaggering with youth and burgeoning artistic talent, he accepts a...

Step into a world where innocence meets the infinite, and the everyday collides with the supernatural. The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories represents Mark Twain at his most philosophical, daring, and haunting. Far removed from his lighthearted tales of riverboats and boyhood adventures, Twain here explores the mysteries of existence, morality, and the fragile nature of human belief.

Wedding bells are ringing for Thomas and Mikah! After over a year of missed connections, secrecy, lies, and outright peril—such is the nature of romance with a secret government agent—it’s finally time for Mikah’s happily ever after. Why does getting married have to be so hard, though? Between nightmares about Thomas being killed at the altar, Rachel’s overzealous planning, and Caleb’s idea of a blowout bachelor party, the road to “I do” seems endless and fraught with stress.

This is my second book of short stories, which I place in the genre of literary fiction. I published a book in 2005 entitled 12, then reworked the stories, polished and honed them into a book that is more of a novel than disconnected stories. I titled that book Sketches Of A Young Man's Life - A Novel In 12 Parts. It is a novel because of its interwoven themes, metaphors, and symbols, which appear, sometimes ghostly, in every story.

Six months after Mikah and Thomas bid each other an agonizing goodbye, Mikah is struggling to pull the pieces of his life back together. When a cute bartender at his workplace shows an interest, Mikah has to work to convince himself that he's ready to date again. Will Mikah find a new love? And is Thomas really gone from his life for good? Find out in The Stranger 5!