Søgeresultater: 15

Summary: Twenty-three unforgettable short stories from one of America’s most celebrated literary masters. John Updike once said of his friend and fellow writer Andre Dubus: “He is a shrewd student of people who come to accept pain as a fair price for pleasure, and to view right and wrong as a matter of degree.” Dubus’s characters are depicted in all their imperfection, but with the author’s requisite tenderness and compassion. After all, they are just as human as we are, and there is much to learn from their complicated, tragic, irrepressible lives.   Including such acclaimed masterworks as ‘A Father’s Story’, ‘Townies’, ‘The Winter Father’, and ‘Killings’, the short stories and novellas compiled here represent the best work of one of our most accomplished and acutely sensitive authors. Dubus’s Selected Stories is an anthology unmatched in its collective portrayal of the human condition.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of Andre Dubus including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.  

Summary: For the past few years Roddy Doyle has been writing stories for Metro Eireann , a newspaper started by, and aimed at, immigrants to Ireland. Each of the stories took a new slant on the immigrant experience, something of increasing relevance and importance in today's Ireland. The stories range from 'Guess Who's Coming to the Dinner', where a father who prides himself on his open-mindedness when his daughters talk about sex, is forced to confront his feelings when one of them brings home a black fella, to a terrifying ghost story, 'The Pram', in which a Polish nanny grows impatient with her charge's older sisters and decides - in a phrase she has learnt - to 'scare them shitless'. Most of the stories are very funny - in '57% Irish' Ray Brady tries to devise a test of Irishness by measuring reactions to Robbie Keane's goal against Germany in the 2002 World Cup, Riverdance and 'Danny Boy' - others deeply moving. And best of all, in the title story itself,Jimmy Rabbitte, the man who formed The Commitments, decides it's time to find a new band, and this time no White Irish need apply. Multicultural to a fault, The Deportees specialise not in soul music this time, but the songs of Woody Guthrie

Summary: Taut, brooding and densely atmospheric, these stories show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness

Summary: A companion piece to the captivating memoir GIVING UP THE GHOST by the Man Booker-winning author, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. This sharp, funny collection of stories drawn from life begins in the 1950s in an insular northern village 'scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.' For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In 'King Billy is a Gentleman', the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. 'Curved Is the Line of Beauty' is a story of friendship, faith and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In 'Third Floor Rising', she watches, dazzled, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity. With a deceptively light touch, Mantel locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood

Summary: The second collection of blazingly original short stories from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times -bestselling author Ian McEwan. A two-timing pornographer becomes the unwilling object of one of his victim's vengeful fantasies. A millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress – passive, yet beautiful – but the union soon becomes a nightmare of jealousy and despair. And an ape reflects on the relationship with a young female writer, mourning their fading love and musing on the fateful deceptions of art. In these seven stories of dream-like lucidity, the wasteland of the human psyche is mapped with deadly precision. 'Resonant and frightening...totally original' Observer 'Exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing' The Times

Summary: A vintage collection of short stories from the bestselling author of Light a Penny Candle and Circle of Friends. Millions of people travel on London's tube every day, yet we usually give our fellow passengers only a cursory glance. But each one of these nameless passengers has their own story to tell. At Notting Hill, the mysterious secretary, harbouring her secrets, travels to work; at Highburyand Islington, Adam has a sudden change of heart; and at Holborn, a disastrous reunion is about to take place... With her characteristic mix of compassionate humour and biting realism, this vintage collection of stories is Maeve Binchy at her very best

Summary: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE These are beguiling, provocative stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments which change or haunt a life. Alice Munro's stories surprise and delight, turning lives into art, expanding our world and shedding light on the strange workings of the human heart

Summary: *The inspiration behind Netflix's The Haunting of Bly Manor * Discover Henry James's most famous and terrifying story in an edition which also includes a unique selection of his best loved ghost stories. A young governess is sent to a great country house to care for two orphaned children. To begin with Flora and Miles seem to be model pupils but gradually the governess starts to suspect that something is very wrong with them. As she sets out to uncover the corrupt secrets of the house she becomes more and more convinced that something evil is watching her. 'A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale' Oscar Wilde

Summary: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE The world's finest living short story writer turns to her family for inspiration; and what follows is a fictionalised, brilliantly imagined version of the past. From her ancestors' view from Edinburgh's Castle Rock in the eighteenth century to her parents' thwarted ambitions in Ontario, and her own awakening in 1950s Canada, Munro effortlessly weaves fact and myth to create an epic story of past and present, proving that fiction has much to tell us about life