Presents short fiction stories by nineteenth-century American author O. Henry, including the title work about the Christmas sacrifices of a young married couple.

An anthology of stories probing the human psyche. In the title story, a woman prepares to put her life on the line to get a man. She will confront him with a murder he committed, at which point he might kill her, but if he doesn't she will have him in her power.

A true-life novel about Lily Casey Smith (the author's grandmother) who at age six helped her father break horses, at age fifteen left home to teach in a frontier town, and later as a wife and mother runs a vast ranch in Arizona where she survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy--but despite a life of hardscrabble drudgery still remains a woman of indomitable spirit. Half Broke Horses...

This collection is Jamaica Kincaid's earliest published writings: her inspired, lyrical short stories.

These stories plunge the listener gently into another way of perceiving both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her narrative is, by turns, naïvely whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered, partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean—family, manners,

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Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggleing New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers,...

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
 
A harvest and not a winnowing, this volume collects 103 stories, almost all of the short fiction that John Updike wrote between 1953 and 1975. “How rarely it can be said of any of our great American writers that they have been equally gifted in both long and short forms,” reads the citation composed for John Updike upon his winning the 2006 Rea Award for the Short

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Tells the lives of five people who come together in post-9/11 Afghanistan. Marcus, an English doctor whose progressive, outspoken Afghani wife was murdered by the Taliban, opens his home--itself an eerily beautiful monument to his losses--to the others: Lara, from St. Petersburg, looking for evidence of her soldier brother who disappeared decades before during the Soviet invasion; David, an American, a former spy who has seen his ideals turned inside...

Bryson (A short history of nearly everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, showing how each room has figured in the evolution of private life.

Frances Mayes, whose enchanting #1 New York Times bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun made the world fall in love with Tuscany, invites readers back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food, there and throughout Italy.
Having spent her summers in Tuscany for the past several years, Frances Mayes relished the opportunity to experience the pleasures of primavera, an Italian spring. A sabbatical from teaching

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Six-year-old Bertie and artist Angus Lordie join forces to rescue Lordie's beloved dog Cyril from the pound in this fourth charming installment in the bestselling 44 Scotland Street series.