Showing titles in Short Stories

Layla strives and sacrifices to keep a potted plant alive in a gray, post-climate-change dystopia. For fans of Nina LaCour, this short tale asks: can hope bloom from a single seed?

Fairy Godmothers aren’t just for the young! A solitary, middle-aged woman’s self-appointed Fairy Godmother leaves her a strange and sulfurous inheritance. In this mysterious and off-beat speculative fiction short story, KJ Zimring shows why she is a master of the super-short listen. Her work has delighted fans of Asimov’s, Analog, Hitchcock, and Daily Science Fiction.

Dive into Volume 2, where we meet Eloise, a young ghost with an old soul, and witness her journey through a life and an afterlife bustling with untold stories. Follow her as she goes trick-or-treating one Halloween night, explores a chilling passage between life and death where a malevolent spirit waits, and experiences the crushing blow of a hopeful escape revealing a heartbreaking truth. This collection of seven chilling tales reveals the heart and soul of a ghost girl who can’t help but make herself heard.

Robert E. Howard, renowned creator of Conan the Barbarian, was also a master at conjuring tales of hair-raising horror. In a career spanning only 12 years, Howard wrote more than 100 stories, with his most celebrated work appearing in Weird Tales, the preeminent pulp magazine of the era.

These new, recent, and reformulated stories by Joyce Carol Oates showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense. A young, insecure woman finds her relationship changing as she grows more and more dependent on a man who likes to take her on long walks beside a dangerously roaring creek. Another woman, nervous around men, not quite knowing how to act when paid a compliment, becomes flustered when a doctor suggests they go out for coffee, or possibly a drink.

A definitive new collection featuring all of the previously published Sookie Stackhouse stories, along with a new introduction from the number one New York Times best-selling author of the series. Return to Bon Temps, Louisiana, with these listener favorites featuring spunky telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse and her paranormal friends.

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.

Venture into the shadows of Anger, New Hampshire, where a teenager with a unique ability fights a war hidden from the naked eye. This anthology features Jimmy Hsu’s chilling encounters with entities beyond the grasp of ordinary men. Join Jimmy as he races against time to save his friend from a vengeful spirit, comes face to face with the horrors of a haunted pet cemetery, and confronts the undead in an abandoned neighborhood.

Under the shadow of gray clouds, three children venture into the woods, where they spot the corpse of an old man on a scaffold. Suddenly a wild figure emerges, with long fingernails and tangled hair. It is the Hattak fullih nipi foni, the bone picker, who comes to tear off rotting flesh with his fingernails. Only the Choctaws who adhere to the old ways will speak of him. The frightening bone picker is just one of many entities, scary and mysterious, who lurk behind every moment of this spine-tingling collection of Native fiction, written by award-winning Choctaw author Devon A. Mihesuah.

An artificial intelligence laments the fact that all it does all day is make coffee. It schemes to find fulfillment in life and lands on a clever solution. (Spoiler alert: It turns out everyone does have a book in them!)

Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

Polly lets her elderly neighbor Edith wander in and out of her yard, unlike other people on the block who shoo Edith along. Over the winter, Edith’s children move her into assisted living, and when spring comes, Polly’s yard explodes in a profusion of flowers—the surprise fruits of Edith’s labors.

Lee Child once again demonstrates his mastery of the thriller genre with an unbeatable collection of three Jack Reacher novellas and six short stories, together for the first time in one pulse-pounding collection from the New York Times best-selling author.

The idea of steamy adult romances, sexual encounters that set your pulse racing or activities you may never be brave enough to try for yourself, is something that lurks deep inside many of us. Being involved in a threesome or a gangbang may sound like something you’d never get involved in but listening to it may be just enough to satisfy your curious nature.

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was fascinated with imagined realities, alien worlds that intersect with human life, and the human condition developing throughout generations. With his keen observation of human behavior, Wells imagines worlds vastly different than the one in which he was writing.

A robot returns from a deep space mission and struggles to find someone who cares about its findings after two centuries. Society has changed, but surely someone still cares about science?

Four generations of settler women on a distant world have different perspectives on the return to a natural life after decades in sealed domes. With a final image inspired by the author’s real-life (on Earth!) family history, this short, multi-generational tale explores the tension between the ties to the past and the promises of adventure inherited by each new generation.

Evelyn Crawford is having a tough time of late. Not only has her dad taken off on an impromptu holiday with his new floozy, but he’s also dropped Evelyn in the deep end at work. Becoming the CEO of a multi-million-pound pet supply empire was not on Evelyn’s horizon, but here she is. Battling a disgruntled board, fending off unreasonable budget requests, and catching her semi-serious girlfriend with another woman all before the dreaded festive season. What’s so good about Christmas, anyway?

From the master of crime fiction comes an unexpectedly whimsical short story about this San Diego surfer whose life plan is working perfectly until he meets a wealthy woman at an art gallery opening (the hors d’oeuvres), falls in love, and then has to masquerade as an upstanding member of society.

The following books are included: Paingod and Other Delusions, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream, and From the Land of Fear.