Other books that might interest you

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  People Who Talk to Stuffed...

  Ao Omae

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  “A captivating exploration of gender dynamics, set against a background of the trying and confusing time of adolescence, when identity is in flux and everything in life is unstable and magical.” —Lydia Conklin, author of Rainbow Rainbow 
  A fresh, thoughtful, and always surprising short story collection from a rising young star in the world of Japanese literature. 
  Composed of the title novella and three short stories, People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice sensitively explores gender, friendship, romance, love, human interaction and its absence, and how a misogynistic society limits women and men. 
  In the title story, Nanamori and Mugito, two university students appalled by society’s gendered roles, rebel. Refusing to interact with other people they use stuffed toys for emotional support. Unlike Nanamori and Mugito, their fellow plushie society member Shiraki does not talk to plushies. Pragmatic, she accepts the status quo that boys sometimes make nasty jokes; she believes their behavior resembles the real world. 
  In “Realizing Fun Things Through Water,” a young woman named Hatsuoka must contend with a mother-in-law who swears by cancer-preventing “hyper-organization” water, and a sister who writes fake news for a living. “Bath Towel Visuals” illuminates the mental cost of not just laughing along at mean humor, while “Hello, Thank You I’m Okay” follows a family’s response when their shut-in son announces he wants to throw himself a birthday party. 
  Written in brisk and gentle prose, Ao Omae’s stories capture the subtleties and complexities of his characters’ inner world, individuals struggling to conform in an inflexible society little tolerant of difference. These stories, sometimes comical, sometimes bittersweet, and always thought-provoking, speak to the pain and desires of all who embrace nuance, repudiate traditional sex roles, and long for a gentler and more tolerant world.

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  Watching Me Watching You - Stories

  Fay Weldon

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  Fay Weldon’s first short-story collection features her trademark themes of feminism, sisterhood, and domestic livelihood, where the ties that bind can also draw bloodLove, loss, and the ever-changing sexual battlefield are the themes of this early anthology by master storyteller Fay Weldon: In “Christmas Tree,” the adulterous playwright hero embarks on a quest for true love, perhaps the most self-deceiving state of all; “Breakages” explores the fragility of married life as a miserly vicar’s infertile wife contemplates his much-darned socks amid ghostly visitations; the loss of hair and female friendship are brought to poignant life in “Alopecia,” while religion becomes an excuse for infidelity in “Holy Stones”; a holiday game of Monopoly reveals the widening holes in the fabric of a family in “Man with No Eyes”; and an old house and its inhabitants are haunted by doomed love in the title story. By turns humorous, ironic, and tragic, Watching Me, Watching You presents Fay Weldon at her most witty, original, and courageous.

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  Dangerous Betrayal - The...

  Bill Blowers

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  Ingeniously blending fact and thrilling speculative fiction, this award-winning novel unveils a conspiratorial sabotage behind the Titanic disaster.   How was it that the unsinkable Titanic, carrying 1320 passengers and a crew of 892, sank in freezing waters—especially when the technology of luxury liner was such that she could have easily avoided the impact with the iceberg? Was it a fated and bizarre accident? Or was it the result of a sinister plot to undermine the success of White Star Lines’ feature attraction on her maiden voyage? At the heart of the mystery: the most brilliant inventor of the era—Nikola Tesla—and a plot to hold the Titanic hostage that went catastrophically wrong.   For more than a century, the secret lay hidden in the bowels of the Titanic at the bottom of the North Atlantic. Now, in this bracing and plausible novel of conspiracy and revenge, set in a gilded age of ruthless power barons, geniuses, and madmen, does the truth finally surface.

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  The Most Dangerous Game

  Richard Connell

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  A mysterious island, shrouded in fear, evil, and darkness. Here the amoral General Zaroff hunts. And what, you ask, is the most dangerous game? It is the manner and substance of his nightly killings.

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  Learning to Talk - Stories

  Hilary Mantel

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  "The multiple performances in this audiobook are uniformly adept, providing listeners the disarming experience of adults unflinchingly looking back at childhood." -AudioFile on Learning to TalkLearning to Talk is a dazzling collection of short stories from the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize and #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy.With a new foreword by Hilary Mantel.In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood.Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin 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, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity.With a deceptively light touch, Mantel illuminates the poignant experiences of childhood that leave each of us forever changed.“A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat...Mantel’s narrators never tell everything they know, and that’s why they’re worth listening to, carefully.” —USA Today“Her short stories always recognize other potential realities...Even the most straightforward of Mantel’s tales retain a faintly otherworldly air.” —The Washington PostA Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.

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  A Newspaper Story

  O. Henry

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  O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), an American writer of outstanding short stories known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and surprise endings.'A Newspaper Story' is an ingenious tale about a lost newspaper blowing through the streets of New York. Each passer-by who comes into contact with any part of it is personally impacted by one of the stories in the paper - but not in the way one would expect.

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