– "Meat. They're made out of meat." – "Meat?" – "There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. …
Part of the Penguin 60s series, issued to celebrate 60 years of Penguin books. This collects "Sonny's Blues", "The Rockpile" and "Previous Condition", all taken from Going to Meet the Man (Penguin, 19…
Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, "Brokeback Mountain" is her masterpiece.
Ophelia Todd is always looking for a shorter distance between two points, so she just wrinkles the map a little--until she gets caught in one of the wrinkles.
"A & P" is a comic short story written by John Updike in 1961 in which the hero and first person narrator takes a stand for what is right and therefore has hope for a better future
A short story from James Joyce's Dubliners. The unnamed protagonist in "Araby" is a boy who is just starting to come into his sexual identity. Through his first-person narration, we are immersed at th…
As part of Bedford/St. Martin's innovative Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism series, this edition of Wife of Bath contains carefully seclected critical essays which approach the book from several…
High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old dropout with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A on…
Banana Yoshimoto's novels have made her a sensation in Japan and all over the world, and Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, is an enchantingly original and…
"Bobok" (Russian: Бобок, Bobok) is a short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky that first appeared in 1873. The title can be translated from the Russian as meaning "little bean" and in the context of the stor…
Margot is a nine-year-old girl whose family moved from Earth to Venus when she was four. She remembers the sun shining on Earth, something it rarely does on Venus. "All Summer in a Day" takes place on…
