May We Shed These Human Bodies

The Barnum Museum

Steven Millhauser · 237 pages

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Aimee Bender · 188 pages

A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the hear

Cosmicomics

Italo Calvino · 153 pages

Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. "Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?"--Publisher description.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Haruki Murakami · 362 pages

From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicles comes this superb collection of twenty-four stories that generously expresses Murakami's mastery of the form. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. Here are animated cr

All Fires the Fire

Julio Cortazar · 157 pages

Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado · 248 pages

In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying di

Museum of the Weird

Amelia Gray · 171 pages

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Karen Russell · 256 pages

Six short stories with subjects ranging from a dejected teenager who discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull's nest to two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove who try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood.

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories

Kevin Wilson · 208 pages

Kevin Wilson's characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider -- a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in "Blowing Up On the Spot," a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabbl

In the Land of Armadillos: Stories

Helen Maryles Shankman · 285 pages

"A radiant debut collection of linked stories from a two-time Pushcart nominee set in the German-occupied town of Wlodawa, Poland, where mythic tales of Jewish folklore meet the real-life monsters of the Nazi invasion"--

What is Not Yours is Not Yours

Helen Oyeyemi · 331 pages

The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales

Kirsty Logan · 148 pages

Twenty tales of lust and loss. These stories feature clockwork hearts, lascivious queens, paper men, island circuses, and a flooded world; some are radical retellings of classic stories, some are modern-day fables, but all explore substitutions for love.

Diving Belles

Lucy Wood · 223 pages

Along Cornwall's ancient coast, the flotsam and jetsam of the past becomes caught in the cross-currents of the present and, from time to time, a certain kind of magic can float to the surface... Straying husbands lured into the sea can be fetched back, for a fee. Magpies whisper to lonely drivers late at night. Trees can make wishes come true - provided you know how to wish properly first. Hous

A Guide to Being Born: Stories

Ramona Ausubel · 199 pages

Eleven short stories chart the cycle of transformation from love to conception to gestation to birth.

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye

A.S. Byatt · 277 pages

A collection of fairy tales for adults. The title novella is on a middle-aged Englishwoman attending a writers' conference in Turkey. She picks up an antique bottle and as she is washing it a djinn appears, offering to grant her three wishes. She asks for a younger body, then requests he make love to her.

Eyes of a Blue Dog

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Blackbird House

Alice Hoffman · 232 pages

With "incantatory prose" that "sweeps over the reader like a dream," (Philadelphia Inquirer), Hoffman follows her celebrated bestseller The Probable Future, with an evocative work that traces the lives of the various occupants of an old Massachusetts house over a span of two hundred years.In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird H

Daydreams of Angels

Heather O'Neill

Heather O'Neill's distinctive style and voice fill these charming, sometimes dark, always beguiling stories. From "The Robot Baby," in which we discover what happens when a robot feels emotion for the very first time, to "Heaven," about a grandfather who died for a few minutes when he was nine and visited the pearly gates, to "The Little Wolf-Boy of Northern Quebec," in which untamed children run

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

Bruno Schulz · 178 pages

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

Lesley Nneka Arimah · 235 pages

"A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. In "Who Will Greet You at Home," a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In "Wild," a disastrous night out shifts a teenager

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

Neil Gaiman · 352 pages

This third collection of short fiction by Gaiman includes previously published pieces of short fiction -- stories, verse, and a Doctor Who story written for the series' fiftieth anniversary (Nothing o'clock). There is also "Black Dog," a new tale that revisits the world of his novel American Gods. The collection explores the masks we all wear and the people we are beneath them to reveal our vulner

Tales from Outer Suburbia

Shaun Tan · 92 pages

From the much-acclaimed creator of The Arrival, The Red Tree and The Lost Thing, fifteen intriguing illustrated stories about the mysteries that lurk below the surface of suburban life.Do you remember the water buffalo at the end of our street?Or the deep-sea diver we found near the underpass?Do you know why dogs bark in the middle of the night?Shaun Tan, creator of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and

Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories

Elizabeth Hand · 282 pages

The Melancholy of Anatomy

Shelley Jackson · 179 pages