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Merciless Gods

Christos Tsiolkas · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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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

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Heat and Light

Ellen Van Neerven · 232 pages

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Happiness, Like Water

Chinelo Okparanta · 202 pages

Short stories. Here are Nigerian women at home and transplanted to the United States, building lives out of longing and hope, faith and doubt, the struggle to stay and the mandate to leave, the burden and strength of love. Here are characters faced with dangerous decisions, children slick with oil from the river, a woman in love with another despite the penalties. Here is a world marked by electri

Short StoriesLiterary FictionSexual OrientationLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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Close Range

Annie Proulx · 287 pages

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short-story collections of our time. Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fierc

Short StoriesLiterary FictionSexual OrientationLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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Difficult Women

Roxane Gay · 272 pages

"Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial). Gay returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege an

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We So Seldom Look on Love

Barbara Gowdy · 209 pages

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Collected Stories

Tennessee Williams · 574 pages

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Mundo Cruel: Stories

Luis Negron · 96 pages

Luis Negrón’s debut collection reveals the intimate world of a small community in Puerto Rico joined together by its transgressive sexuality. The writing straddles the shifting line between pure, unadorned storytelling and satire, exploring the sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking nature of survival in a decidedly cruel world.

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Rolling the R's

R. Zamora Linmark · 149 pages

Thirty-seven stories and poems on Hawaii's Kalihi Valley. The subjects range from the clash of cultures between whites and natives, to the plight of a 10-year-old girl who becomes pregnant.

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Going to Meet the Man

James Baldwin · 235 pages

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of

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A Place I've Never Been

David Leavitt · 194 pages

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Trash: Stories

Dorothy Allison · 237 pages

First published in 1988, the award-winning Trash showcases Allison at her most fearlessly honest and startlingly vivid. The limitless scope of human emotion and experience are depicted in stories that give aching and eloquent voice to the terrible wounds we inflict on those closest to us. These are tales of loss and redemption; of shame and forgiveness; of love and abuse and the healing power of s

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A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

Amy Bloom · 181 pages

"Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."--The New YorkerA great short story has the emotional depth and intensity of a poem and the wholeness and breadth of a novel. Amy Bloom writes great short stories. Her first collection, Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and here she deepens and extends her mastery of the form. R

Short StoriesLiterary FictionLGBTQ+ ProtagonistContemporary Fiction
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This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz · 240 pages

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

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Wrong

Dennis Cooper · 165 pages

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The Quilt & Other Stories

Ismat Chughtai · 225 pages

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Sour Heart

Jenny Zhang · 310 pages

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver · 159 pages

In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.

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Black Tickets: Stories

Jayne Anne Phillips · 265 pages

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Fireworks: Nine Profane Stories

Angela Carter · 130 pages

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Collected Stories, 1939-1976

Paul Bowles · 417 pages

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The Safety of Objects

A.M. Homes · 178 pages

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