Admittedly, we sometimes become oversentimental about motherhood. But in a climate of rampant cynicism and family disintegration, stories about maternal love, courage, devotion, and triumph can be immensely comforting and inspiring. Contributors such as Dave Barry, Barbara Bush, Reba McIntire, Erma Bombeck, and Joan Rivers offer celebrity appeal. But even more heart coddling are the stories by everyday women, sharing their intimate experiences about becoming a mother, almost losing a child, discovering miracles, and honoring the wisdom of grandmothers. Mothers of all ages will appreciate this book as a gift to themselves or as a gift to a beloved mom. But get out your handkerchiefs, the editors showed no restraint when it came to including tearjerkers. --Gail Hudson

Oversized Paperback (4 to 6 lbs)

Ohio

Chicken Soup For The Mothers Soul 1 -2

Anthony Veasna So

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Maryland

Stories

"A debut story collection about Cambodian-American life-immersive and comic, yet unsparing-that marks the arrival of an indisputable new talent in American fiction"--

Afterparties

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A collection of Algernon Blackwood's short stories. I now have a leather bound edition of his entire collected works, so I no longer need this one! No external or internal damage!

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

And Other Ghost Stories

The Empty House

26a3e0e3-d2af-4587-acca-c476c8f8893f-0

Eric LaRocca

Despite some annotations done in highlighter and pencil (which can be erased, of course), the condition of the book is like new. Perfect for readers who like short stories that have a bit of freaky suspense in them.

Virginia

"Amongst the Top 50 Horror Books of All Time" - Cosmopolitan Three dark and disturbing horror stories from an astonishing new voice, including the viral-sensation tale of obsession, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. For fans of Kathe Koja, Clive Barker and Stephen Graham Jones. Winner of the Splatterpunk Award for Best Novella. A whirlpool of darkness churns at the heart of a macabre ballet between two lonely young women in an internet chat room in the early 2000s—a darkness that threatens to forever transform them once they finally succumb to their most horrific desires. A couple isolate themselves on a remote island in an attempt to recover from their teenage son’s death, when a mysterious young man knocks on their door during a storm… And a man confronts his neighbour when he discovers a strange object in his back yard, only to be drawn into an ever-more dangerous game. Three devastating, beautifully written horror stories from one of the genre’s most cutting-edge voices. What have you done today to deserve your eyes?

Things Have Gotten Worse since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes

a8e83fce-c93b-4f70-bcc1-a4613eba1b51-1

Elise Bryant

Elizabeth Eulberg

South Carolina

Ten Romantic Tropes, Transformed

Love is in the air in Serendipity, a collection of stories inspired by romantic tropes and edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer. The secret admirer. The fake relationship. The matchmaker. From stories of first love, unrequited love, love that surprises, love that’s been there all along, 10 of the brightest and award-winning authors writing YA have taken on some of your favorite romantic tropes, embracing them and turning them on their heads. Readers will fall for this collection of stories that celebrate love at its most humorous, inclusive, heart-expanding, and serendipitous. Contributors include Elise Bryant, Elizabeth Eulberg, Leah Johnson, Anna-Marie McLemore, Marissa Meyer, Sandhya Menon, Julie Murphy, Caleb Roehrig, Sarah Winifred Searle, and Abigail Hing Wen.

Serendipity

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Published 1948, 1st Edition - Alfred A. Knopf - Front board marred by some stains - ISBN: 9780394416700

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New Jersey

 The Best of Clarence Day

44a7cabf-7121-4be4-a60d-362bbca4a41c-0

Theodore W. Goossen

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Nevada

This collection of short stories, including many new translations, is the first to span the whole of Japan's modern era from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with the first writings to assimilate and rework Western literary traditions, through the flourishing of the short story genre in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Taisho era, to the new breed of writers produced under the constraints of literary censorship, and the current writings reflecting the pitfalls and paradoxes of modern life, this anthology offers a stimulating survey of the development of the Japanese short story. Various indigenous traditions, in addition to those drawn from the West, recur throughout the stories: stories of the self, of the Water Trade (Tokyo's nightlife of geishas and prostitutes), of social comment, love and obsession, legends and fairytales. This collection includes the work of two Nobel prize-winners: Kawabata and Oe, the talented women writers Hirabayashi, Euchi, Okamoto, and Hayashi, together with the acclaimed Tanizaki, Mishima, and Murakami. The introduction by Theodore Goossen gives insight into these exotic and enigmatic, sometimes disturbing stories, derived from the lyrical roots of Japanese literature with its distinctive stress on atmosphere and beauty.

The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

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Andrew Duplessie

Georgia

Too Scared to Sleep

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Kelly Link

Pennsylvania

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • “The Brothers Grimm meet Black Mirror meets Alice in Wonderland. . . . In seven remixed fairy tales, Link delivers wit and dreamlike intrigue.”—Time Finalist for the Kirkus Prize • “Thought-provoking and wonderfully told . . . so seamlessly entwines the real with the surreal that the stories threaten to slip into reality, resonating long after reading.”—BuzzFeed A new collection from one of today’s finest short story writers, MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow Kelly Link, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble—featuring illustrations by award-winning artist Shaun Tan Finding seeds of inspiration in the stories of the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers—characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose. In “The White Cat’s Divorce,” an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which child will become his heir. In “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear,” a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In “Skinder’s Veil,” a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers—or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche. Twisting and turning in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable—these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the realm of short fiction.

White Cat, Black Dog

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Leesa Cross-Smith

A lush, glittering short story collection exploring female obsession and desire by an award-winning writer Roxane Gay calls "a consummate storyteller." From Kentucky to the California desert, these forty-two short stories expose the glossy and matte hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness, and more. Teenage girls sneak out on a summer night to meet their boyfriends by the train tracks. A woman escapes suffocating grief through a vivid fantasy life. Members of a cult form an unsettling chorus as they extol their passion for the same man. A love story begins over cabbages in a grocery store. A laundress' life is consumed by obsession for a famous baseball player. Two high school friends kiss all night and binge-watch Winona Ryder movies after the death of a sister. Leesa Cross-Smith's sensuous stories will drench readers in nostalgia for summer nights and sultry days, the intense friendships of teenage girls, and the innate bonds felt between women. She evokes the pangs of loss and motherhood, the headiness and destructive potential of desire, and the pure exhilaration of being female. The stories in So We Can Glow--some long, some gone in a flash, some told over text and emails--take the wild hearts of girls and women and hold them up so they can catch the light.

So We Can Glow

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Viet Thanh Nguyen

From the author of The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Refugees is the second piece of fiction from a powerful voice in American letters, praised as "beautiful and heartrending" (Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker), "terrific" (Chicago Tribune), and "an important and incisive book" (Washington Post)

The Refugees

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Yasunari Kawabata

Lane Dunlop

J. Martin Holman

The back pages are bent and there is a tear on page 259 

Oklahoma

Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, the novelist Yasunari Kawabata felt the essence of his art was to be found not in his longer works but in a series of short stories--which he called "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories"--written over the span of his career. In them we find loneliness, love, and the passage of time, demonstrating the range and complexity of a true master of short fiction.

Palm-Of-the-Hand Stories

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Only read once! Perfect condition!

Misfit mothers, prodigal “undaughters,” con artists, and middle-aged runaways populate these ten short stories that blur the lives, we wish for with the ones we actually lead. A tornado survivor grapples with a new identity, a trans teen psychic can read only indecisive minds, a woman informs her family of her plans to upload her consciousness and abandon her body. 

Luke Dani Blue invites the reader into a world of outlier lives made central and magical thinking made real . Surreal, darkly humorous, and always deeply felt, Pretend It’s My Body is bound together by the act of searching-for a spark of recognition and a story of one’s own.

Pretend It’s My Body

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Kelley Armstrong

Rhode Island

The final anthology from the #1 New York Times bestselling Otherworld series
  
Embrace the obscure. New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong once again opens the gates to the Otherworld. This collection of rare and never-before-published novellas and short stories brings the clever wit, dark twists, and intense suspense Otherworld readers have come to expect. Favorite characters return, secrets are revealed, and several important storylines reach their conclusions.
 
PRAISE FOR KELLEY ARMSTRONG
 
"Sexy, smart, and action-packed!"
--Richelle Mead, New York Times bestselling author of the Vampire Academy series
 
"Never a slow moment."
--Charlaine Harris, New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse series

Otherworld Chills

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The next anthology from the #1 New York Times bestselling Otherworld series

More than a decade after Kelley Armstrong first opened the doors to the Otherworld, fans are still clamoring for more. The second in the trilogy, Otherworld Secrets, features fan-favorites such as Cassandra, Savannah, and Adam in rare and never-before-published short stories--plus a brand new novella. Fans old and new will flock to this mystery-themed volume to discover the deepest secrets of this captivating world.

Otherworld Secrets

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A Novel

New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong has bewitched audiences with her Otherworld series of supernatural thrillers. Now, in this new collection of shorter fiction, some of Armstrong's most tantalizing lead characters appear alongside her unforgettable supporting players, who step out of the shadows and into the light.
  
Have you ever wondered how lone wolf Clayton Danvers finally got bitten by the last thing he ever expected: love? Or how the hot-blooded bad-girl witch Eve Levine managed to ensnare the cold, ruthless corporate sorcerer Kristof Nast in one of the Otherworld's most unlikely pairings? Would you like to be a fly on the wall at the wedding of Lucas Cortez and Paige Winterbourne as their eminently practical plans are upended by their well-meaning friends? Or tag along with Lucas and Paige as they investigate a gruesome crime that looks to be the work of a rogue vampire?
Now devotees of the Otherworld can share these special moments with some of their favorite characters--as well as discovering deeper insights into the lives of some of the lesser-known players. But even readers new to the 
 
Otherworld universe will find much to love in these seven tales of friendship, adventure, and enduring romance. For when the superhuman men and women of the Otherworld set their minds to a task, they do so with fierce passion and an undivided sense of purpose that make them, in the end, very much human.
 

Tales of the Otherworld

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Otherworld Nights

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Kim Harrison

Tales from the Hollows and Beyond





New York Times bestselling author Kim Harrison ventures into the mysterious hidden lands of magic and mystery herself, in her first story collection. Into the Woods brings together an enchanting mix of fiction--half brand-new, never-before-published stories, and half tales from her beloved, bestselling Hollows.

This collection includes an original Hollows novella, "Million Dollar Baby," about Trent Kalamack's secret elven quest in Pale Demon, along with two original short stories ("Pet Shop Boys" and "Temson Woods") that explore just what happens when humanity and the supernatural collide, and two novelettes ("Spider Silk" and "Grace") set in new worlds of imagination and adventure.Plus Into the Woods includes all of the previously published Hollows short stories together in one volume for the very first time.

Into the Woods

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Anthony Doerr

Heidi Pitlor

#1 New York Times best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr brings his"stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors" (San Francisco Chronicle) to selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019.



"As soon as you complete a description of what a good story must be, a new example flutters through an open window, lands on your sleeve, and proves your description wrong," writes Anthony Doerr about the task of selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. The year's best stories are a diverse, addictive group exploring everything from America's rich rural culture to its online teen culture to the fragile nature of the therapist-client relationship. This astonishing collection brings together the realistic and dystopic, humor and terror. For Doerr, "with every new artist, we simultaneously refine and expand our understanding of what the form can be."

 

The Best American Short Stories 2019 includes Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Jamel Brinkley, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ursula K. Le Guin, Manuel Muñoz, Sigrid Nunez, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Jim Shepherd, Weike Wang, and others.

The Best American Short Stories 2019

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Jamel Brinkley

California

From a National Book Award finalist, Witness is an elegant, insistent narrative of actions taken and not taken. What does it mean to take action? To bear witness? What does it cost? In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect, to remember, to stand up for, and to really see each other, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape not only their own futures but the legacies and prospects of their families and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust—doctors, employers, siblings—too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon. With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.

Witness

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John Updike

Short Stories and a Sequel

The dozen short stories in John Updike's new collection revisit many of the locales of his fiction: the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger, the lonely farm to which the hero moves as an adolescent, the exurban New England of adult camaraderie and sexual mischief, the New York City of artistic ambition and taunting glamour. Love, including an old woman's for her cats and a boy's for his embattled father, exerts its spell in all twelve; the title derives from a story in which an American banjo virtuoso demonstrates his licks to an enthralled Soviet audience in the heart of the Cold War, while being hounded by the epistolary aftermath of a one-night stand in Washington, D.C.

To these tales Mr. Updike has added a novella-length sequel to his quartet of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Several old strands come at last together, and the dead man's survivors fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness over the edge of the millennium. The place is, as before, the area of Brewer, Pennsylvania; the time, the last months of 1999.

Licks of Love

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Lore Segal

New York

And Other Stories

"For almost six decades Segal has quietly produced some of the best fiction and essays in American literature..."—The New York Times Beloved New Yorker writer Lore Segal, at 95-years-old, is a national treasure. Working at the height of her powers, in this story collection she turns her gimlet eye and compassionate humor on aging and life in the slow lane. From the master of the short short comes a collection of 16 new stories featuring old friends who have loved and lunched together for over 40 years. These erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians offer startling insights into friendship, family and aging. Can the group organize a visit to one of their number in her new, and detested, assisted living situation? Is this a fabulous party with old friends, or a funeral reception? And does who was sleeping with whom, way back when, still matter? In story after story, Segal's voice is always hilarious and urbane, heartbreaking and profound, keen and utterly unsentimental, as she tackles aging's affronts.

Ladies' Lunch

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Joe L. Wheeler

Arkansas

Various novelists, some contemporary, contribute to this collection of love stories, including the story of a teenager's first love and a married couple of 27 years who fall in love all over again.

Heart to Heart Stories of Love

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Manuel Munoz

District of Columbia

Shimmering stories set in California's Central Valley, the first book in a decade from a virtuoso story writer.

"Her immediate concern was money." So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz's dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California's Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal.

These exquisite stories are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns that surround Fresno. With an unflinching hand, Muñoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables but are regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by the migra, as well as the quotidian struggles and immense challenges faced by their families. The messy and sometimes violent realities navigated by his characters--straight and gay, immigrant and American-born, young and old--are tempered by moments of surprising, tender care: Two young women meet on a bus to Los Angeles to retrieve husbands who must find their way back from the border after being deported; a gay couple plans a housewarming party that reveals buried class tensions; a teenage mother slips out to a carnival where she encounters the father of her child; the foreman of a crew of fruit pickers finds a dead body and is subsequently--perhaps literally--haunted.

In The Consequences, obligation can shape, support, and sometimes derail us. It's a magnificent new book from a gifted writer at the height of his powers.

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Jack Canfield

Chicken Soup For The Mothers Soul 1 -2

Anthony Veasna So

Afterparties

Algernon Blackwood

The Empty House

Eric LaRocca

Things Have Gotten Worse since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes

Elise Bryant; Elizabeth Eulberg

Serendipity

Clarence Day

The Best of Clarence Day

Theodore W. Goossen

The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

Andrew Duplessie

Too Scared to Sleep

Kelly Link

White Cat, Black Dog

Leesa Cross-Smith

So We Can Glow

Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Refugees

Yasunari Kawabata; Lane Dunlop; J. Martin Holman

Palm-Of-the-Hand Stories

Luke Dani Blue

Pretend It’s My Body

Kelley Armstrong

Otherworld Chills

Kelley Armstrong

Otherworld Secrets

Kelley Armstrong

Tales of the Otherworld

Kelley Armstrong

Otherworld Nights

Kim Harrison

Into the Woods

Anthony Doerr; Heidi Pitlor

The Best American Short Stories 2019

Jamel Brinkley

Witness

John Updike

Licks of Love

Lore Segal

Ladies' Lunch

Joe L. Wheeler

Heart to Heart Stories of Love

Manuel Munoz

The Consequences