Showing results for "Readings" in Short Stories

The Cottage on the Hill is a horror story, but it’s a J. Robert Lennon horror story, in which the characters’ loneliness - their disconnectedness, their inability, at times, even to speak or listen to one another - is more chilling than any of the supernatural elements.

Do not let Etgar Keret deceive you. The Israeli writer who's worked in film, illustration, animation, and radio, is a storyteller in all senses of the word. Like a conman, he'll promise you a simple story and then the next thing you know your emotional reserves have been completely emptied. It's a literary bait and switch, and he'll get you every time.

Matt Dojny's "You Are the Stepson" is one story told three different ways. Dojny uses "variations on a theme, like movements in a symphony, or parallel universes, existing side by side but never intersecting," writes Halimah Marcus, co-editor of Electric Literature, in her introduction this issue. "The opening to 'You Are the Stepson' tips the [listener] off to the elements that will appear in all three tales contained herein: a cancer-ridden stepfather and his stepson, a bicycle and a gun, and the desperate need for an apology, 'due to the situation with the ant.'”

Benedict Cumberbatch reads five stories featuring the famous vegetarian railway detective, Thorpe Hazell, as heard on BBC Radio 4. In The Affair of the German Dispatch-Box, Hazell hatches a daring plan to retrieve a highly sensitive government document before it reaches the German Ambassador. In...

Here, collected in one volume and chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as "What Kind of Day Did You Have?", "Leaving the Yellow House", and a previously uncollected piece, "By the St. Lawrence". With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. With a preface by Janice Bellow and an introduction by James Wood, this is a collection to treasure for longtime Saul Bellow fans and an excellent introduction for new listeners.

An acclaimed novelist, short story writer and critic, Leslie Poles Hartley is best known for his 1953 novel The Go-Between, which won the W. H. Heinemann Award and was adapted as a BAFTA-winning film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Included here is a radio dramatisation of that classic tale, alongside adaptations of three further novels and five short stories.

A BBC radio anthology of the very best short stories by Stacy Aumonier. Stacy Aumonier was an author, stage performer, 'society entertainer', World War One private and draughtsman, who gained an unrivalled reputation for his short fiction in the 1920s. John Galsworthy described him as ‘one of the best short-story writers of all time’, and several of his tales were adapted for television by Alfred Hitchcock.

In this engaging social history New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell, “the most prolific and successful historical novelist in the world today” (Wall Street Journal), completes his epic Last Kingdom series with this companion book featuring three exclusive short stories and...

H. E. Bates is probably best known for his comic novel The Darling Buds of May, which introduced the lovable Larkins to the world and sparked three hugely popular TV adaptations. In his 68 years, Bates wrote over 20 further novels, more than 300 short stories, children’s books, poems, plays and non-fiction. This collection brings together three full-cast BBC Radio dramatisations and fourteen excellent readings, rounding off with extracts from H. E. Bates autobiographies.

The singular, enchanting debut story collection from Elizabeth McCracken, now back in print as part of Ecco’s “Art of the Story” series, and with a new introduction from the author. Called “astonishingly assured” by The Guardian, the nine stories that make up Elizabeth McCracken’s...

Robert never quite feels at home with Cassie's family, a gang of eccentrics including a reptile smuggler, a worshipper of Osiris, and an old woman who believes her photographs can see into the future. When he breaks up with Cassie, she is so upset that she gives him the most terrible thing she can offer: an envelope of her grandmother's photos, which show in detail the path that Robert's life will take. At first, this vision of the future gives him strength - but soon it becomes a prison on glossy paper.

A powerful reckoning over the people we might have been if we’d chosen a different path, from a master of the short story In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we might have led if we’d made different choices...

You will have ninety minutes to solve the murder. A startling declaration by a new Harvard instructor: sixty-seven-year-old Frances Glessner Lee. It’s 1945. Before her, six wary male students given to assumptions—especially when it comes to women without a formal education—are challenged to solve a real-life whodunit using Mrs. Lee’s creation, the crime scene diorama. Every detail is accurate. And every detail matters when solving a crime with no survivors…

The Nun's Priest's Tale is one of The Canterbury Tales by the 14th century Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Read in Middle English by Robert Ross.