Showing results for "The Birds" in Anthologies & Short Stories

It all started with a simple, yet sneakily difficult challenge from global best-selling author Harlan Coben: Pick a bird of prey, then use it as the inspiration for a brand-new story. The response from some of the best writers on the planet: Game on! The result: Eleven stories that are twisty, scary, surprising and bursting with imagination. An egg worth more than its weight in gold. A mysterious operative known only as Owl. An eagle-watcher who sees more than she should. Even a story that somehow places the Maltese Falcon in a nursing home.

From the opening story, "Willing" - about a second-rate movie actress in her 30s who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being - Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. What happens when his idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.

These four plays, translated into blank verse by C. A. Wheelwright, present to us the wide range of this ancient playwright's fertile imagination. From war and peace to politics and society to the relationships between mena nd women, no topic is off-limits.

A classic of alienation and horror, The Birds was immortalised by Hitchcock in his celebrated film. The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man's sense of dominance over the natural world.

In these tense, macabre stories, bodies fall from the sky, perfect nails conceal grisly secrets and violence pulses behind gleaming façades. From hellish visions to obsessive relationships, acclaimed author Agustina Bazterrica takes us to the dark heart of human desires and fears. Shocking, brutal, yet glinting with sharp humour, "Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird" is a breathtaking dive into human monstrousness from a master of contemporary horror.

"My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream" A woman's fortitude saves her village from disaster. A teenager explores their identity in a moment of quiet. A petition writer reflects on his life as a dog lies...

In this moving collection of short stories and essays, Gordon Lee Johnson (Cupeño/Cahuilla) cements his voice not only as a wry commentator on American Indian reservation life but also as a master of fiction writing. In Johnson’s stories, all of which are set on the fictional San Ignacio reservation in Southern California, we meet unforgettable characters like Plato Pena, the Stanford-bound geek who reads Kahlil Gibran during intertribal softball games; hardboiled investigator Roddy Foo; and Etta, whose motto is “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise”.

As part of Counterpoint's celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry comes this reissue of his 1986 classic, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership. Those stories include "Thicker Than Liquor," "Where Did They Go?," "It Wasn't Me," "The Boundary," "That Distant Land," and the titular "The Wild Birds." Spanning more than three decades, from 1930 to 1967, these wonderful stories follow Wheeler Catlett, and reintroduce listeners to the beloved people who live in Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky.

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.

In this collection - ranging from stories of love found and lost to tales of the supernatural - Ghosh masterfully traces the inscrutable ways of the human heart. The reigning queen of Bombay cinema allows a younger leading man to fall in love with her to spite her husband. A schoolmaster’s ravishing wife joins him in the small town where he works, inspires him to build a garden for her and sets about wrecking his life.

The moment for "I do" has arrived, and all eyes are on the bride - until she turns heel, hijacks a Ducati, and speeds out of town! Now everyone entangled in the wedding that wasn't takes off on an unexpected adventure of the heart: a down-on-her-luck B&B owner who needs a little help finding her own bluebird of happiness. A big city cop with small-town roots who pulls over the girl he could never have. 

"Slow Birds" tells the story of a strangely idyllic world that is plagued by mysterious invaders. Dubbed slow birds, because the cylindrical objects fly at the rate of only a few feet per minute, the artifacts are a complete mystery. Jason Babbidge's life is inexorably changed and linked to the slow birds when his brother, Daniel, climbs aboard a slowbird shortly before it disappears into the unknown.

Here is a selection of some of the best-known and best-loved tales of The Arabian Nights, including "Sinbad", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", "Aladdin", "The Talking Bird", and the "Fisherman and the Genie". In this "treasure house of pleasant things" you will find golden palaces, gem studded caves, and breathtaking gardens.

Birds, Strangers and Psychos is a thrilling anthology that brings together the biggest names in mystery and crime fiction to pay homage to Alfred Hitchcock, the legendary filmmaker whose name is synonymous with suspense. Acclaimed editor Maxim Jakubowski curates 24 original short stories, each inspired by the mood, tension, and style that defined Hitchcock’s groundbreaking work.

When it comes to flying gliders, ace pilot Breeze Callaghan is as smooth as they come. He perfects a skill that will prove vitally important for decades to come - even into the jet age, as demonstrated by Captain Sully Sullenberger, who famously landed his disabled passenger plane on the Hudson River.

Fourth story in a collection of interlinked tales of crime and retribution laced with dark humour, set around the festive season Working in a call centre normally offers few career opportunities. But it looks as if Tracy’s about to get her big break...

Two Blue Birds tells the tale of the classic triangle of the man, the wife and the secretary, who struggle to work out what their relationships are with each other. Neither of the women seem to want the man sexually but the secretary offers devotion while the parasitic wife has more insight into the man and his work. All the relationships seem unhealthy, all three seem to want something different but are incapable of expressing what they desire.

Audiobook performed by George Newbern, Karen White, Michael Crouch, Jenna Lamia, Sophie Amoss, and Allyson Ryan A debut short story collection in the tradition of writers like Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders—complex, imaginative, and refreshingly original—now on audio as part...

Redescubierto en el siglo XX, Alfred de Musset es considerado uno de los grandes escritores románticos franceses cuyas obras muestran una sensibilidad extrema.