Best Short Stories

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. "The best of these stories--and none is written with less than the sharp edge of honed vision--are memory and prophecy. It is controlled and wild, deep and tough, perceptive and shrewd." "In prose that combines the sharp, unsentimental rhythms of Hemingway with gentler, more lyrical descriptions, Mr. O'Brien gives the reader a shockingly visceral sense of what it felt like to tramp through a booby-trapped jungle, carrying 20 pounds of supplies, 14 pounds of ammunition, along with radios, machine guns, assault rifles and grenades. "With The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien adds his second title to the short list of essential fiction about Vietnam. By moving beyond the horror of the fighting to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear, by questioning the role that imagination plays in helping to form our memories and our own versions of truth, he places The Things They Carried high up on the list of best fiction about any war." "When Going After Cacciato appeared out of nowhere to win the 1979 National Book Award, it seemed to many, myself included, that no finer fiction had, as of then, been written in the closing half of the 20th century--or was likely to be in the remaining years to come. O’Brien’s absorbing narrative moves in circles; events are recalled and retold again and again, giving us a deep sense of the fluidity of truth and the dance of memory.” --The New Yorker. "Rendered with an evocative, quiet precision, not equaled in the imaginitive literature of the American war in Vietnam. It is as though a Thucydides had descended from grand politique and strategy to calm dissection of the quotidian efforts of war. Composed in the same lean, vigorous style as his earlier books, The Things They Carried adds up to a captivating account of the experiences of an infantry company in Vietnam. "O'Brien has written a book so searing and immediate you can almost hear the choppers in the background. Drenched in irony and purple-haze napalm, the Vietnam narrative has almost been forced to produce a new kind of war literature. The Things They Carried is an extraordinary contribution to that class of fiction. Between its rhythmic brilliance and its exquisite rendering of memory--the slant of sunlight in the midst of war, the look on a man's face as he steps on a mine--this is prose headed for the nerve center of what was Vietnam." "Simply marvelous ... A striking sequence of stories that twist and turn and bounce off each other . O'Brien has invented a tone of voice precisely suited to this war: it conveys a risky load of sentiment kept in check by both a chaste prose and a fair amount of comedy. The line between fiction and fact is beautifully, permanently blurred. It is the perfect approach to this sort of material, and O'Brien does it with vast skill and grace. It is controlled and wild, deep and tough, perceptive and shrewd. "Consummate artistry ... A strongly unified book, a series of glimpses, through different facets, of a single, mysterious, deadly stone . O'Brien blends diverse incidents, voices, and genres, indelibly rendering the nightmarish impact of the Vietnam experience." The stories have a specificity of observed physical detail that makes them seem a model of the realist's art. What finally distinguishes The Things They Carried is O'Brien's understanding of the nature of memory." It perfectly captures the moral confusion that is the legacy of the Vietnam War. It is about the human heart and emotional baggage and loyalty and love. "O'Brien's stunning new book of linked stories, The Things They Carried, is about the power of the imagination. Nobody else can make me feel, as his three Vietnam books have, what I imagine to have been the reality of that war." In trying to review a book as precious as The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, there is the nightmare fear of saying the wrong thing--of not getting the book's wonder across to you fairly-and of sounding merely zealous, fanatical, and hence to be dismissed. "O'Brien has unmistakably forged one of the most persuasive works of any kind to arise out of any war." "O'Brien succeeds as well as any writer in conveying the free-fall sensation of fear and the surrealism of combat." Maybe a silver star for telling the truth that never happened, passionately, gracefully." The Things They Carried is about life, about men who fought and die, about buddies, and about a lost innocence that might be recaptured through the memory of stories. The gore and terror of Vietnam jungle warfare accumulate into an enormous mass." "Even more than Cacciato, The Things They Carried is virtually impossible to summarize in conventional terms. The novel is held together by two things: the haunting clarity of O'Brien's prose and the intensity of his focus. His blend of poetic realism and comic fantasy remains unique. Just by imagining stories that never happened, and embroidering upon some that did, O'Brien can bring it all back. He can feel the terror and the sorrow and the crazy, jagged laughter. Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five has the American soldier been portrayed with such poignance and sincerity." It carries them, though, with a lovely, stirring grace, because it is as much about the redemptive power of stories as it is about Vietnam." "The author of the National Book Award-winning Going After Cacciato offers us fiction in a unique form: a kind of 'faction' presented as a collection of related stories that have the cumulative effect of a unified novel. .The prose ranges from staccato soldierly thoughts to raw depictions of violent death to intense personal ruminations by the author that don't appear to be fictional at all. Richly wrought and filled with war's paradoxes, The Things They Carried will reward a second, or even a third, reading. His ambitious, modernistic fable, Going After Cacciato, raised the American war novel to new artistic realms. In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien expertly fires off tracer rounds, illuminating the art of war in all its horrible and fascinating complexity, detailing the mad and the mundane. The Things They Carried joins the work of Crane and Hemingway and Mailer as great war literature." "The Things They Carried is distinguished by virtue of the novelty and complexity of its presentation. Mr. O'Brien is a superb prose stylist, perhaps the best among Vietnam War novelists. "The search for the great American novel will never end, but it gets a step closer to realization with The Things They Carried by Tim O' Brien." "His language is simple--no tricks, no phony subtlety, no 'artistic' twists. The Things They Carried charts out a lot of emotional territory, gripping the reader from beginning to end. All of us, by holding O'Brien's stories in our hands, can approach Vietnam and truth." "His characters and his situations are unique and ring true to the point of tears. Read it slowly, and let O'Brien's masterful storytelling and his eloquent philosophizing about the nature of war wash over you. The Things They Carried is a major work of literary imagination." "In The Things They Carried, a matchlessly literary book, O'Brien casts away any least pretense and writes straight from the heart. The Things They Carried is an accomplished, gentle, lovely book." "O'Brien's meditations--on war and memory, on darkness and light--suffuse the entire work with a kind of poetic form, making for a highly original, fully realized novel. The book is persuasive in its desperate hope that stories can save us." "The best of these stories--and none is written with less than the sharp edge of honed vision--are memory and prophecy. It is controlled and wild, deep and tough, perceptive and shrewd." "In prose that combines the sharp, unsentimental rhythms of Hemingway with gentler, more lyrical descriptions, Mr. O'Brien gives the reader a shockingly visceral sense of what it felt like to tramp through a booby-trapped jungle, carrying 20 pounds of supplies, 14 pounds of ammunition, along with radios, machine guns, assault rifles and grenades. "With The Things They Carried , Tim O'Brien adds his second title to the short list of essential fiction about Vietnam. By moving beyond the horror of the fighting to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear, by questioning the role that imagination plays in helping to form our memories and our own versions of truth, he places The Things They Carried high up on the list of best fiction about any war." "When Going After Cacciato appeared out of nowhere to win the 1979 National Book Award, it seemed to many, myself included, that no finer fiction had, as of then, been written in the closing half of the 20th century--or was likely to be in the remaining years to come. O’Brien’s absorbing narrative moves in circles; events are recalled and retold again and again, giving us a deep sense of the fluidity of truth and the dance of memory.”. "Rendered with an evocative, quiet precision, not equaled in the imaginitive literature of the American war in Vietnam. It is as though a Thucydides had descended from grand politique and strategy to calm dissection of the quotidian efforts of war. Composed in the same lean, vigorous style as his earlier books, The Things They Carried adds up to a captivating account of the experiences of an infantry company in Vietnam. "O'Brien has written a book so searing and immediate you can almost hear the choppers in the background. Drenched in irony and purple-haze napalm, the Vietnam narrative has almost been forced to produce a new kind of war literature. The Things They Carried is an extraordinary contribution to that class of fiction. Between its rhythmic brilliance and its exquisite rendering of memory--the slant of sunlight in the midst of war, the look on a man's face as he steps on a mine--this is prose headed for the nerve center of what was Vietnam." "Simply marvelous ... A striking sequence of stories that twist and turn and bounce off each other . O'Brien has invented a tone of voice precisely suited to this war: it conveys a risky load of sentiment kept in check by both a chaste prose and a fair amount of comedy. The line between fiction and fact is beautifully, permanently blurred. It is the perfect approach to this sort of material, and O'Brien does it with vast skill and grace. It is controlled and wild, deep and tough, perceptive and shrewd. "Consummate artistry ... A strongly unified book, a series of glimpses, through different facets, of a single, mysterious, deadly stone . O'Brien blends diverse incidents, voices, and genres, indelibly rendering the nightmarish impact of the Vietnam experience." The stories have a specificity of observed physical detail that makes them seem a model of the realist's art. What finally distinguishes The Things They Carried is O'Brien's understanding of the nature of memory." It perfectly captures the moral confusion that is the legacy of the Vietnam War. It is about the human heart and emotional baggage and loyalty and love. "O'Brien's stunning new book of linked stories, The Things They Carried, is about the power of the imagination. Nobody else can make me feel, as his three Vietnam books have, what I imagine to have been the reality of that war." In trying to review a book as precious as The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, there is the nightmare fear of saying the wrong thing--of not getting the book's wonder across to you fairly-and of sounding merely zealous, fanatical, and hence to be dismissed. "O'Brien has unmistakably forged one of the most persuasive works of any kind to arise out of any war." "O'Brien succeeds as well as any writer in conveying the free-fall sensation of fear and the surrealism of combat." Maybe a silver star for telling the truth that never happened, passionately, gracefully." The Things They Carried is about life, about men who fought and die, about buddies, and about a lost innocence that might be recaptured through the memory of stories. The gore and terror of Vietnam jungle warfare accumulate into an enormous mass." "Even more than Cacciato , The Things They Carried is virtually impossible to summarize in conventional terms. The novel is held together by two things: the haunting clarity of O'Brien's prose and the intensity of his focus. His blend of poetic realism and comic fantasy remains unique. Just by imagining stories that never happened, and embroidering upon some that did, O'Brien can bring it all back. He can feel the terror and the sorrow and the crazy, jagged laughter. Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five has the American soldier been portrayed with such poignance and sincerity." It carries them, though, with a lovely, stirring grace, because it is as much about the redemptive power of stories as it is about Vietnam." "The author of the National Book Award-winning Going After Cacciato offers us fiction in a unique form: a kind of 'faction' presented as a collection of related stories that have the cumulative effect of a unified novel. .The prose ranges from staccato soldierly thoughts to raw depictions of violent death to intense personal ruminations by the author that don't appear to be fictional at all. Richly wrought and filled with war's paradoxes, The Things They Carried will reward a second, or even a third, reading. His ambitious, modernistic fable, Going After Cacciato , raised the American war novel to new artistic realms . In The Things They Carried , Tim O'Brien expertly fires off tracer rounds, illuminating the art of war in all its horrible and fascinating complexity, detailing the mad and the mundane. The Things They Carried joins the work of Crane and Hemingway and Mailer as great war literature." "The Things They Carried is distinguished by virtue of the novelty and complexity of its presentation. Mr. O'Brien is a superb prose stylist, perhaps the best among Vietnam War novelists. "The search for the great American novel will never end, but it gets a step closer to realization with The Things They Carried by Tim O' Brien." "His language is simple--no tricks, no phony subtlety, no 'artistic' twists. The Things They Carried charts out a lot of emotional territory, gripping the reader from beginning to end. All of us, by holding O'Brien's stories in our hands, can approach Vietnam and truth." "His characters and his situations are unique and ring true to the point of tears. Read it slowly, and let O'Brien's masterful storytelling and his eloquent philosophizing about the nature of war wash over you. The Things They Carried is a major work of literary imagination." "In The Things They Carried , a matchlessly literary book, O'Brien casts away any least pretense and writes straight from the heart. The Things They Carried is an accomplished, gentle, lovely book." "O'Brien's meditations--on war and memory, on darkness and light--suffuse the entire work with a kind of poetic form, making for a highly original, fully realized novel.

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. But Mr. Kapasi has problems enough of his own; in addition to his regular job working as an interpreter for a doctor who does not speak his patients' language, he also drives tourists to local sites of interest. In that single line Jhumpa Lahiri sums up a universal experience, one that applies to all who have grown up, left home, fallen in or out of love, and, above all, experienced what it means to be a foreigner, even within one's own family. Frequently finding themselves in Cambridge, Mass., or similar but unnamed Eastern seaboard university towns, Lahiri's characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by India's tumultuous political history. The two things that sustain her, as the little boy she looks after every afternoon notices, are aerograms from homeAwritten by family members who so deeply misunderstand the nature of her life that they envy herAand the fresh fish she buys to remind her of Calcutta. Delusions of grandeur and lament for what she's lostA"such comforts you cannot even dream them"Agive her an odd, Chekhovian charm but ultimately do not convince her bourgeois audience that she is a desirable fixture in their up-and-coming property.

Danny the Champion of the World, 8. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, 11. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and 15.

A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Werner is a German orphan, destined to labour in the same mine that claimed his father’s life, until he discovers a knack for engineering. Yes, there is fear and fighting and disappearance and death, but the author’s focus is on the interior lives of his two characters. Never mind that their paths don’t cross until very late in the novel, this is not a book you read for plot (although there is a wonderful, mysterious subplot about a stolen gem). It is through their individual and intertwined tales that Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably re-creates the deprived civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military occupiers.High-Demand Backstory: A multipronged marketing campaign will make the author’s many fans aware of his newest book, and extensive review coverage is bound to enlist many new fans.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY LOS ANGELES TIMES AND BUZZFEED • Taking place nearly a century before the events of A Game of Thrones, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms compiles the first three official prequel novellas to George R. R. Martin’s ongoing masterwork, A Song of Ice and Fire. These never-before-collected adventures recount an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne, and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living consciousness. A young, naïve but ultimately courageous hedge knight, Ser Duncan the Tall towers above his rivals—in stature if not experience. Tagging along is his diminutive squire, a boy called Egg—whose true name is hidden from all he and Dunk encounter. Featuring more than 160 all-new illustrations by Gary Gianni, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a must-have collection that proves chivalry isn’t dead—yet. “Readers who already love Martin and his ability to bring visceral human drama out of any story will be thrilled to find this trilogy brought together and injected with extra life.” — Booklist. “Readers who already love [George R. R.] Martin and his ability to bring visceral human drama out of any story will be thrilled to find this trilogy brought together and injected with extra life.” — Booklist “The real reason to check out this collection is that it’s simply great storytelling. [Gary Gianni’s illustrations] really bring the events of the novellas to life in beautiful fashion.” — Tech Times. rich in human drama and the colorful worldbuilding that distinguishes other books in the series.” — Publishers Weekly.

When security expert Sean Wilson takes his wife, Amanda, along on a business trip to an isolated bed and breakfast, he’s hoping to combine work and pleasure. When she isn’t writing, Melinda is an avid martial artist: she holds a second-degree black belt in Kenpo karate and teaches women’s self-defense.

-Mark Draper [TOP 10 AMAZON REVIEWER]. _____________________________________________________ BOOK DESCRIPTION: David Simpson's bestselling and award-winning Post-Human science fiction adventure series has been downloaded on the Kindle over one million times in the last three years, delighting readers with a blend of thought-provoking philosophy, cutting edge and speculative science fiction, and high-octane, action-packed suspense, mystery, and adventure. Readers have compared it most often with the works of science fiction master Isaac Asimov and have delighted in turning pages filled to the brim with all the best that science fiction and cyberpunk have to offer, like nanobots, A.I., androids, post-humans, cyborgs, and a cast of likeable characters, suspense, and star-crossed love that you won't be able to resist. ". I read through the books, feeling a strong connection to the characters, wishing at times some of the tech were real, and at others being very thankful that humanity is not quite there." "A thought-provoking, energetic sci-fi book, with a robust dose of high-octane exploits." CONTAINS: SUB-HUMAN ( BOOK 1 ) POST-HUMAN ( BOOK 2 ) TRANS-HUMAN ( BOOK 3 ) HUMAN PLUS ( BOOK 4 ).

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. It is typical of Gabriel García Márquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude , Buendía, stands before the firing squad. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo.

But Oscar may never get what he wants. A book that decisively establishes [Díaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices." He cuts his barn-burning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness." His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences. That Díaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman — in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is just the word for it) work of modern fiction — all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else." a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish, and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games, and classic science fiction. The great achievement of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Díaz's ability to balance an intimate multigenerational story of familial tragedy. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer. In Díaz's landscape we are all the same, victims of a history and a present that doesn't just bleed together but stew. ". The Dominican Republic [Díaz] portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous, and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich. Not so different, perhaps, from anyone else's ancestral homeland, but Díaz's weirdly wonderful novel illustrates the island's uniquely powerful hold on Dominicans wherever they may wander. "Now that Díaz's second book, a novel called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , has finally arrived, younger writers will find that the bar. Oscar Wao shows a novelist engaged with the culture, high and low, and its polyglot language. If Donald Barthelme had lived to read Díaz, he surely would have been delighted to discover an intellectual and linguistic omnivore who could have taught even him a move or two." — Newsweek "Few books require a 'highly flammable' warning, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz's long-awaited first novel, will burn its way into your heart and sizzle your senses. Díaz's novel is drenched in the heated rhythms of the real world as much as it is laced with magical realism and classic fantasy stories." this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Díaz."

The entire book, with its unconventional page arrangement and eclectic, frenetic mix of text and pictures, is a spoof on the art of book design and the art of the fairy tale. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales retells--and wreaks havoc on--the allegories we all thought we knew by heart.