Best Short Stories

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove returns with a dazzling, profound novel about a small town with a big dream—and the price required to make it come true. Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. “Lest readers think hockey is the star here, it’s Backman’s rich characters that steal the show, and his deft handling of tragedy and its effects on an insular town. While the story is dark at times, love, sacrifice, and the bonds of friendship and family shine through ultimately offering hope and even redemption.” ( Publishers Weekly ). “The sentimentally savvy Backman...takes a sobering and solemn look at the ways alienation and acceptance, ethics and emotions nearly destroy a small town and young people.” ( Booklist ). Backman cements his standing as a writer of astonishing depth and proves that he also has very broad range plus the remarkable ability to make you understand the feelings of each of a dozen different characters. The story is fully packed with wise insights into the human experience causing characters and readers to ponder life’s great question of who we are, what we hope to be and how we should lead our lives.” ( The Washington Times ).

These are just some of the tales Tom Hanks tells in this first collection of his short stories. They move in period, location and manner, but all demonstrate a joy in writing, a pleasure in communicating an intensely American sense of atmosphere, friendship, life and family that is every bit as smart, engaging and humane as the man himself. Tom Hanks sees inside people – a wary divorcee, a billionaire trading desire for disaster, a boy witnessing his father’s infidelity, a motley crew shooting for the moon – with such acute empathy and good humour we’d follow him anywhere. Only one of the stories in Hanks' debut features an actor: it's a sharp satire with priceless insider details about a handsome dope on a press junket in Europe. — you will enjoy Uncommon Type .”. —AM New York. “In Uncommon Type , Hanks proves his bona fides as a serious scribe, producing a collection of 17 short stories so accomplished and delightful he can rest assured he has a great fallback plan should that acting thing, you know, not work out… Terrific, Tom.”. —USA Today. “There is often a powerful sense of other lives imagined at a level that goes deeper than writerly research.”. —The Guardian. “Enjoyable..."The Past Is Important to Us” employs a sharp, unexpected conclusion to elevate a story of time travel and romance at the 1939 World’s Fair." These pieces, some of which feature recurring characters and many of which explore the classic American short story territory of small-town life, have the authentic, worn-in feel of a favourite pair of jeans.”. —Metro. “The great strengths of this collection are decency and sentimentality.”. —Sunday Times. “Playful, perceptive and rewarding.”. —Sunday Express. “An entertaining collection.”. —Mail on Sunday. “impressive.”. —The Sun. “There always comes a slight wariness when we discover that someone who is generally renowned for one thing turns out to be very good at something else... —Daily Telegraph. “Tom Hanks is a natural born storyteller… He Belongs to a tradition of American storytellers that includes Mark Twain or O Henry although there is a range of work in Uncommon Type that defies such a catch-all definition.”. —The Herald.

-- Mark Twain Mark Twain (1835-1910) was the first American writer to capture the unique and colorful vernacular of his country's populace. Ed Begley, Sr., and Will Geer read excerpts from Twain's LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, and Geer continues with many of the other selections from THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN in his clear, jocular tones.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding audio transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times. “A triumph.” —Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review. “Toni Morrison’s finest work. [It] sets her apart [and] displays her prodigious talent.” — Chicago Sun-Times. An extraordinary work.” — The New York Times. Resonates from past to present.” — San Francisco Chronicle. “A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. “Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.” — New York Review of Books. “A work of genuine force. Beautifully written.” — The Washington Post. “There is something great in Beloved : a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. a glorious book.” — The Baltimore Sun. A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. rich, provocative, extremely satisfying.” — Milwaukee Journal. Toni Morrison has become one of America’s finest novelists.” — The Plain Dealer. A lasting achievement.” — The Christian Science Monitor. “Written with a force rarely seen in contemporary fiction. One feels deep admiration.” — USA Today. Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry and power she is born to tell comes right out.” — The Village Voice. “A book worth many rereadings.” — Glamour. “In her most probing novel, Toni Morrison has demonstrated once again the stunning powers that place her in the first ranks of our living novelists.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Shattering emotional power and impact.” — New York Daily News.

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. Barbara Kingsolver is the bestselling author of the novels, The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, as well as collected essays, High Tide in Tucson.

The collection includes:Riding for the Brand, The Black Rock Coffin Makers, Dutchman's Flat, The Nester and the Piute, Mistakes Can Kill You, Trail to Pie Town, and Big Medicine. Some equally famous friends--Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson--perform cameos in a well-produced multicast adaptation of RIDING FOR THE BRAND, complete with jingling spurs, war whoops, and gunshots.

Poet, author and internationally acclaimed speaker David Whyte looks at the fruitful discipline of finding and asking ever keener and more beautiful questions throughout our lives. An Associate Fellow at Templeton College and Said Business School at the University of Oxford, he is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development, where he works with many European, American and international companies.

Enter into The Hiding Place to relive Corrie ten Boom's heart-pounding account as a leader in the Dutch Underground during World War II.

NOW THE ACCLAIMED HBO SERIES GAME OF THRONES Here is the first volume in George R. R. Martin’s magnificent cycle of novels that includes A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords . Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones. Whenever he's allowed to leave, he returns to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives with the lovely Parris, a big white dog called Mischa, and two cats named Augustus and Caligula, who think they run the place.

Enter into The Hiding Place to relive Corrie ten Boom's heart-pounding account as a leader in the Dutch Underground during World War II.

Enter into The Hiding Place to relive Corrie ten Boom's heart-pounding account as a leader in the Dutch Underground during World War II.

The count’s refinement and genteel nature are exactly what we’re longing for.” — Ann Patchett “How delightful that in an era as crude as ours this finely composed novel stretches out with old-World elegance.” —The Washington Post He can’t leave his hotel. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. [ A Gentleman in Moscow ] is laced with sparkling threads (they will tie up) and tokens (they will matter): special keys, secret compartments, gold coins, vials of coveted liquid, old-fashioned pistols, duels and scars, hidden assignations (discreet and smoky), stolen passports, a ruby necklace, mysterious letters on elegant hotel stationery . “Marvelous.” — Chicago Tribune “The novel buzzes with the energy of numerous adventures, love affairs, twists of fate and silly antics.” — The Wall Street Journal “A winning, stylish novel.” —NPR.org “Enjoyable, elegant.” — Seattle Times. In the end, Towles’s greatest narrative effect is not the moments of wonder and synchronicity but the generous transformation of these peripheral workers, over the course of decades, into confidants, equals and, finally, friends. With them around, a life sentence in these gilded halls might make Rostov the luckiest man in Russia.” — The New York Times Book Review “This is an old fashioned sort of romance, filled with delicious detail. Towles’s tale, as lavishly filigreed as a Fabergé egg, gleams with nostalgia for the golden age of Tolstoy and Turgenev.” — O, The Oprah Magazine “‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ and ‘Eloise’ meets all the Bond villains.” —TheSkimm. an imaginative and unforgettable historical portrait.” — Booklist “House arrest has never been so charming as in Towles’s second novel, an engaging 30-year saga set almost entirely inside the Metropol, Moscow’s most luxurious hotel. “An irresistible and astonishingly assured debut about working class-women and world-weary WASPs in 1930s New York…in the crisp, noirish prose of the era, Towles portrays complex relationships in a city that is at once melting pot and elitist enclave – and a thoroughly modern heroine who fearlessly claims her place in it.” — O, the Oprah Magazine “With this snappy period piece, Towles resurrects the cinematic black-and-white Manhattan of the golden age…[his] characters are youthful Americans in tricky times, trying to create authentic lives.” — The New York Times Book Review “This very good first novel about striving and surviving in Depression-era Manhattan deserves attention…The great strength of Rules of Civility is in the sharp, sure-handed evocation of Manhattan in the late ‘30s.” — Wall Street Journal “Put on some Billie Holiday, pour a dry martini and immerse yourself in the eventful life of Katey Kontent…[Towles] clearly knows the privileged world he’s writing about, as well as the vivid, sometimes reckless characters who inhabit it.” — People “[A] wonderful debut novel…Towles [plays] with some of the great themes of love and class, luck and fated encounters that animated Wharton’s novels.” — The Chicago Tribune “Glittering…filled with snappy dialogue, sharp observations and an array of terrifically drawn characters…Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change.” —NPR.org.