Fiction > Anthology

A collection of Maeve Binchy's wonderful, heartwarming stories celebrating the joys and travails of travel.

In The Best Australian Stories 2011, Cate Kennedy selects the year's most outstanding short fiction. Featuring much loved masters as well as exciting new voices, this book is a perfect introduction to Australia's best contemporary fiction. Previous contributors include Nam Le, Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Tim Winton, Mandy Sayer, DBC Pierre, Frank Moorhouse, Karen Hitchcock, Peter Goldsworthy, Marion Halligan, Venero Armanno and many more.

Silence is an exquisite, poignant collection of 'fictions' by one of Australia's finest writers. Each piece has its own startling imagery. This is a book that constantly surprises with its echoes of famous voices, and how the astonishing breadth of material - historical, personal, imagined - is held together by its central theme and by a web of subtle connections. Rodney Hall is one of Australia's finest writers. He has won the Miles Franklin Award twice for Just Relations and The Grisly Wife and many of his novels and poems have b... read more

The new book of essays from Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom. Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom' was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the 21st century. Now, a new collection of Franzen's non-fiction brings fresh demonstrations of his vivid, moral intelligence, confirming his status not only as a great American novelist but also as a master noticer, social critic, and self-investigator. In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in ... read more

Draws together twenty-five of the finest contemporary writers whose stories represent the most stimulating, startling, deeply moving and humorous writing about the beach. This book includes contributions from: Paul Bowles, Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer, Ian McEwan, Tim Winton, Graham Swift, and John Updike.

The ocean has been one of the wellsprings of the human imagination for almost as long as we have existed. Its immensity, its mystery and its restlessness speak to something deep within us, something fundamental to our natures. And from this source, great literature has been formed. Here bestselling novelist James Bradley has gathered together a stunning collection of writing, from extraordinary authors both Australian and international, to show the power and the drama of the sea.

A wedge is driven between a husband and wife when a mysterious stranger arrives, claiming to have grown up in their home. After agreeing to marry a beautiful, headstrong Russian immigrant in exchange for a promotion, a bus boy turned waiter finds himself entangled in a web of organized crime. A strange confluence of circumstances at the end of an ordinary workday causes a man to go off the grid, living off what he can forage in the same affluent suburb where he once lived comfortably with his family. These and the other mesmerizin... read more

Australia's best short stories the definitive collection. Each year, The Best Australian Stories anthology showcases the country's most exciting short fiction. Short stories have enjoyed a remarkable renaissance in the years since the series began, and some of today's most celebrated short-fiction writers made their debuts in this much-loved annual. In 2011, Black Inc. presents the best of the best the best Australian short stories of the past decade. By turns comic and heartbreaking, devastatingly realistic and dazzlingly inventiv... read more

In this collection, acclaimed writer Mandy Sayer brings together nine of the best Australian examples of the long story - tales that combine the intensity of the short story with the complexity of a novel. In these stories, characters grow up, hook up and break up, endure calamitous loss and discover delectable love, travel to faraway places and find themselves right back where they started. From the exotic to the familiar, the sensuous to the dangerous, these soaring flights of the imagination boldly traverse the vast terrain of h... read more

'American literature and the short story might be said to have come of age at about the same time, and this, along with something in the bustling and energetic American temperament, might go some way towards explaining why the two go together as well as they do'. This title includes twenty-one short stories from some of the best American writers over the last two hundred years that provide a mesmerizing, multi-faceted portrait of a country, a people and the unique literature produced by this most exuberant of nations.

The Golden Age of the English short story lies from its first wide acceptance in the middle of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, a period when there were a great many outlets in Britain for shorter fictions. "The Penguin Book of English Short Stories" celebrates this period through some of the most widely known writers of the time. Though many of the chosen authors are more generally known for their novels, here they provide some perfect examples of much shorter work. Each of these concise, evocative, subtle... read more

'The short story is enjoying a revival all the more encouraging when viewed against the gloom surrounding the future of the literary novel ...'. In this title, fifteen further short stories from the golden age of the short story offer more gems from some of the masters of the genre. Whether it is the lyrical prose of Thomas Hardy or the irreverent wit of Kingsley Amis, the monologues of Virgina Woolf or Muriel Spark, the authors here demonstrate that the vitality of the form remains as compelling today as when these stories were or... read more

'Do the Irish have, in relation to anybody else, any special capacity for the short story?'. In this collection of thirty-eight short stories covering many generations and moods of Irish writing, this question is emphatically answered in the affirmative. These mercurial, intoxicating, witty and sometimes sad stories range from Lady Gregory's moving retelling of an ancient love story through to the extraordinary and prolific William Trevor.

'The short story has become one of the major forms of modern literary expression - in some ways the most modern of them all'. The story of the British short story since the Second World War is one of change and revolution and this powerful and moving collection brilliantly demonstrates the evolution of the form. Containing thirty-four of the most widely regarded postwar British writers, it features tales of love and crime, comedy and the supernatural, the traditional as well as the experimental. This many-storied, many-splendored c... read more

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Maeve Binchy is one of the world's best loved story tellers. This collection from Australia and around the world gives us stories that are sad and happy, thoughtful and humourous, but always abounding with the author's trade mark generosity of spirit. Families, friends, lovers and the lonely, all are drawn with affection and wisdom.

A collection of beautiful and lyrical Australian writing about the bush. It includes some of our famous 'bush bards', such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, as well as some more modern writers, like Richard Flanagan and Robyn Davidson. Reading through this hugely comprehensive collection, you'll be able to smell the foliage and feel the crunch of sticks underfoot.

A dozen of the most successful and popular writers today including: Helen Fielding, Robert Harris, Patrick Marber, Zadie Smith, John O'Farrell, Roddy Doyle, Melissa Bank and Irvine Welsh have written 6000-word fictional monologues along the lines of Alan Bennet's "Talking Heads". And Colin Firth makes his debut as a fiction writer. The result is a book of completely original stories that have heart, soul and wit. All the writers have given their work free, and Penguin is giving GBP1 per copy sold to the TreeHouse Trust, a charity w... read more

A jilted lover skirts the edges of time and place as she walks the streets of London at night; a woman returns to the scene of her honeymoon without her husband; a bereft daughter traces her relationship with her mother as she slowly packs up a house in the aftermath of death. In this brilliant collection of intimate and intense stories, Michele Roberts takes us to nineteenth century Venice, 1970s England, modern-day France and beyond. Here too are Tristram and Isolde with a twist; George Sand, sick in Venice with her unfaithful lo... read more

The men in Bullfighting are each concerned with loss in different ways - of their place in their world, of power, virility, love - of the boom days and the Celtic Tiger. 'The stories, his memories, were wearing out' the narrator of the title story thinks, 'and there was nothing new replacing them.' The stories move from classrooms to graveyards, local pubs to bullrings; featuring an array of men at their working day and at rest, taking stock and reliving past glories. In the first, 'Recuperation', a man sets off for a prescribed wa... read more