North American Short Stories

In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves.

Sometimes your husband isn't enough. Hopefully he knows this and encourages you to find the pleasure you deserve from other lovers. That's an arrangement that real-life cuckoldress Raven Merlot has had with her husband for many years. Marsha reluctantly agrees to hike a mountain trail with husband Rick, only for Rick to wrench his ankle in the middle of nowhere. As the weather closes in, they are rescued by ‘mountain man’ Josh, who takes them to his cabin. With snow piling up outside, sexual tension rises inside, and soon Rick is watching Josh and Marsha keep warm in a very traditional ...

A wonderful collection of short stories" by some of the all-time great American writers: 1. "The Diamond Lens" by Fitz James O’Brien; 2. "Titbottom’s Spectacles" by George William Curtis; 3. "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe; 4. "The Eyes of the Panther" by Ambrose Bierce; 5. "The Lightning Rod Man" by Hermann Melville; 6. "Seeds" by Sherwood Anderson; 7. "Who Was She?" by Bayard Taylor; 8. "The Man who stole a Meeting House" by John Townsend Trowbridge; 9. "Memoirs of a Yellow Dog" by O. Henry

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society. In this volume we offer up a small selection of talents from the literary landscape of the North American male author whose time has now come again.

The silence in the deep woods is not always empty. Sometimes, it’s listening. The Pacific Crest Trail is a 2,650-mile journey through the last great wildlands of the American West. Thousands walk it, seeking solitude and adventure. But they are not always alone. For decades, a steady drumbeat of testimony has emerged from these remote spaces—chilling, firsthand accounts of encounters with something that should not exist. This is not a book of folklore. It is a sober presentation of testimony from the people who know this wilderness best: seasoned thru-hikers, Forest Service employees, ...

This collection is a short-story lover's dream. Included are 17 classic works, representing the finest American writers in the genre. Included are "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville, "The One Million Pound Bank Note" by Mark Twain, "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving.

One of the dark, eerie tales that can only come from Stephen King, orginally a part of the #1 New York Times bestseller Everything's Eventual, "The Road Virus Heads North" tracks an author who buys a creepy paiting at a yard sale which was painted by a metal-head neighbor just before he...

Meticulous, funny, eccentric - Mary has always been mindful of the complex role she plays as a professor of history. Her lectures are carefully written out beforehand; her departmental loyalties ambiguous. She is so careful, in fact, that she began to see herself as flat, dull, and lifeless. The closing of Brandon College, the institution she'd spent more than fifteen years at, changes everything. Forced to find another position, Mary finds herself at an experimental college in rainy Oregon.

Not all Norse explorers are human in this collection. Jomungander, the Midgard Serpent, has his own Vinland Saga when he hunts his prey in the deep sea and ends up fighting for his life on Turtle Island against a clan of Haudenosaunee Monster Snakes. Ymirling the Jotun must defeat the mighty Shingebiss to win land for himself in Vinland. Who will be the victor in these culture clashes?

“The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” is an Edgar Allan Poe short story that expertly blends his dark perspective with the comic. -This is the original story—only word order and difficult vocabulary have been updated. -End notes, interpretation, and discussion of major themes follow the text. -Biographical information on Edgar Allan Poe is included. -For other classic short stories in easy to understand updated English search for “Simplified for Modern Readers Series.”