Author: Nicholas Royle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781784632311
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover - or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere.

Author: Philip Hensher
Publisher: Penguin Books Limited
ISBN: 9780141986210
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'Sometimes - not often - a book comes along that feels like Christmas. Philip Hensher's timely, but timeless, selection of the best short stories from the past 20 years is that kind of book. His introduction is as enriching as anything that has been published this year' Sunday Times A spectacular treasury of the best British short stories published in the last twenty years We are living in a particularly rich period for British short stories. Despite the relative lack of places in which they can be published, the challenge the medium represents has attracted a host of remarkable, subversive, entertaining and innovative writers. Philip Hensher, following the success of his definitive Penguin Book of British Short Stories, has scoured a vast trove of material and chosen thirty great stories for this new volume of works written between 1997 and the present day. Includes short stories by A.L. Kennedy, Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jackie Kay, Graham Swift, Jane Gardam, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman, Martin Amis, China Miéville, Peter Hobbs, Thomas Morris, David Rose, David Szalay, Irvine Welsh, Lucy Caldwell, Rose Tremain, Helen Oyeyemi, Leone Ross, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Will Self, Gerard Woodward, James Kelman, Lucy Wood, Hilary Mantel, Eley Williams, Sarah Hall, Mark Haddon and Helen Dunmore.

Author: Philip Hensher
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141992212
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
'Excellent, entertaining and ingenious ... from Oscar Wilde to Arthur Conan Doyle, this fine anthology celebrates one of the richest moments in Britain's literary history' Sunday Times The quarter century between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War saw an extraordinary boom in the popularity and quality of short stories in Britain, fuelled by a large, eager new magazine readership. The great writers of the age produced some of their finest work, and literary genres - the ghost story, science fiction - took shape. This richly varied, endlessly entertaining anthology brings together authors from Katherine Mansfield to Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce to Saki, H. G. Wells to Rebecca West. It celebrates a teeming, innovative world of literary achievement. Edited with an introduction by Philip Hensher

Author: Malcolm Bradbury
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141965150
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
This anthology is in many was a ‘best of the best’, containing gems from thirty-four of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo. Above all, as you will discover, it satisfies Samuel Butler's anarchic pleasure principle: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I daresay I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all ...'

Author: Lucy Caldwell
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN: 1912697602
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
A group of teenage boys take turns assessing each other’s changing bodies before a Friday night disco… A grieving woman strikes up an unlikely friendship with a fellow traveller on a night train to Kiev… An unusually well-informed naturalist is eyed with suspicion by his comrades on a forest exhibition with a higher purpose… The stories shortlisted for the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University take place in liminal spaces – their characters find themselves in transit, travelling along flight paths, train lines and roads, or in moments where new opportunities or directions suddenly seem possible. From the reflections of a new mother flying home after a funeral, to an ailing son’s reluctance to return to the village of his childhood, these stories celebrate small kindnesses in times of turbulence, and demonstrate a connection between one another that we might sometimes take for granted. The BBC NSSA is one of the most prestigious prizes for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000, and four further shortlisted authors £600 each. James Runcie is joined on the judging panel by a group of acclaimed writers and critics including: Booker Prize shortlisted novelist Fiona Mozley; award winning writer, poet and winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize, Derek Owusu; multi-award winning Irish novelist and short story writer, Donal Ryan; and returning judge, Di Speirs, Books Editor at BBC Radio.

Author: Laura Pashby
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
ISBN: 1787137120
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Embrace the power of storytelling with Little Stories of Your Life. Start telling your own story, find your creative self and be more mindful. Combining the wellbeing benefits of mindfulness, creativity and daily photography, this book shows you how to use words and photographs to capture precious little moments and how to share these in order to connect with others. Each chapter explores the different ways you can tell your own stories, considers why you might choose to tell them and helps you to create a patchwork of tiny tales about your life, however small they might be. Throughout the book, Laura shares her own personal stories and research that shows you how to tune out of the bigger picture and focus on the everyday. There are exercises to gently guide you through how to journal and harness your inner creativity, as well as tips on improving your photography, photo challenges and writing prompts to get you started. It’s easy to feel that our own lives are not enough, but real lives are not defined by bright, exciting events: we don’t need a grand narrative arc. It’s the stretches of time in between that matter, the tiny moments and the daily choices that make us who we are.

Author: Elaine Chiew
Publisher: Myriad Editions
ISBN: 1912408376
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Set in different cities around the world, Elaine Chiew's award-winning stories travel into the heart of the Singaporean and Malaysian Chinese diasporas to explore the lives of those torn between cultures and juggling divided selves. In the title story, four writers find their cultural bonds of friendship tested when a handsome young Asian writer joins their group. In other stories, a brother searches for his sister forced to serve as a comfort woman during World War Two; three Singaporean sisters run a French gourmet restaurant in New York; a woman raps about being a Tiger Mother in Belgravia; and a filmmaker struggles to document the lives of samsui women—Singapore's thrifty, hardworking construction workers. > Acutely observed, wry and playful, her stories are as worldly and emotionally resonant as the characters themselves. This fabulous debut collection heralds an exciting new literary voice.

Author: Jesmyn Ward
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 1328485390
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
A collection of the year's best stories selected by celebrated two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward In her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2021, guest editor JesmynWard says that the best fiction offers the reader a "sense of repair."The stories in this year's collection accomplish just that, immersing the reader in powerfully imagined worlds and allowing them to bring some of that power into their own lives. From a stirring portrait of Rodney King's final days to a surreal video game set in the Middle East, with real consequences, to an indigenous boy's gripping escape from his captors, this collection renders profoundly empathetic depictions of the variety of human experience. These stories are poignant reminders of the possibilities of fiction: as you sink into world after world, become character after character, as Ward writes, you"forget yourself, and then, upon surfacing, know yourself and others anew. The Best American Short Stories 2021 includes GABRIEL BUMP - BRANDON HOBSON - DAVID MEANS- JANE PEK - TRACEY ROSE PEYTON - GEORGE SAUNDERS - BRYAN WASHINGTON - KEVIN WILSON - C PAM ZHANG and others

Author: Oliver Burkeman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715246
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Provocative and appealing . . . well worth your extremely limited time." —Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks. Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.

Author: Philip Hensher
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141979283
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 873

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Book Description
TELEGRAPH, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES AND OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Hilarious, exuberant, subtle, tender, brutal, spectacular, and above all unexpected: these two extraordinary volumes contain the limitless possibilities of the British short story. This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones. The most famous authors are here, and many others, including some magnificent stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals. The Penguin Book of the British Short Story has a permanent authority, and will be reached for year in and year out. This volume takes the story from its origins with Defoe, Swift and Fielding to the 'golden age' of the fin de siècle and Edwardian period. Edited and with an introduction by Philip Hensher, the award-winning novelist, critic and journalist.