Adult Winter Reading: Rekindle an Old Flame

Collects all 31 short stories by Flannery O’Conner, including 12 not previously published in the collections the author put together during her lifetime. The short stories are arranged chronologically. Includes an introduction by Robert Giroux from the original 1971 edition, as well as a foreword by Hilton Als.

The stories in Five-Carat Soul -none of them ever published before-spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge. They’re funny and poignant, insightful and unpredictable, imaginative and authentic-all told with McBride’s unrivaled storytelling skill and meticulous eye for character and detail.

Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids . . . These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded by sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty–and the hidden strengths–of human beings.

In her debut collection, internationally acclaimed writer Bolu Babalola retells the most beautiful love stories from history and mythology with incredible new detail and vivacity. Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from long-erased places.

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture. Brought together for the first time in one volume, they include eight of Hurston’s “lost” Harlem stories, which were found in forgotten periodicals and archives.

Wideman’s stories are grounded in the streets and the people of Homewood, the Pittsburgh neighborhood of his childhood, but they range far beyond there, to the small western towns of Wyoming and historic Philadelphia, the contemporary world and the ancient past. He explores the interior lives of his characters, and the external pressures that shape them.

With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings , taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie . This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories

After Midnight brings together some of du Maurier’s darkest, most haunting stories, ranging from sophisticated literary thriller to twisted love story. Alongside classics such as “The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now,” both of which inspired unforgettable films–are gems such as “Monte Verità,” a masterpiece about obsession, mysticism, and tragic love, and “The Alibi,” a chilling tale of an ordinary man’s descent into lies, manipulation, and sinister fantasies that edge dangerously close to reality.

These stories are funny and serious, outrageous and completely familiar. Readers will meet a cast of characters ranging from a woman who cleans her soon-to-be ex-husband’s house to a woman who seduces her paper boy. These stories are short, but leave readers completely satisfied and reveling in the complexity of our strange lives.

Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret–Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side.

Japan’s internationally celebrated master storyteller returns with five stories of women on their way to healing that vividly portrays the blissful moments and everyday sorrows that surround us in everyday life. First published in Japan in 2003 and never before published in the United States, Dead-End Memories collects the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, quietly discover their ways back to recovery.

In her debut collection of short fiction, Due takes us to Gracetown, a small Florida town that has both literal and figurative ghost; into future scenarios that seem all too real; and provides empathetic portraits of those whose lives are touched by Otherness. Featuring an award-winning novella and fifteen stories-one of which has never been published.

With intensity and emotional precision, Kirstin Valdez Quade’s unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters defined by the desire to escape the past or else to plumb its depths. Always hopeful, these stories chart the passions and obligations of family life, exploring themes of race, class, and coming-of-age, as Quade’s characters protect, betray, wound, undermine, bolster, define, and, ultimately, save each other.

Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change–the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens–with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder.