Short Stories

If it Bleeds is a collection of four new novellas—Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, The Life of Chuck, Rat, and the title story If It Bleeds—each pulling readers into intriguing and frightening places. A collection of four uniquely wonderful long stories, including a stand-alone sequel to The Outsider. News people have a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads'. And a bomb at Albert Macready Middle School is guaranteed to lead any bulletin. Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency is working on the case of a missing dog - and on her own need to be more assertive - when she sees the footage on TV. But when she tunes in again, to the late-night report, she realizes there is something not quite right about the correspondent who was first on the scene. So begins 'If It Bleeds' , a stand-alone sequel to The Outsider featuring the incomparable Holly on her first solo case. Dancing alongside are three more long stories - 'Mr Harrigan's Phone', 'The Life of Chuck' and 'Rat' . The novella is a form King has returned to over and over again in the course of his amazing career, and many have been made into iconic films, If It Bleeds is a uniquely satisfying collection of longer short fiction by an incomparably gifted writer.

Cortazar's stories are like small time pieces, where each polished part moves relentlessly on its own particular path, exercising a crucial and perpetual influence on the mechanism as a whole. Moments jerk forward and retract, reflect and refract: an island at noon from an aeroplane - an aeroplane at noon from an island; the living deceiving the dying and also themselves, about death; fatality by fire in an ancient Roman arena and in a modern city apartment. It is a world that is constantly shifting, upsetting our balance and our peace of mind, a world outside of time that provokes a fascination bordering on terror. Cortazar is the master of the form and this celebrated collection houses some of his finest work.

Yoshimoto has a magical ability to animate the lives of her young characters, and here she spins the stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. A third finds her sleep haunted by another woman whom she was once pitted against in a love triangle. Sly and mystical as a ghost story, with a touch of Kafkaesque surrealism, Asleep is an enchanting new book from one of the best writers in contemporary international fiction.

One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched, interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essential character. A once-popular singer, desperate to make a comeback, turning from the one certainty in his life . . . A man whose unerring taste in music is the only thing his closest friends value in him . . . A struggling singer-songwriter unwittingly involved in the failing marriage of a couple he’s only just met . . . A gifted, underappreciated jazz musician who lets himself believe that plastic surgery will help his career . . . A young cellist whose tutor promises to “unwrap” his talent . . . Passion or necessity—or the often uneasy combination of the two—determines the place of music in each of these lives. And, in one way or another, music delivers each of them to a moment of reckoning: sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes just eluding their grasp. An exploration of love, need, and the ineluctable force of the past, Nocturnes reveals these individuals to us with extraordinary precision and subtlety, and with the arresting psychological and emotional detail that has marked all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed works of fiction.