The Garden Party (Penguin English Library) by Katherine Mansfield

$20.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories | Series: The\Penguin English Library

They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it.' A windless, warm day greets the Sheridan family on the day of their garden party. As daughter Laura takes the reins on party preparations the news of a neighbour's demise casts a cloud over the host and threatens the entire celebration. The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War. ...Show more

Pet: Stories by Kathryn van Beek

$20.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories

Pet is a dark and humorous short story collection that explores our relationships with children, lovers, and other animals. “Hectic, chatty, very modern New Zealand, very, very readable.”—Steve Braunias“These beautifully crafted stories about humans and their animals an d animals and their humans are sharp, taut, brilliantly written exposés of our untamed behaviour to each other. Kathryn’s writing is intense and merciless but totally entertaining and gripping from start to finish.”—Stuart Hoar ​ ...Show more

Supper Waltz Wilson, and Other New Zealand Stories by Owen Marshall

$50.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories

Essential New Zealand Short Stories by Owen Marshall (ed)

$40.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories

The short story has been the forte of distinguished New Zealand writers from Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson through to fresh young talents such as Eleanor Catton and Craig Cliff. There could be no better guide to a sampler of their best work than Owen Marshall, who has been called New Zealand's best living writer of short stories. Marshall's indispensible collection features fifty arresting and significant stories that show why short fiction has been so important in the development of our literature, and also why it continues to appeal. First published in 2002, this new edition of the collection features five new stories from writers who excel at a magnificent national genre: perfectly polished stories peopled by perceptive, quirky and intriguing characters. First published 2002. ...Show more

The Daylight and the Dust: Selected Short Stories by Janet Frame; Michele S. Roberts (Introduction by)

$25.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories | Series: Virago Modern Classics Ser.

'The Daylight and the Dust' is a comprehensive selection of Janet Frame's short stories. Written over four decades, they come from her classic prize-winning collection 'The Lagoon and Other Stories', right up to 'You Are Now Entering the Human Heart'.

The New York Stories by John O'Hara

$26.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories | Series: VINTAGE CLASSICS

'Superb... These thirty-two stories inhabit the Technicolor vernaculars of taxi drivers, barbers, paper pushers and society matrons... O'Hara was American fiction's greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and tone of all strata of mid-century society' Wall Street Journal John O'Hara remain s the great chronicler of American society, and nowhere are his powers more evident than in his portraits of New York's so-called Golden Age. Unsparingly observed, brilliantly cutting and always on the tragic edge of epiphany, the stories collected here are among O'Hara's finest work, and show why he still stands as the most-published short story writer in the history of the New Yorker. ...Show more

Owen Marshall: Selected Stories by Owen Marshall

$40.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories

A generous selection from New Zealand's foremost writer of short stories. Peter Simpson in reviewing Owen Marshall's stories in the New Zealand Listener wrote: 'Marshall is held in uncommon affection by New Zealand readers - generally we admire and respect rather than love our writers.' This love is per haps evoked not just by the superb quality of Marshall's writing but because his stories so precisely capture his fellow New Zealanders and their country. From the provinces to the cities, the remote landscapes to journeying overseas, Marshall's stories show a deep understanding of who and where we are. Sometimes he skewers the locals with sharp and sly comedy, in other stories there's an elegiac sadness or a grim reality, but always an insightful exploration of human emotions. From the substantial body of work created over the last thirty years, critic, writer and academic Vincent O'Sullivan has selected sixty stories that give a wide representation of Marshall's range. He once wrote that short stories should aspire to a combination of 'intransigence and poetry', both of which are evident in this fine selection. 'Marshall is a writer who speaks with equal intensity to the unbearable loveliness and malevolence of life.' - Carolyn Bliss, World Literature Today ...Show more

Grand Union by Zadie Smith

$35.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories

In the summer of 1959, an Antiguan immigrant in north west London lives the last day of his life. A mother looks back on her early forays into matters of the human heart, considering the ways in which desire is always an act of negotiation, destruction, and self-invention. A disgraced cop stands amid th e broken shards of his life, unable to move forward into a future that holds no place for him. A teenage scion of the technocratic elite chases spectres through a premium virtual reality, trailed by a little girl with a runny nose and no surviving family. We all take a much-needed break from this mess, on a package holiday where the pool's electric blue is ceaselessly replenished, while political and environmental collapse happen far away, to someone else. Interleaving ten completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from the New Yorker and elsewhere, Zadie Smith presents a sharply alert and slyly prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us. ...Show more

Owen Marshall : Selected Stories by Owen Marshall (ed Vincent O'Sullivan)

$45.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories

Peter Simpson in reviewing Owen Marshall's stories in the New Zealand Listener wrote: 'Marshall is held in uncommon affection by New Zealand readers -- generally we admire and respect rather than love our writers.' This love is perhaps evoked not just by the superb quality of Marshall's writing but beca use his stories so precisely capture his fellow New Zealanders and their country. From the provinces to the cities, the remote landscapes to journeying overseas, Marshall's stories show a deep understanding of who and where we are. From the substantial body of work created over the last thirty years, Vincent O'Sullivan has selected sixty stories that give a wide representation of Marshall's range. He once wrote that short stories should aspire to a combination of 'intransigence and poetry', both of which are evident in this fine selection. This collection first published September 2008. ...Show more

The Best of Owen Marshall's Short Stories by Owen Marshall

$36.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories

This is a collection of 67 of The Best of Owen Marshall's Short Stories drawn, by Marshall himself, from eight collections. Owen Marshall talks about the selection process in the Preface: "The sixty-seven stories in this book have been selected from some one hundred and fifty published.... The main crit erion was merit - which perhaps means no more than that some took our fancy more than others - but we also considered the balance of themes and styles. To allow some sense of writing development, we decided on an order which is generally chronological, but didn't hesitate to make minor departures from that sequence when there seemed advantage. This selection doesn't claim to be definitive in any significant way. Despite my best efforts, the stories are only approximations of what l wished to achieve. l'm still learning, and that, too, is pall of the satisfaction of writing." ...Show more

How to Walk a Dog by Mike White

$35.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories

The highs and lows, joy and heartache of owning a dog are told in this beautifully written story of life in and around a dog park. 'This wryly affectionate portrait of dogs and their people is a tail-thumpingly delightful read.' Jane Clifton 'So charming and funny and sincere - this is dog lit at its b est.' Steve Braunias 'Mike White, for decades one of the country's most persuasive journalists, makes a case here as irrefutable as it is moving: throw a stick, make a dog happy, be a better person. He has convinced me.' Vincent O'Sullivan Mike White began walking his SPCA-rescue huntaway, Cooper, at Wellington's dog parks ten years ago, and since then has become part of a remarkable community of people and their pets. Written with wit, wisdom and heartbreaking poignancy, How to Walk a Dog is a story anyone who has ever owned or loved a dog will relate to. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will learn some of the secrets of living with a dog. Illustrated with drawings from acclaimed cartoonist Sharon Murdoch. ...Show more

Blue in Chicago - And Other Stories by Bette Howland

$28.00 NZD

Category: Short Stories

The work of a woman who has invested her life in her art, and who will, I think be remembered as one of the significant writers of her generation.' Saul BellowBlue in Chicago collects together the sharp, bittersweet stories of Bette Howland and restores to our bookshelves an extraordinarily gifted write r, who was recognized as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life. Bette Howland was an outsider: an intellectual from a working-class neighborhood in Chicago; a divorcée and single mother, to the disapproval of her family; an artist chipped away at by poverty and perfection. Each of these sides of her life plays a shaping role in her work. Mining her most precarious struggles for her art in each of these stories, she chronicles the fears and hopes of her generation.Blue in Chicago, and other stories introduces UK readers to a wry, brilliant observer and a writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humor. Published in the US under the title Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.'If there's a Howland bandwagon (and there should be), hold me a seat, or I'll stand. No problem, I'll stand.' Paris Review ...Show more