Arcadia Public Library

This much-anticipated second collection of stories is signature Ted Chiang, full of revelatory ideas and deeply sympathetic characters. In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and the temptation of second chances. In the epistolary "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of...

"Known not only for his brilliant novels but also for short stories chronicling the Jazz Age, such as 'Bernice bobs her hair' and 'The diamond as big as the Ritz,' F. Scott Fitzgerald continued to write stories his entire life, some of which were never published--until now. Many of the stories in I'd die for you were submitted to major magazines and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald's lifetime but were never printed. A few were written as...

The three laws of Robotics: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm 2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. With these three, simple directives, Isaac Asimov changed our perception of robots forever when...

"A penetrating collection by Alexandrea Kleeman, the celebrated author of YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE MINE, these short stories perplex and delight, populated with characters seeking to understand the somehow lacking world around them"-- Provided by publisher.

The stories collected here are linked by more than the exquisitely winding prose of their creator: Helen Oyeyemi's ensemble cast of characters slip from the pages of their own stories only to surface in another. The reader is invited into a world of lost libraries and locked gardens, of marshlands where the drowned dead live and a city where all the clocks have stopped; students hone their skills at puppet school, the Homely Wench Society commits...

From the creator and executive producer of the beloved and universally acclaimed television series BoJack Horseman , a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love--the best and worst thing in the universe Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack Horseman , Raphael Bob-Waksberg's stories will make readers laugh, weep, and shiver in uncomfortably delicious recognition. In "A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion,"...

A collection of stories which includes "Home," a wryly whimsical account of a soldier's return from war; "Victory lap," a tale about an inventive abduction attempt; and the title story, in which a suicidal cancer patient saves the life of a young misfit.

"The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories range in setting from Japan at the outset of World War II to a remote cabin in the woods of Wyoming, and the characters that inhabit them range from a misanthropic survivor of an apocalyptic flood to a unicorn hidden in a suburban house. Whether fantastical or realistic, gothic or lyrical,...