Stories about the inhabitants of the village of Chelm.

Israel's hippest bestselling young writer today, Etgar Keret is part court jester, part literary crown prince, part national conscience. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God gathers his daring and provocative short stories for the first time in English. Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Keret's stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best comic authors, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain-from a father's first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens. Bus Driver includes stories from Keret's bestselling collections in Israel, Pipelines and Missing Kissinger, as well as Keret's major new novella, "Kneller's Happy Campers," a bitingly satirical yet wistful road trip set in the afterlife for suicides.

15 of Kafka's best known stories including the Metamorphosis, the Penal Colony and the Great Wall of China.

"In this collection of Stefan Zweig's short stories, the very best and worst of human nature are captured with sharp observation, understanding and vivid empathy. Ranging from love and death to faith restored and hope regained."

"This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector's best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as "The Smallest Woman in the World," "Love," "Family Ties," and "The Egg and the Chicken." Lispector's luminous regard for life's small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title story"--

"You need to bribe someone into giving you weed? Don't worry, just step into this court room and call the defendant a murderer. You're a rich, lonely man and you want the joy of company? Don't worry, just buy up people's birthdays, and you'll have friends calling every day. You need to get girls into bed? Don't worry, you know a writer you can strong-arm into writing you a very persuasive story. You're stood on the edge of a very high building, with all of your wretched sorrows? Don't worry, fly already! In these 22 short stories, absurdity leaks out of the cracks in the everyday, wild capers reveal painful emotional truths, and the bizarre is just another name for the familiar. Wickedly funny and thrillingly smart, Fly, Already is a collage of the surrealism of life, written by veteran commentator on the circus farce that is the heart."--Provided by publisher.

"A book that will last, that you will reread all your life and then pass on to your grandchildren. Or ask to be buried with."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Following the historic publication of Norton's The Complete Works of Isaac Babel in the fall of 2001, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel appears as the most authoritative and complete edition of his fiction ever published in paperback. Babel was best known for his mastery of the short story form—in which he ranks alongside Kafka and Hemingway—but his career was tragically cut short when he was murdered by Stalin's secret police. Edited by his daughter Nathalie Babel and translated by award-winner Peter Constantine, this paperback edition includes the stunning Red Cavalry Stories; The Odessa Tales , featuring the legendary gangster Benya Krik; and the tragic later stories, including "Guy de Maupassant." This will be the standard edition of Babel's stories for years to come.

The most famous collection of short fiction by acclaimed Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kis. In these nine stories Kis depicts human relationships, encounters, landscapes--the multitude of details that make up a human life. Kis combines fiction and history in postmodern style, and in a postscript provides fascinating historical backgrounds and other notes for the reader that add interest and context. An enduring classic of Slavic literary fiction.

In an afterlife populated by people who have killed themselves, Mordy, our hero, discovers that his girlfriend has "offed" herself in response to his suicide, and he sets out to find her.

Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-SmithThirteen short tales from one of the most blistering and innovative writers of the twentieth century.The small incidents of life become moments of inner revelation in the luminous writi[Bokinfo]

These stories introduce a man who finds equal pleasure in his beautiful girlfriend and the fat, soccer-loving lout she turns into after dark; shrinking parents; a case of impotence cured by a pet terrier; and a pessimistic Middle Eastern talking fish.

Expresses the author's deep concern with the problems of existence and identity and with the trials of childhood, motherhood, and friendship, and includes art criticism, aphorisms, and more

In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then narrates a number of unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell ("here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me"). As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: "Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative..." A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, India, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on and on about the nature of a single drop of water. A child laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. "The excitement of his writing," Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in The New York Review of Books, "is that he has come up with his own original forms--there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature."

Written between 1980 and 1986, the stories in The Lute and the Scars were transcribed from the manuscripts left by Danilo Kis following his death in 1989. Many are autobiographical. Others resurrect protagonists belonging to Kis's fellow Central European novelists.

Collects early short stories by the Israeli author, on various topics including war, relationships, and aging.

'Everyone makes mistakes, even God.' In the original Odessa Stories collection published in 1931, Babel describes the life of the fictional Jewish mob boss Benya Krik - one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature - and his gang in the ghetto of Moldavanka, around the time of the October Revolution. Praised by Maxim Gorky and considered one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian literature, this is the first ever stand-alone collection of all Babel's narratives set in the city, and includes the original stories as well as later tales.

A new selection of Isaac Babel's 26 most vital and beautiful stories, in acclaimed translations by Boris Dralyuk Isaac Babel honed one of the most distinctive styles in all Russian literature. Brashly conversational one moment, dreamily lyrical the next, his stories exult in the richness of everyday speech and sensual pleasure only to be shaken by brutal jolts of violence. These stories take us from the underworld of Babel's native Odessa, city of gangsters and lowlives, of drunken brawls and bleeding sunsets, to the terror and absurdity of life as a soldier in the Polish-Soviet War. Selected and translated by the prize-winning Boris Dralyuk, this collection captures the irreverence, passion and coarse beauty of Babel's singular voice.