"One of the darkest, most nightmarish stories of the twentieth century, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" created a sensation when it was first published in 1948. Now celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary, this lucid tale of a sleepy town's annual lottery--and the monstrous desires it awakens--endures as an essential classic of American fiction. The Lottery and Other Stories unites "The Lottery" with twenty-four wonderfully strange and equally terrifying...

"Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish that hasn't changed in a thousand years. For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now - just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity - the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets...

A collection of ten short stories by the Southern author Flannery O'Connor.

This collection assembles Carson McCullers' best stories, including her study of love and longing "The Ballad of the Sad Café." A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose café serves as the town's gathering place. Among other works, the collection also includes "Wunderkind," McCullers' first published story, written when she was only...

This omnibus volume by one of the South's greatest writers includes stories published prior to 1980. Stories are as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types--farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery--but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime's vision.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train comes a novel of love, risk, and self-discovery. Angela can feel the clock ticking. She is single in New York City, stuck in a job she doesn't want and a life that seems to have, somehow, just happened. She inherited a flair for Italian cooking from her grandmother, but she never seems to have the time for it these days, her oven holds only sweaters. Tacked to her office bulletin board...

Hugh McVey moves from Missouri to the agrarian town of Bidwell, Ohio. He invents a mechanical cabbage planter to ease the burden of famers, but an investor in town exploits his product, which fails to succeed. His next invention, a corn cutter, makes him a millionaire and transforms Bidwell into a center of manufacturing. McVey, perennially lonely and ruminative, meets Clara Butterworth, who attends college at nearby Ohio State and is perennially...

"Rosamunde Pilcher brings her readers into the lives of five very different, but equally intriguing people. Plagued by loneliness, regret, abandonment and loss, fate will unite them in a dilapidated estate house in Northern Scotland. It is in this house, on the shortest day of the year, that these five people will find each other and, ultimately, find themselves."--P. [4] of cover.