The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its fourteenth yearInspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes's Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its fourteenth volume.Best British Short Stories 2024 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2023 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online.

Known for both its industrial roots and arboreal abundance, Sheffield has always been a city of two halves.From its botanical gardens and elegant parks, to the brutalist high-rise estates of Park Hill, and the hinterland nightclubs of ‘Centertainment’, it is a city caught between the forges of the past and the melting pot of the present.Bringing together new short stories from some of the city’s most celebrated writers, The Book of Sheffield traces the contours of this comp...

A simple act of gallantry in the Malaysian jungle spawns a lifelong feud in the Home Counties...A fading actor with a terminal illness devises a meticulous plan to leave the stage in style...A pregnant composer contemplates motherhood at the end of civilisation...Spanning centuries and continents, the stories in this collection amount to a tour de force of literary worldbuilding. From deeply insecure time travellers to medieval mystics and futuristic body modificati...

Thumbnails is a collection of short stories or “micrograms” in which Gregory Norminton once again experiments with form, using his stylish and witty prose to examine the nooks and crannies of our distracted lives. Witty and thought-provoking, the stories are brief but clear sketches very different people and places in very different times. Taken as a whole, the collection is an exercise in storytelling, proving that narrative can be found in the most unlikely packages. Sexual love flourish...

The Lost Art of Losing is a collection of aphorisms by award-winning novelist Gregory Norminton. By turns comic and despairing, jubilant and wry, they present, through fragments, a picture of the mind — and of troubling times. Gregory Norminton transforms the aphorism into something more accessible and personal. Ultimately he uses aphorisms to question everything — including the aphorism itself: "Incessantly we ask the meaning of life to protect us from hearing the perfectly obvious answer...

An incredible collection of stories for our shared planet from the likes of Joanne Harris, Toby Litt and Liz JensenA riveting and provocative collection of short fiction, Beacons throws down the gauntlet to award-winning writers, challenging them to devise original responses to the climate crisis. From Joanne Harris’ cautionary tale of a world where ‘outside’ has become a thing of the past, to Nick Hayes’ graphic depiction of the primeval bond between man ...

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, the Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his witty and satirical best. Perhaps intended as a companion to his final, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pecuchet, this compilation was the result of a lifetime of collecting the absurd and the cliched with darkly humorous explanations. A playful look at nineteenth-century values and talking points, this dictionary will provide enduring entertainment and prove relevant e...

From his life’s work so far, spanning more than four decades, Les Murray has selected these 100 poems, his personal best. Including classics such as ‘The Broad Bean Sermon’, ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’ and ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’, this elegant hardback is guaranteed to delight Murray fans and introduce new readers to his work. This is a wonderful gift, and a treasure trove of the best poems ever written in Australia.‘No poet has ever travelled like this, whether ...

If it’s time for a rhyme, or you need a satiric lyric, the Collins Rhyming Dictionary is the fastest and easiest way to refine your line.The most accessible way to find the rhyme you need. Other rhyming dictionaries are characterised by the use of obscure words for padding, subsections for disyllabic and trisyllabic rhymes, and reverse phonetic order – but we avoid such complications and, as a result, have the most practical rhyming book available.The most satisfactory rhym...

Ian Watson's latest collection shows the same range and apparently inexhaustible fund of ideas that have characterized all his previous books. No other contemporary figure in SF is so prolific or inventive a writer of short stories. In the title story we immediately encounter a phantasmagoric vision of a society increasingly dependent on recycling its usable material; other brilliant inventions include a planet inhabited by lemur-like aliens who bafflingly produce marvellously finished sto...

Love, angels, addiction and death; they're all here in My First Colouring Book, a collection of short stories from award-winning novelist Lloyd Jones. Themed on all the colours of the rainbow - and a few extra - these stories and essays paint a picture of criss-crossing lives. They are spoken by an unexpected variety of voices: a young girl has adventures in the night, a surgeion becomes a shepherd; a middle-aged man seeks love for the last time. And his travel essays, sent from the compas...

This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.When the Barbarians Arrive is a selected works from Singaporean poet Alvin Pang's five previous collections, including Testing the Silence (1997) and City of Rain (2003). Wry, sensitive and intelligent throughout, the selection ranges from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, at once recognisably national and international...