Fiction > Short Stories

This collection of short stories and novel extracts follows the 2007 Pikihuia Awards for Maori Writers. The biennial awards and their subsequent publications have become well-known and much-anticipated, as they bring more undiscovered gems to the attention of the New Zealand reading public. This year's awards were judged by James George, Barry Barclay, Kelly Ana Morey and Wena Harawira.

This novel is based on the myth of the Celtic god Angus who carries dreams to people while they sleep. Woven into Angus's story, are 5 contemporary fables, exquisite short stories in which dreams play a pivotal narrative role. Angus is present in all of these stories because the dreams themselves shape what happens to the characters.

In this definitive collection by one of New Zealand's best-loved authors, Witi Ihimaera offers his personal choice of twenty-four stories from throughout his illustrious career. The pieces span more than thirty-five years - since his first collection, Pounamu Pounamu (1972), was published - and showcase the range, originality and humanity of this truly amazing writer. First published 2003.

In the 1980s Tim Winton made his mark with tough, spare stories about youth and promise, of early parenthood and the challenges of loyalty. Now, almost twenty years since his last collection, he returns to the form with seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia.Here are turnings of all kinds

Both revealing and disturbing, these eponymous tales explore themes of perversity and power, lust and mortality, offering the reader a disquieting feast of debauchery and decadence. This collection of interwoven stories is a gripping, haunting read, with an edgy tone reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe at his most dazzling and thought-provoking. Its dark, disquieting images linger long after the book itself is finished.

These stories happened decades ago or yesterday, in a pulpit, garden, airport, cupboard, train or bed. Twenty-six women, young and old, talk about moments when sex (or abstaining from sex) changed their lives in some way. Today, they all live in New Zealand's most prim and proper city ...but their sexual epiphanies occurred all around the world. First published January 2010.

Among the numerous pieces of writing that Katherine Mansfield produced during her short life, there were fifteen stories that were not completed on her death but which she had intended for inclusion in her collection named after one of them, The Dove's Nest. This fourth volume of her stories, reproduced here, was published posthumously in 1923. J.B. Priestley wrote of them: 'the merest beginnings are capital reading. Even though we never come to the point, and do not know what the stories are about, it does not seem to matter very ... read more

Here are the best short stories and novel extracts from the Pikihuia Awards for Maori Writers 2011, as judged by Keri Hulme, Katie Wolfe, Erima Henare and Reina Whaitiri. The book will contain the stories from the 18 finalists for Best Short Story written in English, the five finalists for the Best Short Story in Maori and the six finalists for the Best Novel Extract. For over ten years, the Maori Literature Trust and Huia Publishers have been responsible for this unique and increasingly popular biennial writing competition... read more

Charlotte Grimshaw's collection of interlinked stories, Opportunity, was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Prize, and won New Zealand's premier award for fiction, the 2008 Montana Book Award. Grimshaw has described Opportunity as a single, unified composition, less a series of stories than a novel with a large cast of characters. In Singularity, her powerful new collection, she has continued to develop the structure she explored in Opportunity. Characters from that book reappear, and new characters are added... read more

As long as people have been writing, they have been writing about nature. But nature - as we know it - is changing. Economic migration, overpopulation and - most significantly - climate change are shaping the natural world into something unfamiliar. Instead of providing a respite from the urban landscape, the natural world now reflects our mistakes; our abuse; our politics. As our conception and experience of nature changes, so too does the way we write about it. "Granta 102" will be a seminal collection, addressing lost worlds, va... read more

Isaac Bashevis Singer's work explores humanity in all of its guises. This collection of forty-seven short stories, selected by Singer himself from across the whole of his career, brings together the best of his writing. From the supernatural "Taibele and Her Demon" to the poignant "The Unseen", and from gentle humour in "Gimpel the Fool" to tragedy with "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy", these tales explore good and evil, passion and restraint, religious fervour and personal failings, within the traditional shtetls of pre-war Eastern Europe ... read more

This third collection of short stories by Alice Tawhai explores the complex mix of beauty and heartache, resilience and joys of people living in seemingly bleak situations. The perceptions of people and their lives are fresh and poignant, seeing the humanity and quiet hope alongside the darkness. The vivid imagery and intensely evocative writing make each story and those in them hauntingly memorable.

Maeve Binchy is one of the world's best loved story tellers. This collection from Australia and around the world gives us stories that are sad and happy, thoughtful and humourous, but always abounding with the author's trade mark generosity of spirit. Families, friends, lovers and the lonely, all are drawn with affection and wisdom.

One of the 20th century's great short story writers, Mansfield explored emotional bonds in an intensely visual style of impressionistic details. This collection of her finest work features perceptive tales that reflect Mansfield's own bohemian lifestyle, which involved tempestuous relationships with Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf. "Prelude", a reminiscence of her New Zealand girlhood, is included, as well as "The Garden Party", "Bliss", and others. This title is part of Dover Original.

From the heathered fells and lowlands of Cumbria with their history of smouldering violence, to the speed and heat of summer London, to an eerily still lake in the Finnish wilderness, Sarah Hall evokes landscapes with extraordinary precision and grace. The characters within these territories are real-life survivors, but whether it's a frustrated housewife seeking extreme experience or a young woman contemplating the death of her lover, dark devices and desires rise to the surface. And the human body, too - flawed, visceral, and ful... read more

Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel Garcia Marquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo's revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings, stranded in a young couple's back garden; a town plagued by dying birds that fall from the sky and an awestruck village captivated by a beautiful drowned sailor. Teeming with the magical oddities for which h... read more

Profound, moving and compassionate, Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century. Here, for the first time in English, on the twentieth anniversary of his death, is a landmark selection of his fiction - all in brand new translations. These exquisitely wrought stories open up a rich, vibrant world of wonder, adventure, resistance, love, cruelty and visceral energy, where nothing is as it seems. In "The Fugitive" an office worker composes the most beautiful poem ever, only to find events taki... read more

'Your brother or sister, it might be said, is your other self - your grander, sadder, braver, shrewder, uglier, slenderer self ...Your sibling is your most severe judge and your fiercest defender. You must always rescue them. They always abandon you ...You recognise one another, this is your relief and your ruin. They are your duty. They stun you with the sudden presence and force of their goodness. They give you Christmas presents that show you are strangers. You are strangers.' You love them; it cannot be explained why or how.' F... read more

George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist. From his earliest published article in 1928 to his untimely death in 1950, he produced an extraordinary array of short non-fiction that reflected - and illuminated - the fraught times in which he lived and wrote. 'As soon as he began to write something,' comments George Packer in his foreword to this new two-volume collection, 'it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge - in short, to think - as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent.' This ... read more

Spanning her last five collections and bringing together her finest work from the past fifteen years, this new selection of Alice Munro's stories infuses everyday lives with a wealth of nuance and insight. Written with emotion and empathy, beautifully observed and remarkably crafted, these stories are nothing short of perfection. This is a masterclass in the genre, from an author who deservedly lays claim to being one of the 'major fiction writers of our time'.