Gems, shards, quickies, bon bons, snapshots, nuggets, tickles, or even pinpricks. Each 100 Word Story is its own kind of special. NOTHING SHORT OF presents the best of 100 Word Story, the leader in short-short fiction and a popular go-to for great reading. In these very short stories, every word, every detail, every moment matters. And the things left out, the spaces around the stories, are just as intense. What can a hundred words do? They can send chills, they can bring you to tears, they can take your breath away. In often racy, always charged encounters -- from wild messy breakups to a disgruntled clown dinner to quiet revelations over folded laundry -- these 100-word stories take us to lightning moments when everything, big and small, is at stake. In NOTHING SHORT OF, a hundred words is all you need.

Genetic specialists labeled her abnormal; deformed; arthritic; defective. She labeled herself... Nothing Short of Joy

Be swept away by passion... with intense drama and compelling plots, these emotionally powerful reads will keep you captivated from beginning to end. First comes marriage – and Justice St. John has a plan.

Grant Faulkner's sharply observed, darkly funny, heart-breaking bursts of highly compressed prose offers a startling view of what reality might look like through a funhouse microscope. Fissures pushes the boundaries of flash prose, and thank goodness for that. Sometimes less is so much more. -Dinty W. Moore, author of Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals

Nothin Short of Dyin is the long awaited 14th book in the Garth Ryland mystery series. Called an exemplary series hero by Publishers Weekly, Ryland lives and works in the small town of Oakalla, Wisconsin (Lake Woebegone made sinister) where passions run high, secrets go deep, and nothing is ever quite as it seems. His morning starts quietly on a picture perfect, mid-November day. But even as he stands at his office widow admiring the flawless blue sky and coverall layer of fresh white snow, he knows it wont last. Wisconsin Novembers are notoriously bad. They are one long gray litany of cloudsthe ankle deep slush you wade through on your way to your first cold of the season. Besides, it was a Monday. So Garth isnt surprised when town marshal Cecil Hardwick soon arrives and wants Garth to accompany him to a clover field just outside of town where a mud-caked black pickup with bullet holes in the door and blood on the seat is parked. Garth does so under protest, and only because Cecils jurisdiction ends at the city limits, where Garths begins. The driver of the pickup is nowhere to be found, and there is no way to identify the pickup because it has no license plate or registration. A day long search turns up nothing but a menacing ex-football star from the Deep South who is looking for the same pickup. The first fire occurs in the night at Fickle, a whistle-stop five miles south of Oakalla. It bears an eerie resemblance to an earlier fire along Coon Lake where a ghost reportedly walks the shoreline a stones throw away from where a father and daughter once drowned. The second fire strikes at the heart of Oakalla, and at Garths heart as well. It threatens his friendship with his housekeper Ruth, who refuses him access to Ruths ward at the Womens Shelter, and whom Garth blames for the fires. Another fire will occur. A life will be lost. What promises to become a beautiful friendship will be destroyed before the mystery is unraveled and justice served.

One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the noises growing louder. I am sure they are making love in Zenab's bedroom which is next to mine.Waldo, a fêted filmmaker, is confined by old age and ill health to his London apartment. Frail and frustrated, he is cared for by his lovely younger wife, Zee. But when he suspects that Zee is beginning an affair with Eddie, 'more than an acquaintance and less than a friend for over thirty years,' Waldo is pressed to action: determined to expose the couple, he sets himself first to prove his suspicions correct - and then to enact his revenge.Written with characteristic black humour and with an acute eye for detail, Kureishi's eagerly awaited novella will have his readers dazzled once again by a brilliant mind at work.

Part memoir, part monologue, with a dash of startling honesty, There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say features biographies of legendary historical figures from which Paula Poundstone can’t help digressing to tell her own story. Mining gold from the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller, Joan of Arc, and Beethoven, among others, the eccentric and utterly inimitable mind of Paula Poundstone dissects, observes, and comments on the successes and failures of her own life with surprising candor and spot-on comedic timing in this unique laugh-out-loud book. If you like Paula Poundstone’s ironic and blindingly intelligent humor, you’ll love this wryly observant, funny, and touching book. Paula Poundstone on . . . The sources of her self-esteem: “A couple of years ago I was reunited with a guy I knew in the fifth grade. He said, “All the other fifth-grade guys liked the pretty girls, but I liked you.” It’s hard to know if a guy is sincere when he lays it on that thick. The battle between fatigue and informed citizenship: I play a videotape of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer every night, but sometimes I only get as far as the theme song (da da-da-da da-ah) before I fall asleep. Sometimes as soon as Margaret Warner says whether or not Jim Lehrer is on vacation I drift right off. Somehow just knowing he’s well comforts me. The occult: I need to know exactly what day I’m gonna die so that I don’t bother putting away leftovers the night before. TV’s misplaced priorities: Someday in the midst of the State of the Union address they’ll break in with, “We interrupt this program to bring you a little clip from Bewitched.” Travel: In London I went to the queen’s house. I went as a tourist—she didn’t invite me so she could pick my brain: “What do you think of my face on the pound? Too serious?” Air-conditioning in Florida: If it were as cold outside in the winter as they make it inside in the summer, they’d put the heat on. It makes no sense. The scandal: The judge said I was the best probationer he ever had. Talk about proud. With a foreword by Mary Tyler Moore

Fiction. With raw, lyrical ferocity, ALL THE COMFORT SIN CAN PROVIDE delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise--tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence. Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page--honest, cutting, and wise.

Shortly after a young couple vow to love each other through sickness and health, their commitment is tested when a tragic farm accident destroys their world. Surviving the insurmountable damage seems impossible, but when a community comes together and profoundly demonstrates what can be done through prayer and support-and a Kansas farm family puts all their trust and faith in God-lives are inspired by results that are nothing short of miracle.For some, farming is a calling more than an occupation, and to those who participate in the time-honored production of America's food supply, the challenge of staying solvent through the generations is a continual concern. And when tragedy strikes at the heart of a farming family, the repercussions demand the best of individuals and community, calling forth that spirit and resolve so essential to those who live and grow on the land. This mother's account of her adult son's shocking experience with loss and the subsequent struggle to maintain life as a husband and father, and regain his role within the rural landscape of the Kansas heartland, is a heartfelt tribute to the qualities that made and keep America's precious farm families doing what they do best.