Word count 26,380

A spider and a fly. A boy and an ant. A dog and a beaver. They may seem like unlikely companions, but they’ll soon learn that they have more in common than they think. When a creature is in need, help often comes from the most unexpected places. The Bookworm and Other Stories is a collection of stories both short and long about animals, birds, and insects who come together in kindness and friendship. Kids will learn fun facts about the animal kingdom while laughing at the antics of these delightful characters. In the end, they’ll see that we can be friends with everyone, regardless of our differences.

After gaining phenomenal popularity and critical acclaim online with smallstoriesonline.com, Derek Kirk Kim collects the stories that garnered him all the attention in the past two years with this handsome new collection. Through a series of sensitive-and often hilarious- short stories, Kirk Kim deftly explores the not-so-average twenty-something's' quarter-life crisis, romantic neurosis, and perhaps most refreshingly of all, Korean-American life.

Isaac Bashevis Singer' s first collection of stories, "Gimpel the Fool," is a landmark work that has attracted international acclaim since it was first published in 1957. In Saul Bellow' s masterly translation, the title story follows the exploits of Gimpel, an ingenuous baker who is universally deceived but who declines to retaliate against his tormentors. Gimpel and the protagonists of the other stories in this volume all inhabit the distinctive pre World War II ghettos of Poland and, beyond that, the larger world created by Singer' s unforgettable prose.

Are damaged people destined to inflict damage? A young boy sidelined for being different, an artist unable to distance herself from her past, a famed actress past her prime, a Casanova who plays women but is acutely aware of his loneliness. These are some amongst the various tales of damaged people seeking escape, fulfilment or acceptance. Some long, some short, these sixteen stories have common themes of unhappy marriages; of secrets and lies, pleasure and guilt; of children letting down parents and vice versa; of women of a certain age, and whether they’ve still ‘got it’; of entitled and misogynistic men; and of the hypocrisy and double standards within Indian society. With original and unexpected angles, these tales explore the darkness that underpins the often ordinary lives of people. Thought-provoking, intense and evocative, these stories will transport you into the heart of India where tradition and modernity collide, often with devastating results.

On moving into a new apartment abroad in his Bavarian hometown, the narrator realises that some of his possessions and elements of his new neighbourhood open a window into a flurry of memories, serving as allegorical threads to his childhood, self-consciousness and discovery of the world. What begins as a personal narrative quickly cedes to a social archaeology, inviting the reader/listener on a homegoing journey in the backdrop of Cameroon’s tottering democratic trajectory. Modulated with poetry and music, The Radio tunes in to diaspora, home, nation, education, existence, religion as well as Mbum popular culture, showcasing creative re-appropriation and re-mixing of global trends and icons in specific communities.

This publication is a culmination of my attempt at writing which started in 1966 in emulating Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe whose story I had grown so greatly fascinated with through English lessons I was having from a friend of my late father. It was then that I started nurturing dreams of writing a similar life-like story in the first person narrative voice. I would almost every day religiously confine myself in my study and write zestfully for hours from morning after breakfast up to night with intermittent breaks. Soon, I was beginning to get lost in the imaginary world I was starting to create. My first story was in 1972 in response to a call for contributions to a short story competition. It might have been part of the preliminary run-down to our participation in FESTAC in Lagos Nigeria. Ever since then I have been engrossed in writing one thing or another. But at some time I would be mostly preoccupied with reading and editing the scripts of my slowly accumulating story collections. But the dim prospects of being published were a damper to accelerated writing. But I still kept an eye on my work as treasures to be preserved for posterity. Some of the stories: The Day of Judgment Has Arrived, Bra Spiders Flight on his Friend Bra Cunny Rabbits Success have been adaptations of folktale I have heard, collected and translated from Krio. Requiem for the Presumptuous Mister Courifer has been an adapted version of Adelaide Caseley Hayfords Mister Courife. Richard Gets Lured into a Wide Reading and Literate Culture is an adaptation of the autobiography of a section of black American writer, Richard Wright who in fact passed through Freetown on his way to Ghana in 1954 a year before I was born. A dream of Coming into Great Wealth Turns Sour an adaptation of a fascinating episode in the life of Olaudah Equiano, the first major black African writer to have emerged from the dungeons of slavery to line the literary landscape.The most recent is Writer's Cramp Gripping, or Crippling an ill-fated response to a cue to a writers competition at Writers.com. The total number of stories included is 12 covering a wide range of themes of love, changing fortunes, materialism, the process of growing up, reflections on ones past, the blatant display of power featuring life-like characters. Some of the selections have been read to great effect at public readings. The prospects of being published seeming more and more chancy even with the publication of my Folktales from Freetown which was widely reviewed internationally on the BBC, American journals and stocked in many university libraries in the US and in Britain as well as in the Library of Congress, made me decide in 2007 after returning from the U.S.A. on an International Visitors programme to start publishing on the internet rather than keep waiting for an unforeseen chance of publication. This saw many of them published in ezinearticles.com and articlescorner.com, the latter which was in 2009 pulled down. But for the fact that I had had printed copies from the site I would have lost all trace of them as well. The Day of Judgement could be rightly said to have received the greatest exposure having first been published in LOTUS, a journal of the Afro Asian Writers Association, read throughout the world and translated into Bulgarian and published in a journal of the Bulgarian PEN in 2008. My decision to start publishing my stories on the web in spite of its hazards and its being un-remunerative was to give visibility to them and my creativity which could otherwise be lost to time and to the reading world.

With his beloved Gothic tales, Washington Irving is said to have created the genre of the short story in America. Though Irving crafted many of the most memorable characters in fiction, from Rip Van Winkle to Ichabod Crane, his gifts were not confined to the short story alone. He was also a master of satire, essay, travelogue, and folktale, as evidenced in this classic collection. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, "Every reader has a first book.... which, in early youth, first fascinates his imagination, and at once excites and satisfies the desires of his mind. To me, this first book was The Sketch Book of Washington Irving... The charm of The Sketch Book remains unbroken; the old fascination still lingers about it."