The first collection of Fonseca's short stories to appear in English, ranging across his oeuvre, exploring the sights and sounds of Rio de Janeiro. Fonseca's Rio is a city at war, where vast disparities, in wealth, social standing and prestige are untenable. Rich and poor live in an uneasy equilibrium, where only overwhelming force can maintain order and violence and deception are the essential tools of survival. From the tale of the businessman who rans over pedestrians to let off steam to a serial killer being pushed to kill more by his lover, this collection is a true gem.

Vivian Gilbert Zabel and Holly Jahangiri offer a collection of 21 original short stories spanning a variety of themes and genre, many crime or mystery based.

In the eight years since his first full-length novel Gridlinked was published by Pan Macmillan, Neal Asher has firmly established himself as one of the leading British writers of Science Fiction, and his novels are now translated in many languages. Most of his stories are set in a galactic future-scape called ‘The Polity’, and with this collection of marvellously inventive and action-packed short stories, he takes us further into the manifold diversities of that amazing universe. No one does monsters better than Neal Asher, so be prepared to revisit the lives and lifestyles of such favourites as the gabbleduck and the hooder, to savour alien poisons, the walking dead, the Sea of Death, and the putrefactor symbiont.

The first of Chekhov's works to be published in a serious literary journal, `The Steppe', with its masterly account of a spectacular thunderstorm, signifies his maturation as a writer of short stories. While the majority of his tales focus on the privileged classes, this selection shows that Chekhov never forgot his origins as the son of a failed provincial grocer, and characters as varied as the brutal soldier in `Gusev', the downtrodden old constable in `On Official Business', and the bemused peasants in `New Villa' testify to the power and flexibility of his art.

Steve Almond, the man whose candy jones fueled the bestseller Candyfreak, returns with a collection of stories that both seals his reputation as a master of the modern form and risks getting him arrested. The cast of characters in The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories includes a wealthy family certain they have been abducted by space aliens, a sexy magazine editor who falls for a worldclass cad, and a beleaguered dentist who refuses to read his best friend’s novel. Michael Jackson and Abraham Lincoln make cameos, as do a variety of desperate and beautiful loonies, all of whom are laid bare, often literally. In these twelve stories, Almond refuses to let his characters off the hook, or to abandon them, until we have seen the full measure of ourselves within their struggle.

The Porcher House After his divorce Anthony Walker walks away from his life in Maryland and moves to the Space Coast of sunny Florida where he finds the love of his life, Emilia Porcher. There’s only one thing keeping them apart…. She’s been dead for over fifty some years. Anthony has to ‘Risk it All’ to find his way through the thin veil of reality, past and present, to be with the woman he’s fallen in love with.

Reproduction of the original: The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde and Other Stories by Mary de Morgan