Haunted by a sense of inner emptiness, Frank Ward struggles to reconcile with his tormented past. He is aided by a series of intense encounters, as well as by an unexpected plunge into researching the life of so-called "Good Nazi", Albert Speer.
The twenty-six prose poems in Kahlil Gibran masterpiece, The Prophet, explore various dimensions of the human condition in profound, elegant and sometimes cryptic ways, giving full consideration to the question of how best to live one's life.
Winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2020
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is a prestigious annual award for the best work of unpublished short fiction from within the Commonwealth. It is managed by Commonwealth Writers, an initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation set up to inspire, develop and connect writers and storytellers across the five global regions.
Million-story City includes short stories, screenplays, comics and other writings. With a profound sense of justice and suspicion toward social changes made in the name of progress, Preece is firmly on the side of the underdogs: refugees, alienated office workers and underground rap collectives, lost souls.
James Joyce's short masterpiece takes in love, loss, ageing, change, Irish culture, identity politics ... and the finer shades of living and dying. "The great novella is Joyce's 'The Dead' ... [Its scenes are] among the most exquisite passages of prose fiction in the entire canon." IAN McEWAN
Stylistically innovative, Anwar's use of everyday Indonesian helped make that language more dynamic as it evolved in the postwar years. Thematically, his poetry is intense, personal and emotional, given to hope, fury or anguish, sober reflection or wild fervour, playfulness or defiance. The poems resist easy interpretation, but are direct, ......
Akaki Akakievich, a solitary, unworldly government clerk, is often mocked by his colleagues - not least on account of his pathetically threadbare overcoat, no longer a match for the St Petersburg climate. By turns wry, sad, tender and satirical, Gogols greatest short work provided the template for a new way of storytelling in the modern age.
In these three warm and nuanced tales, Indonesia's supreme storyteller Pramoedya Ananta Toer gives us vivid, memorable characters caught between optimism and a darker place. A disabled veteran of his country's war of independence against the Dutch slowly succumbs to despair; a child bride's lost innocence is cherished by her observant younger ......
"I would prefer not to." In this novella, widely considered one of the finest works of American literature, a lawyer hires the "incurably forlorn" Bartleby as a clerk in his small firm. Silent and enigmatic, Bartleby performs well at first. One day, however, when requested by his employer to assist with some routine proofreading, he declines, ......
