"Rappaccini's Daughter" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the December 1844 issue of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and later in the 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. It is about Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher in medieval Padua who grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes...

The innovative novels and stories of Michael Blumlein, MD, have introduced new levels of both terror and wonder into the fiction of scientific speculation. His work as a medical researcher and internist at San Francisco's UCSF Medical Center informs his tales of biotech, epigenetics, brain science, and what it means to be truly----if only temporarily----human. Our title piece, "Thoreau's Microscope," inspired by a historic High Sierra expedition with...

Welcome to Creelyville: Slick Rick was on the run. Police were on the hunt for him after a failed robbery attempt. After racing through Pidgeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, he needed to get off the main road and followed an old, half-hidden road that led, to his surprise, to a town like nothing he had ever seen before. He might just wish that he hadn't seen this one. The Failure: Carl Watkins was always a wannabe who never was. A...

These stories are a brilliant evocation of a narrow, close-knit community that of the streets of London's East End in the 1890s. Having lived and worked there, he knew that his East Enders were not a race apart, but ordinary men and women, scraping by perhaps, but neither criminals nor paupers. He chronicled their adventures and misadventures, their wooing and their funerals, with sympathy, humor and a sense of both the tragedies and comedies to be...

From the Foreword:
"And so," the story writers used to say, "they lived happily ever after."

Um-m-m—maybe. After the glamour had worn off, and the glass slippers were worn out, did the Prince never find Cinderella's manner redolent of the kitchen hearth; and was it never necessary that he remind her to be more careful of her finger-nails and grammar? After Puss in Boots had won wealth and a wife for his young master did not that

...

Escritora y periodista española, Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851- 1921), es considerada como una de las novelistas clave en el realismo y el naturalismo español del siglo XIX y principios del XX. No solo fue un referente literario, sino que su defensa de los derechos de la mujer la convirtió en una de las primeras feministas españolas. Fue la lectura de Emile Zola uno de los impulsos decisivos para que Pardo Bazán desarrollase una fecundísima carrera...

"Dagon" is a 1917 short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft. One of the first stories he wrote as an adult, it centres around the recollection of a tortured, morphine-addicted narrator who was captured by a German ship during World War I. After escaping his captors, he drifted for many miles before winding up stranded in a hellish place littered with rotting carcasses and home to an ancient horror. A chilling tale by a master story-teller, "Dagon"...

Twelve stories of women caught in the emotional turbulence of romance in Manhattan. For the twelve narrators of Susan Minot's breathtaking collection - artists and lawyers, teenagers and thirty-somethings - love in New York doesn't come easy. And as they struggle to reconcile their yearnings for romance with their needs for independence, they face resistance to emotional commitment at every turn. In intense snapshots of these women's most intimate...

Rambles and Daydreams is a short book of short fiction, a collection of short stories and flash fiction by author Billy DeCarlo, with two bonus poems. The works range from under 1,000 to over 5,000 words, and center around the quirky thoughts and behavior of everyday people, similar to the stories of Raymond Carver. The centerpiece of this collection is Key West, a Hemingway-esque love story. If you loved Raymond Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet,...

Breece D'J Pancake cut short a promising career when he took his own life at the age twenty-six. Published posthumously, this is a collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia.