Showing titles in Anthologies & Short Stories

Miss Valencia Ravensdale was only supposed to observe the festivities at her aunt’s masquerade ball on New Year’s Eve, 1814, but when the handsome Colonel Robert Clayworth sees her holding up the walls, everything changes. Valencia finds herself falling in love with the Colonel, but he only has the one night in London before he has to rejoin his troops in France.

Lancashire, 1612: Fourteen-year-old Grace Sowerbutts is at a dangerous crossroads, caught between the righteous might of the local Pendle Protestants, the fury of their Catholic neighbors, and the insidious threat of witchcraft. Divided by Witchcraft is the second in a new series of historical fiction short stories examining the frenzy of witch hunting that swept the north of England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries - including the most famous, that of the Pendle Witches in 1612.

Welcome to the Gothic London of the 1800s. These saucy tales quicken the pulse, thrill the mind, and excite parts of the body that other, lesser books fail to reach. Short stories featured in this sweet confection of blood, sex, and Gothic melodrama include "Holmes of the Baskervilles", "Miss Katie Bell - Victorian Vampire", "Joan Dark Is Lost", and "The Vampire Alice Through the Looking Glass". Here, vampires walk the streets and your favorite characters from Victorian literature are twisted until they snap.

Jennet Preston was an ordinary woman with an extraordinary death. Pursued and vilified by her young lord and master, Thomas Lister, she was accused and tried - twice - for murder by witchcraft in 1612. This is the story of her second trial. A friend of the Device family of Malkin Tower, Jennet Preston’s story starts and ends in Yorkshire, yet is inextricably entwined with the most famous witch trial in British history - that of the Pendle Witches.

Imagine, its 1956 – over a decade since the war ended. You’re in London, and it’s the worst year of your life. Your wife left you, your dirt poor, and your best friend just moved to Germany. This is the cruel reality of Edgar Carlisle, at least in his mind. Unknowingly suffering from moderate stage Alzheimer’s disease, Edgar Carlisle ventures out on one crisp, winter morning for a mere sign of hope, but what he finds instead, is something much more interesting.

In the Year 2889 by Jules Verne is a diary of the observations of Fritz Napoleon Smith, the editor of an influential futuristic newspaper. It is an action-packed tale of technological advances and science fiction scenarios. Some of the predictions were remarkably accurate.

In this classic by Ambrose Pierce, a soldier falls asleep during war times. When he awakens, he finds an enemy man on a horse - but struggles with himself on shooting him. Instead he shoots the horse, and a comrade sees the horse and the man falling through the sky.

"Canadian Family Adventures" follows the tale of 10 Irish siblings who immigrate to Canada in the late 1880s. Their mother, Maggie Collins, wants her children, between the ages of 10 years old and 30 years old, to have a good life, and she arranges for them to sail to Canada. The ten siblings arrive in Canada by ship, and each one settles in a different area of Canada and pursues a different career.

The reenactment of the iconic battle of the American Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg, is in its second day, and the paramedics at Aid Station Three have seen their share of cuts and scrapes and heat exhaustion. With 20 minutes until the start of the next battle scenario, Eric, the senior EMT, sends the minor injury cases on their way. Suddenly, a cannon shot booms, followed by more in quick succession, followed by thunder. Has the battle started early? Strangely, it sounds more like the sounds of battle are coming from the actual site of the Battle of Gettysburg.

An aristocrat, an exile, a contradiction, and a tortured soul, Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy offers a series of strange and unusual meetings at various points in space and in time.

“Hello, my name is Aura Smith; we are here to take you back to your time. I do not exactly why you think killing, what was his name again...oh yes, Stalin was a great idea, but you can’t just go around fixing things like that. Without Stalin, the world would have been a very different place, you see. I understand he was evil for whatever the historical context is, but we just can’t go altering all the bad things in history. The Fates do not like it."

Charles thought he had it all - until a devastating betrayal and the shattering loss of his family drove him to living on the streets. Beatrice is the first person who's truly cared about him in a long time. Little by little, he's finding reasons to care about rebuilding his life. Drawn to Charles and the temptation of a second chance, Beatrice is faced with the hardest of decisions. But his insight, secrets - and the reminder of a profound past encounter - will give her unexpected inspiration, gratitude, and the strength she needs to find her way - perhaps in time for Christmas.

In the summer of AD 777, Charlemagne rode out to conquer the Saracens and reclaim Hispania for the Holy Roman Empire. While immortalized in the words of medieval poets, scholars, and historians, the story never told is the one of what happens when all the men leave and the village is left to run itself. This is a story of Lady Matilda, the wife of Lord Harold, one of Charlemagne’s many lieutenants. After Lord Harold departed, nearly two years ago, Matilda, her maiden, Marta, and her steward, Otto, had been left to maintain the affairs of their small hamlet of Doblesmark.

On the storm-swollen Aisne in northeastern France, an alcoholic actor combats both his demons and nature’s tempests. Along the Main and Rhine in Germany, a kindhearted logger has but one wish: to travel with the lumber from his small Franconian hometown to the end of the river in the Netherlands, where it feeds into the majestic North Sea. In a bucolic vale in the French region of Brittany, two families, divided by religion and an unnamed stream, sustain a centuries-old feud, their resolve no match for the constantly shifting flow of water.

"Cavalleria Rusticana" racconta la storia di Turiddu, umile contadino siciliano innamorato della bella Lola, promessa sposa al ricco carrettiere Alfio. Gelosia, vendetta, umiliazione, passione... Sentimenti intensi che si incrociano nella Sicilia ottocentesca e che esploderanno in un drammatico duello finale.

A departure from London’s normal tales of the frozen North, all of these tales take place in the islands of Hawaii. The tales deal with racial issues, family relationships, leprosy quarantines, missionaries, and the diverse people who make their homes on the beautiful Hawaiian islands. London traveled to Hawaii in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including an eight-month stay shortly before he died in 1916. He had a fondness for the islands that is apparent in the rich descriptions in these tales.

The Mysterious Stranger is a novel by the American author Mark Twain. It tells the tale of three boys, Theodor, Seppi, and Nikolaus, who live relatively happy simple lives in a remote Austrian village called Eseldorf in 1590, and their meeting with a handsome stranger who, unknown to the boys, is Satan incarnate.

Ivory Shepard didn’t want to be a pirate when she grew up, but she didn’t plan on being orphaned and alone at 13 with her three cousins either. After a Spanish raid in Charles Towne left them with nothing, Ivory held her cousins together, trained them to fight for their lives, and led them to a life of quiet refuge on the banks of the Ashley River. Believing they were out of reach of the hands of unscrupulous men, they found life on the farm a tolerable substitute for the traditional alternatives life would force onto them - until the night the pirates showed up.

Whatever happened to British protest? For a nation that brought the world Chartism, the Suffragettes, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and so many other grassroots social movements, Britain rarely celebrates its long, great tradition of people power. In this timely and evocative collection, 20 authors have assembled to reimagine key moments of British protest, from the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to the anti-Iraq War demo of 2003.

In this final book of Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna Ferber's series featuring the indomitable Emma McChesney, Emma's newly married son Jock has relocated to Chicago, leaving Emma an empty-nester. Her secret romance and pending nuptials stall when their company is thrown into an uproar at the height of the selling season. To defeat her long-time nemesis and take the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company international, the always-competitive Emma sails off on a whirlwind tour of South America.