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Shimmer Chinodya, winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa region) is one of Zimbabwe's foremost fiction writers. This collection of short stories reveals his development as a writer of passionate questioning integrity. The first stories, 'Hoffman Street' and 'The Man who Hanged Himself' capture the bewildered innocence of a child's view of the adult world, where behaviour is often puzzling and contradictory; stories such as 'Going to See Mr B.V.' provide the transition between the world of the adult and that of the child where the latter is required to act for himself in a situation where illusions founder on a narrow reality. 'Among the Dead' and 'Brothers and Sisters' look wryly at the self-conscious, self-centred, desperately serious world of young adulthood while 'Playing your Cards', 'The Waterfall', 'Strays' and 'Bramson' introduce characters for whom ambition, disillusion, and disappointment jostle for attention in a world where differences of class, culture, race and morality come to the fore. Finally, in 'Can we Talk' we conclude with an abrasive, lucid, sinewy voice which explores the nature of estrangement. The charge is desolation. Can we Talk and Other Stories speaks of the unspoken and unsaid. The child who watches but does not understand, the young man who observes but cannot participate, the man who stands outside not sure where his desires and ambitions lead, the older man, estranged by his own choices. 'Can we Talk' is not a question but a statement that insists on being heard, and demands a reassessment of our dreams.

Moving On bristles with the talent of writers from Zimbabwe. This collection brings together twenty of Zimbabwe's finest storytellers, from within the country and without. Many of the characters in this anthology are themselves moving on:  from the chains of the past, from the loss of loved ones, from long-held beliefs. Some from life itself and others to a brighter future. Between the covers the reader will encounter the father who uses his take on democracy to name the family dog, the villager who desperately waits for shoes and salt to ward off witchcraft, the young man who flees with the book, the boys who hide from the big noise, and a host of other characters.

Winner of the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction The 14 stories ofThe Dogs of Detroiteach focus on grief and its many strange permutations. This grief alternately devolves into violence, silence, solitude, and utter isolation. In some cases, grief drives the stories as a strong, reactionary force, and yet in other stories, that grief evolves quietly over long stretches of time. Many of the stories also use grief as a prism to explore the beguiling bonds within families. The stories span a variety of geographies, both urban and rural, often considering collisions between the two.

Irony and humour have always been used to counter frustration, despair and to expose double standards. In these ten sharply polished stories, Mandishona explores the dark comedy that lies just beneath the surface of tragedy in Zimbabwean society in the last decade. His perceptions leave few untouched: politicians, new farmers, exiles, stranded queues and inflation that renders the currency worthless... Truth and morality are dispensable in a society where wealth is rewarded with respect, integrity marred by untruth, rumour displaces fact, and power is only interested in its own survival. Mandishona holds a mirror up to reality and without equivocation asks us to look at what is real: the likeness or the distortion and what it is we want to see.

The Piano Tuner, Peter Meinke writes of the foreignness that awaits us when we go abroad and when we answer our own front door to admit a stranger, that confronts us in unfamiliar cities and villages and in the equally disquieting surroundings of our memories and regrets.Often in these stories, what seems a safe, comfortable environment turns suddenly threatening. In the title story, a writer's quiet existence amid his antiques and books is dismantled, piece by piece, by a demonic, beer-bellied piano tuner. In \"The Ponoes,\" a man recalls how, as a young boy living in Brooklyn during World War II, he became a collaborationist in the brutal pranks of two Irish bullies. In \"The Twisted River,\" the sedate collegiality of a Polish university is disrupted when an American on a Fulbright grant attempts to blackmail two faculty members. And in \"The Bracelet,\" a young anthropology student doing field work in Africa finds herself drawn further and further into the role of a priestess of Oshun, into a life dictated by the configuration of cowry shells cast upon the floor.Meinke writes of a world where our control over our lives seldom exists across a border, and often extends no further than our fingertips. Attempts to bridge two cultures, two lives are sometimes successful, as when an actor finds love in the arms of a tough-talking barmaid, but more usually lead to disillusionment, as when a hard-drinking salesman's career is shattered after he is drunk under the table one night by a Polish engineer, or when an English father struggles to find common ground with his American son. Riveting, almost terrifying, the stories in The Piano Tuner tell of decent men and women caught in events that they could never have predicted, would never have chosen.

The story of Sir Guy, once as familiar as the tales of King Arthur, is now largely forgotten. Originally composed about 1240 A.D., this heroic romance early circulated in countless manuscripts, first in poetic, then in expanded prose form. Later, in 1525, the extended version was printed in French, and later still, in 1821, it was rendered into English. That last essential act unfortunately served little purpose, since the translation was thereafter available only to successive descendants of the family that prepared it. In 1959, however, The University of Texas acquired this unique translation, followed by a copy of the rare 1525 issue in 1963, and with both texts rejoined now offers, through William B. Todd, one final service: an edition for present readers. So rescued from oblivion, Guy of Warwick emerges as a grand exemplum of chivalric conduct. Perhaps even more than Arthur, or Launcelot, or Galahad, the hero is a very proper knight, displaying at once all the mundane attributes of nobility: unswerving loyalty to kin, kith, and king; the ready rescue of damsels in distress; the prompt dispatch of dragons, giants, or other enemies of the realm—and in aftertime exhibiting also all the spiritual qualities of true gentility: defense of the faith against every infidel, mortification of the flesh, and final withdrawal to a hermitage. Thus Guy may rightly deserve not only his early accolade as the \"Hercules of England\" but also some measure of the tribute usually reserved for a patron saint. However regarded, this knight's exploits must necessarily rank as one of the great \"matters of Britain\" and again become an essential part of Western cultural heritage.

In astronomy, the termination shock is the boundary that marks the outer limits of the sun's influence -- the ripple outward of our solar wind and its collision with the interstellar medium. This debut collection of stories evokes those moments when lives are unpredictably shaken and reset by forces beyond their grasp. Making use of a diverse array of narrative modes, settings, and voices, these stories traverse space and time, moving from Egypt during the Second World War to modern-day Liberia and an unfamiliar Los Angeles. The title story, \"Termination Shock,\" offers a lyrical exploration of two traumatic moments in a woman's life that occur decades apart and continue to reverberate in humorous and poignant ways. Janice Margolis shows us characters on the precipice of change -- including a narrator in fevered quarantine following the death of her mother from Ebola, a cross-cultural love in a swiftly transforming Syria, and the desolation of the Berlin Wall, which from its various sectors and coordinates, confesses its crimes and mourns its destruction.

Keys in the River: New and Collected Stories, is a cycle of stories about life, love and spirituality, told as if the reader were sitting and listening to neighbors and friends talking about life. Some stories are tender, even comic; in others, tragedy and outrage lurk. The stories share a common thread, a noble stance in the struggle to find love, freedom, completeness, humanness and satisfaction.

Writer Paul Ruffin celebrates the mysteries of the sea in the short story collection The Time the Waters Rose. From shrimp boat captains to shipyard workers, Ruffin's characters are men who drink, swear, fight, and sometimes kill, but what unifies them is that all-embracing magic of the Gulf coast and the barrier islands. While some are drawn to the Gulf for its mystery, others are there simply to earn a living,and all are unforgettable, from the bawdy, snuff-dipping, rednecks to the land-locked shipbuilder who erects a ship in his suburban backyard to the salty old freethinker aboard The Drag Queen who gives his evangelical shipmate hell for suggesting they say grace before lunch.The title story, which Ruffin started writing as a ten-year-old bored with traditional Biblical tales, is an irreverent, satirica l retelling of the epic Noah story. All the other tales are set in and around the Mississippi coast, but they are not your typical sea and fishing yarns. While some of the stories may seem far-fetched, they are all drawn from Ruffin's experiences and are rich with tactile descriptions of the Pascagoula River and its surrounding marshlands, from the sun and shadow play of the open waters to the powerful thunderheads and squalls that arise at a moment's notice over the islands of the Gulf.

Irony and humour have always been used to counter frustration, despair and to expose double standards. In these ten sharply polished stories, Mandishona explores the dark comedy that lies just beneath the surface of tragedy in Zimbabwean society in the last decade. His perceptions leave few untouched: politicians, new farmers, exiles, stranded queues and inflation that renders the currency worthless... Truth and morality are dispensable in a society where wealth is rewarded with respect, integrity marred by untruth, rumour displaces fact, and power is only interested in its own survival. Mandishona holds a mirror up to reality and without equivocation asks us to look at what is real: the likeness or the distortion and what it is we want to see.