An ice cream van rolls into a war zone. A goldfish pleads with its owner, who has seasonal affective disorder. An advertising agency of the future struggles to capture the zombie market. A woman screams silently at a pair of social workers who visit to talk about her anorexic daughter.Brought together for the first time and introduced by prize-winning novelist Kerry Hudson, The Forge Anthology is a collection of over 30 pieces of startling and thought-provoking flash fiction from t...

Macabre meetings, sinister excursions, and deadly relationships; uncanny encounters; a classic ghost story featuring an American god; a historical murderer revived in a frightening new iteration; innovative Lovecraftian turns; shadowy fairy tales and weird myths; strange children, the unexpected, the supernatural, the surreal, and the all-too real . . . tales of the dark. Such stories have always fascinated us, and modern authors carry on the disquieting traditions of the past while invent...

The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its seventh year.Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking...

Laurie dreams of a better life. The girl lives with her kind brother Robert under her father's roof on the edge of a forest, and their happiness is punctuated by the moments of terror to which he subjects them. Can they ever escape?

'Other folks get so well known,And nobody knows about my own,'Have you met my sister Jane? She's a great big crow! My Grandpa is an owler and Grandma knits jerseys for wasps! And my other Granny is an octopus...Meet Aunt Flo, Brother Bert and more extraordinary family members in Ted Hughes' irresistible Meet My Folks, his first book for children, illustrated beautifully by George Adamson.

In her prize-winning fourth collection, Mean Time, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy dramatizes scenes from childhood, adolescence and adulthood, finding moments of grace or consolation in memory, love and language amid the complexities of life. These are powerful poems of loss, betrayal and desire.

These outstanding stories from the 2010 Bristol Short Story Prize will provoke, stimulate, move, amuse, unsettle, and entertain

This collection brings together twenty short stories from eighteen of New Zealand's accomplished writers. They explore the dark and dangerous milieu of our comfortable existence. There is humour, tenderness, surprise, anger, sorrow and abject desperation in these stories from the four winds. The authors are Patricia Grace, Albert Wendt, Alice Tawhai, Briar Grace-Smith, Paula Morris, Tina Makereti, James George, Renée, Jacqui McRae, Eru Hart, Helen Waaka, Toni Pivac, K-t Harrison, Anya Ngaw...

Dark secrets lurk in a parent's bedroom, secrets that should never be unearthed. An inquisitive child seeking answers to the secrets; dark and mystical secrets to which only his parents know the horrifying reality.The Toy Hospital is a chilling tale as told by a child about to change his own world inexorably and permanently. This chilling tale comes from my upcoming anthology of short stories:' Death Row Rejects' The story is around 4200 words and is a short horror story told in the first ...

'These poems delight in a wily, mischievous, nonchalant negotiation between the affections and attachments of Muldoon's own childhood, family and place, and the ironic discriminations of a cool literary sensibility and historical awareness.' Times Literary Supplement

This changes things is Claire Askew’s first full collection, coming after years of work in Scotland’s flourishing poetry and spoken word scene. Her poems focus on the lives and experiences of women - particularly the socially or economically marginalised - at pains both to empathise and to recognise the limits of this empathy. They embody a need to acknowledge and challenge the poet’s privileged position as documenter and outsider, a responsibility to the poem’s political message and to th...

Following on from Sticks and Stones, the May break your bones anthology is a collection of fifty powerful stories from all around the world. In under 1000 words, they have the power to transport you, to make you laugh, cry, and everything in between.AuthorsAbigail Williams, Adam Brannigan, Alison Wassell, Andy Kind, Anna Hopwood, Carey Camburn, C. Finity, Denise Bayes, Denny Jace, Donna L. Greenwood, Eleanor Luke, Emily Midgley, Emily Ives-Keeler, Felicity Lucas, Finley Hopm...