A host of short story collections photographed against a red background

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Reading lists

12 short story collections to sink into

The Wandering

The most ingenious, unique novel you will read all year, where you choose your own story as you travel across the world, from one of Asia's most exciting female writers.

An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge... Questions such as: “Where am I going?”... “Which choice will make my life worthwhile?” feel existential and urgent... Who can travel, and on what conditions, is one of the primary human rights questions of our era, and The Wandering skilfully takes it on.

With its choose-your-own adventure structure, The Wandering is fiction at its most lifelike, presenting the reader with choices and inevitable misgivings... It is also fiction at its most untethered, where readers can hurl themselves across time zones, selves and situations, free of risk, danger or discrimination.

An ingeniously crafted debut which lets you make your own choices about where you want the story to go. This is an electrifying novel about cosmopolitanism and global nomadism that keeps readers on their toes.

Sets you free to roam the Earth... an incisive commentary on the cosmopolitan condition.

The perfect match of theme and genre...impeccably executed... This book is escapism taken to the next level, while still making serious and significant comments about modern societies... Paramaditha excels at mordant observations about migration, the brutality of Trump’s America, the falsehood of the American dream, and the personal dimension of the 'refugee crisis'... [It] made me think about the world, about chance and fate and the choices we make.

A cleverly crafted tale about the illusion of free will, and the stakes and pressures that accompany the choices influenced by one’s identity in the world.

A story of migration, of searching the world for happiness and hoping that it will be found over the next page (or if you turn to page 42)... While it might seem at first to be a book about travel, it is in fact a tale of belonging... A deeply affecting, intensely personal novel that uses its experimental method of storytelling to worm its way into your very bones... an interactive adventure like no other.

Intan Paramaditha shakes up her readers. Her stories reveal that the most terrifying thing in life is not one of the supernatural ghosts that populate her work, but human prejudice. As far as I’m concerned, only writers of genius are able to convey a layered and nuanced world, and Paramaditha is one of them.

This is a book for the new age - put yourself in the shoes of a global nomad and choose which way you want to go.

*The most unusual novel you will read all year, where you create your own story* 
 
'An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge' Lauren Elkin, Guardian 
 
Longlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize 
 
You've grown roots, you're gathering moss. You're desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go. 
 
Turn the page and make your choice. 
 
You may become a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet other travellers with their own stories to tell. Freedom awaits but borders are real. And no story is ever new. 
 
'Sets you free to roam the Earth... an incisive commentary on the cosmopolitan condition' Tiffany Tsao 
 
'An electrifying novel about cosmopolitanism and global nomadism that keeps readers on their toes' Book Riot 
 
Winner of an English PEN Translates Award, and a Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America

Intan Paramaditha

Stephen J Epstein

In this dazzling debut story collection from celebrated Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha, fairytale, taboo, lust and death all come together in a heady, intoxicating mix. 
 
A black velvet butterfly darts out of a cave. Menstrual blood pools in the backseat of a car. Rats pour forth from an open doorway. 
 
These stories set in the Indonesian everyday – in corporate boardrooms, in shanty towns – reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. Melding horror and myth, this is subversive feminist fiction at its finest, where men and women alike are arbiters of fear, and where revenge is sometimes sweetest when delivered from the grave. 
 
The Vintage Classics Weird Girls series: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors. Bold, disruptive, chilling and enchanting, these tales of the weird are strange enough to get lost in.

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Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors.

Weird Girls

East of Eden

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Jane Austen: The Complete Works

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Intan Paramaditha

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12 short story collections to sink into

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