Penguin Books Australia

Demetri Martin is a Very Important Award-Winning Comedian, so spends a lot of his time travelling around, with a notebook, filling it with jokes and incredibly long palindromes (over 500-words long, in fact). The very best of those are collected here, from his acclaimed comic drawings and the world's worst comeback lines, to brilliant charts and graphs (Incidence of Lung Cancer in Dragons, a Sad Clown/Happy...

A veritable collection of 25 short stories by young and prizewinning Asian writers from 15 countries: Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the UAE, Guyana, UK, USA and Australia.

The stories dwell on universal themes of human experience—social conflict, the clash of cultures, clash between tradition and modernization, loyalty, betrayal...

Smalltown is a view of the Australia we politely ignore.

In this rich and austere collaboration, photographer Martin Mischkulnig has joined writer Tim Winton to produce a meditation on the peculiar collision of beauty and ugliness that characterises our far-flung towns.

Eight brilliant stories by a master of the form, author of the classic 'Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam' and 'The Kiss'

  A penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation—and, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners— Comedy in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella, first published in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time...

'A cool, patient voice that draws the reader in. von Schirach…has the talent to dazzle.' New York Times Book Review
A private boys' school that harbours a gang of teenage exorcists.
A drug deal that goes bizarrely awry when a dog gets involved.
A couple who like to swing – until one partner hits the wall.
A brutal gang rape whose perpetrators are known but cannot be convicted.
Crimes, bad...

Lorenzo has a few issues. They include the fact that he doesn't have, or want, any friends. Because this is making his parents unhappy, he tells them he has been invited on a skiing holiday with a group from school. In fact, he is planning to spend the week happily ensconced in the cellar of their apartment building with a supply of canned tuna.

Then his estranged older sister Olivia turns up in the...

Ron Rash has long been a critically acclaimed writer but his novel, Serena, catapulted him to new heights garnering rave reviews across Australia and becoming a New York Times bestseller. The New Yorker said 'Rash's evocative rendering of the blighted landscape and the tough characters who inhabit it recalls both John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy.'

'This whole collection is brimming with vibrant and original writing.'
- Brenda Walker

28 life-changing stories about who we are, and what we want to be.

Some of us just blow with the breeze, and some of us feel every wind-shift.  Some of us are never blown the same way twice, and some of us are never the same way wherever we're blown
- Glen Hunting

When Satan appears in the story, he looks a...

'What you staring at?'
he said, looking quickly into the rearview and touching the place his eyebrow might have been.
'You're not exactly Marilyn Monroe yerself.'

Short stories from Goldie Goldbloom.
Dark.  Delicious.  Superb.

Griffith REVIEW 's second annual fiction collection will focus on the Pacific region: from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific islands, New Zealand and Australia. What binds us? What pulls us apart? 

As economic, political and cultural power moves from North America and Europe to the Asia-Pacific, Australia is enjoying a new relationship with its neighbours. The shift of individuals and ideas across...

A love-struck young ranch hand, an aging Argentine lover, a trusted confidante who isn't a friend and two hitchhikers named Bonnie and Clyde.

Caught between opposing forces—fidelity and desire, impulse and security, innocence and experience—Meloy's unforgettable characters have each reached a fork in the road. But what kind of fool wants it only one way?

These eleven stories are funny...

This eclectic anthology of new stories showcases some of our finest short-story writers, and proves that the short story is alive and well in Australia.

From seasoned practitioners of the form through to rising and emerging stars of the short-story firmament, New Australian Stories 2 caters for all tastes. There's humour, mystery, drama, and even some delusion and deceit. Whole lives are captured in...

The stories in Laura van den Berg's rich and inventive debut illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane.

A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot impersonator. A grieving missionary becomes obsessed with a creature rumoured to live in the forests of the Congo. And, in the title story, a young woman travelling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning...

These ten stories offer a stunning vision of contemporary American suburbia, littered with tension, heartbreak and revelations.  Andrew Porter's stories take readers across the country - from rural Pennsylvania to Southern California to the quiet streets of Connecticut.

At the heart of each story characters struggle to find meaning in their daily lives.  Among them a college student searches...

The Pen and the Stethoscope is a unique collection of fiction and non-fiction by doctor–writers that gives us a fascinating look behind the doctor's mask and gets inside the minds of those who deal with enormous existential issues and traumatic situations on a daily basis.

It is through writing that many doctors have plumbed the depths and richness of their experience. This book takes a critical...

Sherman Alexie delivers a heartbreaking and hilarious collection of stories that explore the precarious balance between self-preservation and external responsibility in art, family, and the world at large.