We hope that you are enjoying the 2022 Reading Challenge! If you’re not already, be sure to follow along in our Better World Books 2022 Reading Challenge Facebook Group, subscribe to our text messages, or email list to stay up-to-date. This month, our category is Short and Sweet Stories. This can include any essays, novellas, short stories, poetry or whatever quick read is calling your name. Check out our recommended titles below and Happy Reading!
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Giovanni’s Room
by James Baldwin
Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
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Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing: Essays
by Lauren Hough
As an adult, Lauren Hough has had many identities: an airman in the U.S. Air Force, a cable guy, a bouncer at a gay club. As a child, however, she had none. Growing up as a member of the infamous cult The Children of God, Hough had her own self robbed from her. The cult took her all over the globe—to Germany, Japan, Texas, Chile—but it wasn’t until she finally left for good that Lauren understood she could have a life beyond The Family. Along the way, she’s loaded up her car and started over, trading one life for the next. She’s taken pilgrimages to the sights of her youth, been kept in solitary confinement, dated a lot of women, dabbled in drugs, and eventually found herself as what she always wanted to be: a writer.
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Rip Van Winkle and Other Stories
by Washington Irving
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR’d book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson’s short novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886, became an instant classic, a Gothic horror originating in a feverish nightmare whose hallucinatory setting in the back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence. Its revelatory ending is one of the most original and thrilling in English Literature. This new edition of Stevenson’s most famous work includes three additional short stories, two short essays, and extracts from contemporary writing on psychological disorders. The introduction considers the reasons for the book’s popularity, “the double,” and psychoanalytic interpretations, as well as crime, sex, class, and urbanism in the 1880s.
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The Little Prince
by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
The highest standards in editing and production have been applied to the Wordsworth Children’s Classics, while the low price makes them affordable for everyone. Wordsworth’s list covers a range of the best-loved stories for children, from nursery tales, classic fables, and fairy tales to stories that will appeal to older children and adults alike. Many of these volumes have contemporary illustrations, and while they are ideal for shared family reading, their attractive format will also encourage children to read for themselves. Like all Wordsworth Editions, these children’s books represent unbeatable value.
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The Old Man and The Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from loss and transforms them into a magnificent twentieth-century classic. Written in 1952, this hugely successful novel confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a large part in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.
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The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a valuable piece of American feminist literature that reveals attitudes toward the psychological health of women in the nineteenth century. Diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” by her physician husband, a woman is confined to an upstairs bedroom. Descending into psychosis at the complete lack of stimulation, she starts obsessing over the room’s yellow wallpaper: “It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! … The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell.”
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The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
A masterpiece of Western culture, this is the first attempt to link all the Greek myths in a cohesive whole to the Roman myths of Ovid’s day. Horace Gregory, in this modern translation, turns his own poetic gifts toward a deft reconstruction of Ovid’s ancient themes. This fine version, with David Cronenberg’s inspired introduction and the new translator’s beguiling afterword, is, I suspect, the most disturbing though the most comforting of all so far; others will follow, but don t hesitate: this is the transforming text for you.
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The Poetry of Robert Frost
by Robert Frost
This is the only comprehensive volume of Robert Frost’s published verse; in it are the contents of all eleven of his individual books of poetry-from “A Boy’s Will” (1913) to” In the Clearing” (1962). The editor, Edward Connery Lathem, has scrupulously annotated the more than 350 poems in this book.
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Three-Ten to Yuma and Other Stories
by Elmore Leonard
From America’s premier storyteller comes this collection of seven classic western tales of destiny and fatal decision, featuring the story that became the basis for the 1957 western film classic, “3:10 to Yuma,” which starred Glenn Ford.
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