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Deftly translated by Ryan Choi, these stories and vignettes (plus two short plays) all have radical brevity in common, demonstrating that Akutagawa was an early and prescient master of what we now call "flash" fiction and non-fiction. With a striking economy of means, the author gives us vivid, eccentric, feeling characters, young and elderly, learned and unpolished, urban and rural. Akutagawa's observations and notes â€" on dreams, on being impersonated, on mountain towns, winter nights, university life and, poignantly, the Great Kantō Earthquake â€" are as rich and evocative as his stories, with which they share a mesmerising quality.  First published in Japan between 1914 and 1927 (some posthumously), these works have been overlooked in favour of Akutagawa's longer tales, which have formed the basis of his reputation in the West. In translating them, Choi rounds out our understanding of this master stylist.Â

Two guys named Tom Bone. A spaceman speaking only lyrics from pop songs, confusing the aliens. A Gogol-esque telesales agent with a dog problem. A return to a desolate Australian mining town. Cowboys, detectives and witches, unlike you've ever seen them. An irate email to Sepp Blatter. Wise children. Musings on whisky, the sea and the end of the damn world. Marcus Preece was one of the most interesting writers you've never heard of. Before his death in 2017 at fifty-three, the filmmaker, teacher and editor had completed dozens of short stories, screenplays, comics, poems and music journalism; he left behind incomplete drafts of dozens more. Malu Halasa, herself an author and editor with ten books to her name, was a friend of Preece, and his de facto literary executor; this book collects the best of his finished writings. This collection includes short stories, screenplays, comics and other writings. With a profound sense of justice and suspicion toward social changes made in the name of progress, Preece is firmly on the side of the underdogs: refugees, alienated office workers and underground rap collectives, lost souls. The centrepiece of the book is Million-Story City, a fabulous place populated by highly original characters, where storybook conventions mix and flow in a sequence of tales pitched perfectly for both adult and younger readers. Unexpected and singular, this anthology is a tribute and a sheer delight.

Rūdolfs Blaumanis's 1899 short story masterpiece, based on a contemporary newspaper account, tells of several fishermen lost at sea after the ice floe on which they work calves off and drifts away rapidly. One by one, the thirteen men and a boy must deal with the creeping reality that they may not see the mainland -- or their loved ones -- again. There is fish to eat, and two horses if necessary, but the very surface of the floe is eroding steadily ... and the nights are cold and terrible. Without ever moralising or over-elaborating, Blaumanis coolly and efficiently observes the state of each of the main characters in turn, whether natural leaders, optimists, craven opportunists, terrified, stoic, compassionate or alienated. In the shadow of encroaching death, each must come to some kind of reckoning.

These stories, by one of the rising stars of Estonian literature, depict ordinary people undergoing extraordinary metamorphoses; it is not only their own lives that are changed forever, but also those of the bystanders drawn in by their fascinating particularities. In "The Butterfly Man", a small-time, self-effacing magician is hired to join a circus -- not on account of his negligible conjuring skills, but because of the exotic butterflies that peel away from him when his emotions are excited. The night watchman in "The Beauty Who Had Seen It All", a man of base, amoral inclinations, discovers the power of invisibility --and seduces a beautiful woman with jaded tastes. "The High Season" tells of an aloof, cantankerous poet whose devotees remain protective of him even at a distance, guarding him at a local cafe where he drinks endless cups of coffee and becomes a fixture -- literally.

The Buy To Let Loose concept is buying properties and renting them out to grow an income stream that displaces your day job. Anshu Kotak has been investing in buy to let for a decade and has self-built a multi-million-pound property portfolio which last year matched her rental income to her corporate salary when she quit her corporate job.

This story, by one of Europe's most skilful practitioners of the art of short fiction, has now been translated into English for the first time. Zose, a beautiful, diligent and innocent peasant girl, works as a maid in the service of a wealthy country estate. Courted by the local young men and resistant to the attentions of her master, who forces himself upon her, she is in fact wholly in love with Tofylis, the huntsman. But Tofylis's good looks and practised seduction manoeuvres have blinded her to his brutishness and faux sophistication. This simple tale from 1897 is made deeply complex by Zemaite's acute, compassionate eye and ear for the lives of the lower classes in Lithuania at the time. As a depiction of patriarchal attitudes, coercive control and the limited options facing poor women, it has remarkable contemporary resonance.

After arranging a house swap with a debonair antiques dealer, a darkly handsome American named Luca Tempesta arrives in a quaint English village. Tempesta, who claims to run a detective agency in Los Angeles, is supposedly on holiday - but the inhabitants of the village are unconvinced.

Klaus Werner travels to the Algerian Sahara to research a book on desert insects. He is billeted in a local monastery, but upon arrival he finds it empty of its inhabitants.He soon discovers that it is a recent crime scene.