How To Steal A Piano And Other Stories

How to Steal a Piano and other stories is a set of intriguing tales of our time – some dark and challenging, others light and comical.

In the tradition of Aleksandar Hemon's The Question of Bruno and David Bezmozgis's Natasha, a stunning debut collection of short fiction that nails with deadpan irony the dislocations of exile and the disconnects of daily life. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

From the acclaimed, award-winning author comes this stunning collection of stories set in a world of everyday dislocation, where people nevertheless find connection, mystery, and love. These tales are of ordinary but poignant beauty: at the pub, strangers regale each other with memories of Christmases past; lovers share tales over dinner about how they met, their former lovers, and each other; a woman even tells a story to her fourteen-year-old self. As Smith explores the subtle links between what we know and what we feel, she creates an exuberant, masterly collection that is packed full of ideas, humor, nuance, and compassion. Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other.

In her first-ever solo anthology, New York Times bestseller Rebecca Cantrell demonstrates her award-winning skill with four wonderful stories, including the prequel to her Hannah Vogel series where Ernst Vogel explores the shadowy world of Weimar-era Berlin on the cusp of the Nazi rise to power as he investigates the murder of a young cigarette boy at his cabaret. The collection also includes a journey through the wreckage of postwar Berlin in a search for hope, a fated meeting on a train to a concentration camp, and a supernatural warrior protecting a shtetl in wartime Czechoslovakia.

'The Man Upstairs and Other Stories' is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse. Nineteen tales can be found inside, with the first one being 'The Man Upstairs'. It tells the story of a quick-tempered female composer and music teacher, named Annette Brougham, who is disturbed by a knocking on her ceiling. She visits the flat above to complain, but despite her initial feelings of anger towards him, she soon finds herself drawn to "Alan Beverley", the modest and charming struggling artist she finds there.

'The Kreutzer Sonata' is the self-lacerating confession of a man consumed by sexual jealousy and eaten up by shame and eventually driven to murder his wife. The story caused a sensation when it first appeared and Tolstoy's wife was appalled that he had drawn on their own experiences together to create a scathing indictment of marriage. 'The Devil', centring on a young man torn between his passion for a peasant girl and his respectable life with his loving wife, also illustrates the impossibility of pure love. 'The Forged Coupon' shows how an act of corruption can spiral out of control, and 'After the Ball' examines the abuse of power. Written during a time of spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, these late stories reflect a world of moral uncertainties.

The stories in "All Our Yesterdays..." and Nine Other Stories continue to explore the lives of the Cockburn family and other characters in and around the fictional town of Menninger, North Dakota, first created in the novel The Song Is Ended and continued in the novel The Dark Between The Stars and the short stories in Meatball Birds and Seven Other Stories. While the events and the characters found in the ten stories exist in rural and small town settings, the themes explored have a universal appeal.

"Gary Carden is a folklorist and storyteller. He was raised by his grandparents in a house filled with the past. He grew up listening to Grady Cole and Renfro Valley on the radio while his grandfather tuned musical instruments with a tuning fork and sang hymns from a shape-note songbook. He grew up with cows, June apple trees, comic books, the Farmers' Federation, and Saturday movies. He told his first stories to 150 white leghorn chickens in a dark chicken-house when he was six years old. His audience wasn't terribly attentive and tended to get hysterical during the dramatic parts."--