How does it work?
Every book is a collection of short stories, meant to be picked up, and put down after one story! A perfect study break.
Every short film is under 30 minutes (many under 10 minutes), a great alternative to your usual youtube fare :)
2018 World Fantasy Award winner : Where is Wendy? Leading a labor strike against the Lost Boys, of course. A Scottish academic unearths ancient evil in a fishing village. Edgar Allan Poe s young bride is beguiled by a most unusual bird. Dorothy, lifted from Kansas, returns as a gymnastic sophisticate. Emily Dickinson dwells in possibility and sails away in a starship made of light. Alice s wicked nemesis has jaws and claws but really needs a sense of humor. Enter the Emerald Circus and be astonished by the transformations within.
Just Like Being There is the first collection of science fiction stories by award-winning author and aerospace engineer Eric Choi spanning his 25 year writing career. The stories are "hard" science fiction in which some element of engineering or science is so central there would be no story if that element were removed. Story topics include space exploration, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, cryptography, quantum computing, online privacy, mathematics (statistics), neuroscience, psychology, space medicine, extra-terrestrial intelligence, undersea exploration, commercial aviation, and the history of science.
Still Life with Plums is a vibrant collection of short stories that weaves together the outwardly distant lives of several strangers. With heaping doses of dark humor and magical realism, these ten stories enliven a cast of characters carefully speckled throughout the southern portion of the United States. From West Virginians, to Texans and Latinos, Still Life with Plums circles the paths of a Black-Irish West Virginian, a wise-cracking dog groomer, an emasculated husband, a Guatemalan widow, a Japanese-Latin-American poster child from WWII, and a meticulous predator.
Imagine a Hollywood encounter between Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, “two female icons of disability.” Or the story of “Moby Dick, or, The Leg,” told from Ahab’s perspective. What if Vincent Van Gogh resided in a twentieth-century New York hotel, surviving on food stamps and direct communications with God? Or if the dwarf pictured in a seventeenth-century painting by Velazquez should tell her story? And, finally, imagine the encounter between David and Goliath from the Philistine’s point of view; These are the characters who people history and myth as counterpoints to the “normal.”
A groundbreaking Jewish feminist short story collection. It showcases a wide range of stories offering variegated cultures and contexts and points of view: Persian Jews; a Biblical matriarch; an Ethiopian mother in modern Israel; suburban American teens; Eastern European academics; a sexual questioner; a Jew by choice; a new immigrant escaping her Lower East Side sweatshop; a Black Jewish marcher for justice; in Vichy France, a toddler's mother hiding out; and more. Organized by theme, the stories in this book emphasize a breadth of content. Skip around, encounter an author whose other writing you may know, be enticed by a title, or an opening line.
"Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet is the first English-language collection of short stories by Cui Zi'en, China's most famous and controversial queer filmmaker, writer, scholar, and LGBTQ rights activist. Drawing on his own experiences growing up in socialist and postsocialist China, Cui presents ten queer coming-of-age stories of young boys and men as they explore their sexuality and desires. Richly imaginative and vividly written, Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet portrays the emergence of queer cultures in postsocialist China while foregrounding the commitments to one's erotic and passionate attractions even as they lead to cultural transgressions.
"A themed collection of short stories about animals, which offers a striking example of environmentally concerned literature from the Arab world, by an Egyptian author with a keen and sensitive eye for the behavior of animals-especially homo sapiens"
What do a family of luchadores, a teen on the run, a rideshare driver, a lucid dreamer, a migrant worker in space, a mecha soldier, and a zombie-and-neo-Nazi fighter have in common? Reyes Ramirez's dynamic short story collection follows new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traversing life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. [...] each story becomes increasingly further removed from our lived reality, engaging numerous genres from emotionally touching realist fiction to action-packed speculative fiction, as well as hallucinatory realism, magical realism, noir, and science fiction.
In this poignant and meditative collection of short stories, Zubair Ahmad captures the lives and experiences of the people of the Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan. In an intimate narrative style, Ahmad writes a world that hovers between memory and imagination, home and abroad. The narrator follows the pull of his subconscious, shifting between past and present, recalling different eras of Lahore's neighbourhoods and the communities that define them. The contradictions and betrayals of this region's history reverberate through the stories, evident in the characters, their circumstances, and sometimes their erasure.
No Time to Mourn is a collection of short stories, poems, artwork and photography penned, produced and presented by South Sudanese women. It reflects the lives of the women writers and artists, and at the same time gives voice to the very real lived experiences and lives of every woman of South Sudanese heritage. The ideas and experiences in this book span decades they straddle borders, they cross continents and describe events that are hard to imagine, even with some knowledge of South Sudan's history. It is hard not to be moved as you read what many of these authors have lived through as they strive to achieve those basic of human rights: life, liberty and security.
This daring, irreverent short-story collection dissects and explores the conundrums of contemporary life and what it is to be human, through a world very like our own. A corporate satire follows a pair of dark operatives working for a chicken franchise as they take careful revenge on counterfeiters. A coder calculates the odds of her husband's cold developing complications and killing him, in a story told in code. A relationship at breaking point is told via a scrambled timeline of events that works like a puzzle. A man spends his inheritance on technology that will allow him to fly. And an archeologist working for mining companies against the interests of Indigenous communities develops a mysterious psychological condition that causes her to black out and commit extreme acts of generosity -- from the internet.
Award-winning author Leslie Greentree presents fourteen short stories in this dark, often funny, deeply compelling collection that asks how we locate, create, and avoid meaning in our lives. These are stories about people and relationships challenged by death and redeemed by art. Satirical, political, personal, and tender, they take us to funerals, protests, art galleries, to the dark side of the service industry, and through cities on fire. Taking on the social collective, the performance of death, the political battleground, and the search for existential happiness with fearlessness and verve, Not the Apocalypse I Was Hoping For is full of sharp observation, irreverence, wit, and compassion.
The stories in A Common Person and Other Stories, R. M. Kinder’s third short-story collection and the winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, expose the disruption in our modern life and the ever-present threat of violence, and, most importantly, they capture the real heroism of everyday people. The characters in these stories, most set deep in the middle of America, seem to invite trouble through their concern for others: a neighbor’s mistreated dog, a boy standing up to a bully, a woman who faces cancer and the loss of love. Kinder’s characters struggle with conflicts common to us all—to treat humans and animals with compassion, to open minds and hearts to diversity, all while balancing the welfare of the individual and the larger community.
Set in the Syrian neighborhood of al-Qaweyq, Sour Grapes is a collection of fifty-nine wry, satirical short stories loosely connected by a cast of rotating characters living at society's margins. Inspired by the heroines of Arab mythology, the women of al-Qaweyq navigate the patriarchal community with brash confidence and dark humor while the younger generation of children inherit a bitter cynicism from their fathersConsidered a master of the short story, Zakaria Tamer is one of the Arab world's most prominent and widely read writers. Columbu and Capallera's fluid translation gives English readers access to Tamer's original and provocative voice.
Pixar's unprecedented string of hit animated features was built on the short films in this collection. The shorts are: The Adventures of Andre and Wally B., Luxo, Jr., Red's Dream, Tin Toy, Knick Knack, Geri's Game, For The Birds, Mike's New Car, Boundin', Jack-Jack Attack, Mater and The Ghost Light, One Man Band and Lifted.
Pixar shorts are: Mater's Tall Tales: Air Mater, BURN-E, Dug's Special Mission, George & A.J., Toy Story Toons: Hawaiian Vacation, Partly Cloudy, Toy Story Toons: Small Fry, Mater's Tall Tales: Time Travel Mater, Your Friend the Rat along with Oscar nominated shorts Presto (2008), Day & Night (2010) and La Luna (2011).
This animated short about tropical islands and volcanoes takes place over a span of millions of years.
Baja racers challenge Lightning McQueen to an off-road race during a town celebration to honor its founder.
A Chinese-Canadian woman suffering from empty nest syndrome gets a second shot at motherhood when one of her handmade dumplings comes alive.
Elsa wants to throw Anna an amazing 19th birthday party, but the whole day could be ruined when her powers go haywire due to a cold.
Christmas is celebrated in Arendelle when Anna and Elsa open the gates for the first time in years. However, the sisters find themselves alone when others leave to observe their own holiday customs, so Olaf searches for traditions to bring to the girls.
A baby sandpiper searches for bits of food on a beach, despite its fear of the surf coming in and out.
A young Indian boy daydreams of Hindu superheroes while his father is meditating in this short film.
VIU Library | email:library@viu.ca | Nanaimo: 250.740.6330 | Cowichan: 250.746.3517 | tiwšɛmawtxʷ: 1.888.920.2221 ext.6330 |
Report a Problem