Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

Onlookers is a story collection about people living in the same Southern town whose lives intersect in surprising ways.
(Description from catalog)

When he moves home to Chesapeake Shores, newly single father and former army medic Kevin O'Brien gets an unexpected second chance at love when he meets bookseller Shanna Carlyle, who teaches him how to trust again.
(Description from NoveList)

Meet the women of American Housewife. They wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it&#x;s cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies from the oven. Taking us from a haunted pre-war Manhattan apartment building to the unique initiation ritual of a book club, these twelve delightfully demented stories are a refreshing and wicked answer to the question: What do housewives do all day? (Description from catalog)

It's 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine's father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church-a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But she does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.
(Description from catalog)

Stephen King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels. King writes to feel "the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind," and in You Like It Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.
(Description from catalog)

Both on and off the rez, interlinked characters contend with history and identity as contemporary members of the Seneca Nation. (Description from NoveList.)

A thrilling anthology of thirteen short stories that span the wide-ranging imagination of the New York Times bestselling author of the Scholomance Trilogy, including a sneak peek at the world where her next novel will be set.
(Description from catalog)

The visionary writer and director of Get Out, Us, and Nope, and founder of Monkeypaw Productions, curates this groundbreaking anthology of all-new stories of Black horror, exploring not only the terrors of the supernatural but the chilling reality of injustice that haunts our nation.
(Description from Amazon)

In the tradition of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor, Schweblin's stories move on the boundary between the real and the fantastic. This selection, chosen by the author, is an indispensible piece of contemporary Argentine literature. (Description from catalog)

This collection of short stories, set in fictional Cross River, Maryland, includes the tales of a struggling musician who is God's last son and a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation about a childhood game sparks a riot in a once-segregated town. (Description from NoveList)

Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood.
(Description from NoveList)

A chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from the multiple award-winning author of the national bestseller, The Cabin at the End of the World, and A Head Full of Ghosts. (Description from catalog.)