"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed and bestselling novel The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson is one of America's most provocative and powerful authors. In Fortune Smiles--his first book since Orphan Master--he continues to give voice to characters rarely heard from, while offering something we all seek from fiction: a new way of looking at our world. In six masterly stories, Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters,...

Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human personality. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals-brother and sister. teacher and student, two lonesome strangers on a subway-in the beautiful, bracing prose that has become her signature. In the title story, a white, aspiring professor in Detroit tries to shake a black, male shadow during the summer of the city's 1967 race riots. In "The Rescuer,"...

This book presents eight of the author's short stories. In "Bog Girl: A Romance," a story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he's extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In "The Prospectors," two opportunistic young women fleeing the Depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant's...

"Like You'd Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators only Shepard could bring to pitch-perfect life. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed...

Sometimes calculating, other times bewildered, Catapult's characters orbit around each other enacting the deeply human tragicomedy of wit and misunderstanding and loss. With dexterous, atmospheric, and darkly comic prose, Fridlund conjures worlds where longing is open-ended, intentions misfire, and the line between comfort and cruelty is often difficult to discern. A gripping collection, unsettling in its familiar strangeness.

"A debut story collection offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of life for contemporary Chinese people, set between China and the United States"--

Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" (Salon.com) and "one of the quiet giants ... of American fiction" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed Break it Down (1986) to the...

A collection of twelve short works that portrays contemporary American family life visits morally complex themes in a fractured nation of inhabitants searching for connection and understanding.

"Told in the intimate voices of complex, endearing characters, Five Tuesdays in Winter intriguingly subverts expectations as it explores desire, loss, jolting violence, and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs."--Dust jacket flap. "With Writers & Lovers and Euphoria, Lily King's books catapulted onto bestseller and best-of-the-year lists across the country, further cementing her reputation as one of the most "brilliant" (NYTBR), "wildly talented"...

"From Paul Yoon, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Once the shore and snow hunters, comes a luminous collection of short stories set throughout the world--from the Hudson Valley to the Russian Far East--across periods of time after World War II"--