Anthologies & Short Stories

Book SynopsisThe characters who inhabit Blake's haunting landscape-awash in their own worlds, adrift in their own lives-struggle to salvage what they can of their hopes and dreams from the encroaching tides.Trade ReviewWhen he writes about it, you can feel it, smell it, taste it, hear it, see it, that strange, lost, unknown corner of Texas. It is a whole other country and Blake gives it to you with all its oddity and mystery, as it is. -- Molly Ivins Reticent, closely guarded, and cryptic, Glenn Blake's terse prose partakes of poetry's careful measures. His stories concern rice fields, houses that disappear into the encroaching high water, and the poignantly named Old and Lost Rivers. He has caught with a peculiar mixture of sadness and humor the personality of this rough, modest, and little-known place. -- Rosellen Brown Angulo makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins and development of for-profit higher education. His attention to the nineteenth-century institution is groundbreaking. Academe Set in the Old South of Southeast Texas, these tales are spare yet atmospheric, with a profound sense of place. If Raymond Carver and Larry Brown had a love child, the result would be Glenn Blake... A writer of tightly constructed short fiction is not dissimilar from an artist who paints miniature portraits. Blake is a master. Lone Star LiteraryTable of ContentsReturn FireDeguelloOld RiverThe BottomHazard How Far Are We from the Water?Chocolate BayWesternsWhen the Gods Want to Punish YouThanksgivingOpen SeasonMarshShooting StarsThe Old and the Lost

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Book Synopsis Pioneering Indian American writer Bharati Mukherjee is best known for her novel,Jasmine,and her breakthrough collection,The Middleman and Other Stories,which won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her writing is distinguished as much by its narrative style and shifting points of view as it is by Mukherjee’s piercing emotional observations on the immigrant experience and her depiction of racism, nostalgia, and displacement. The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjeeis the first volume to feature the author’s complete short fiction—all 35 stories. Leading Mukherjee scholar Ruth Maxey edits the collection, unearthing seven unknown stories: five in Mukherjee’s unpublished 1963 Iowa Writer’s Workshop M.F.A. thesis,The Shattered Mirror, and two tales from 2008. Arranged chronologically, this essential collection brings many of Mukherjee’s stories back into print, fromthe semi-autobiograpTrade Review“This meticulously edited volume offers a less-traveled, lambent path into Bharati Mukherjee’s work, reintroducing the writer through her lifelong experiments with the short story genre. An immersion in the elusive meanings and restlessly shifting perspectives and settings of Mukherjee’s short stories invites reconsideration of her craft and concerns. Gathering together for the first time the unpublished short stories from her MFA thesis, alongside stories from her published but out-of-print later collections, as well as individually published pieces from throughout her career, this volume will surprise and stir Mukherjee admirers and critics of Mukherjee alike.”—Susan Koshy, Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and coeditor of Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora“What a boon to scholars—and, indeed, to readers of all kinds—to be able to survey the full sweep of one of the truly emblematic literary careers of the postwar period in one volume. The consistency of emotional depth and intercultural intelligence achieved in Bharati Mukherjee’s short stories written across many decades is something wonderful to behold.”—Mark McGurl, Professor of English, Stanford University, and author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing"The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee compiles the shorter works of the South Asian American author, showcasing Mukherjee’s exquisite flow of language and diverse range.... The Collected Stories of Bharati Mukherjee expands upon the legacy of an astute, masterful writer."—Foreword Reviews

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Book Synopsis Pioneering Indian American writer Bharati Mukherjee is best known for her novel,Jasmine,and her breakthrough collection,The Middleman and Other Stories,which won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her writing is distinguished as much by its narrative style and shifting points of view as it is by Mukherjee’s piercing emotional observations on the immigrant experience and her depiction of racism, nostalgia, and displacement. The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjeeis the first volume to feature the author’s complete short fiction—all 35 stories. Leading Mukherjee scholar Ruth Maxey edits the collection, unearthing seven unknown stories: five in Mukherjee’s unpublished 1963 Iowa Writer’s Workshop M.F.A. thesis,The Shattered Mirror, and two tales from 2008. Arranged chronologically, this essential collection brings many of Mukherjee’s stories back into print, fromthe semi-autobiograpTrade Review“This meticulously edited volume offers a less-traveled, lambent path into Bharati Mukherjee’s work, reintroducing the writer through her lifelong experiments with the short story genre. An immersion in the elusive meanings and restlessly shifting perspectives and settings of Mukherjee’s short stories invites reconsideration of her craft and concerns. Gathering together for the first time the unpublished short stories from her MFA thesis, alongside stories from her published but out-of-print later collections, as well as individually published pieces from throughout her career, this volume will surprise and stir Mukherjee admirers and critics of Mukherjee alike.”—Susan Koshy, Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and coeditor of Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora“What a boon to scholars—and, indeed, to readers of all kinds—to be able to survey the full sweep of one of the truly emblematic literary careers of the postwar period in one volume. The consistency of emotional depth and intercultural intelligence achieved in Bharati Mukherjee’s short stories written across many decades is something wonderful to behold.”—Mark McGurl, Professor of English, Stanford University, and author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing"The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee compiles the shorter works of the South Asian American author, showcasing Mukherjee’s exquisite flow of language and diverse range.... The Collected Stories of Bharati Mukherjee expands upon the legacy of an astute, masterful writer."—Foreword Reviews

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Book SynopsisSome of North Carolina's finest fiction and nonfiction writers come together in Every True Pleasure, including David Sedaris, Kelly Link, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and more. Within the volume are stories and essays that view the full spectrum of contemporary life though an LGBTQ lens.

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Book SynopsisPlatinum 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. From a surreal fairytale depicting a ragtag crew of neighborhood boys in the throes of sexual awakening to a chronicle of the gender-bending and homoerotic entanglements of university students to romantic love triangle erotica to a story that examines teacher-student love and the norms of sex and age, Cui centers queer sexuality as a core part of human experience. 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 passioTrade Review“Artist, activist, pioneer, and provocateur, Cui Zi’en is known for shaking up the world of Chinese queer cinema and standing at the forefront of the queer rights movement in China. Now, for the first time, a selection of his avant-garde literary works is available in English. This collection reveals Cui Zi’en’s strange literary universe, brimming with the uncanny, the philosophical, and the beautiful.” -- Michael Berry, author of * Enter the Clowns: The Queer Cinema of Cui Zi’en *“In Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet Cui Zi’en invites readers into an enchanted world of childhood innocence, family legends, and young love. Through vivid language and skilled storytelling, Cui creates a queer utopia where gender and sexual fluidity are celebrated in ways that challenge the patriarchal, heterosexual, and homosexual norms of our times. This collection showcases Cui as one of the most talented and original queer writers in the world today.” -- Hongwei Bao, author of * Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance *"The volume’s abundant supplementary material includes meticulous footnotes, a lengthy interview with the author, and an appendix that illustrates the diversity of his artistic output. Throughout, Cui’s impulses to provoke the forces that repress sexuality and uphold literary conventions are grounded in joie de vivre. Reminiscent of the writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini, this is an indelible portrait of an artist." * Publishers Weekly *Table of ContentsSeries Editors’ Introduction / Carlos Rojas vii Editors’ Introduction / Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel xi Preface / Translated by Petrus Liu xxiii Uncle’s Elegant Life / Translated by Lisa Rofel 1 Intrigue Like Fireworks / Translated by Fran Martin 10 Some Admire Wisdom, Others Do Not / Translated by Derek Hird 20 Orphans of the Japanese Empire / Translated by Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen 45 The Silent Advent of the Age of Sexual Persuasion / Translated by Petrus Liu 71 Men Men Men Women Women Women / Translated by Yizhou Guo 82 Men Are Containers / Translated by Casey James Miller 117 Fire and Wolf Share a Fondness for Male Beauty / Translated by Yizhou Guo 129 Teacher Eats Biscuits Thin as Parchment / Translated by William F. Schroeder 141 Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet / Translated by Wenqing Kang and Cathryn H. Clayton 153 Interview with Cui Zi’en / Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel 257 Appendix: Works by Cui Zi’en 273 Bibliography 279 Contributors 283 Place of First Publication 285

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure." * The New York Times Book Review *

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in Better Times focus onwhat’s happening in places people don’t think to look. Women, sometimes displaced, often lonely, are at the heart of these stories.In Better TimesSara Batkie focuses on themoments in women’s lives when the wider world is wrapped up in other matters: a father and daughter, separated by time and an ocean, dreaming of each other; a girl in a home for “troubled women” imagining the journey of the first dog in space; a phantom breast returning to haunt a woman after her mastectomy; a young woman giving birth to a litter of eggs. Such are the ordinary women weathering extraordinary circumstances in Better Times. Divided into three sections covering the recent past, our current era, and the world to come, the stories gathered here—with characters stymied by loneliness, motherhood, illness, even cataclysmic climate change—inteTrade Review“Batkie’s stories shrewdly commingle the hopeless and the hopeful. Her women, demoralized by the absence of fathers and husbands, by stunted careers and aimless children, are locked in self-doubt and self-flagellation, though rarely do they lose faith in ‘better times,’ even when they’ve had slim experience of them.”—Mike Peed, New York Times Book Review "Nine tales—four from the past, four in the present, one set in the not-too-distant future—compose Batkie's stellar debut, all memorably portraying an ineffable yearning from well-drawn characters who may have known or will know better times. . . . In this remarkable collection, Batkie creates strong, evocative imagery with economy and precision. She elevates both the common and uncommon experiences of her characters, resulting in something quite extraordinary."—Publishers Weekly, starred review"Moving from the recent past into the future, Sara Batkie's short story collection Better Times traverses lives that are subtly or drastically twisted away from what is familiar. Mystery and surrealism underlie the mundane, their charges lingering in the air."—Foreword Reviews“Sara Batkie is a writer for our times: lyrical and smart, clear-eyed and true. Better Times may portend just that—better times, at least for literature, in these dark hours.”—Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award“With a controlled ferocity of perception, Sara Batkie lays bare a world in which all of us are spies and strangers, both to one another and ourselves. She’s a kind of Jean Rhys for our time, and this is a haunting first collection.”—Brian Morton, author of Florence Gordon and Starting Out in the Evening“Better Times is a book of quiet passions, narrated with grace. In these nine finely observed stories Batkie explores with empathy the impolite agonies that change the gravity of her characters’ worlds.”—Tracy O’Neill, author of The Hopeful“These stories are epic in scope with a frank beauty that embellishes the book’s stirring insights. A debut of gems, Batkie’s work is important fun.”—Seth Fried, author of The Great Frustration“The men and women in Better Times are adrift. Yet they keep looking for ways to connect and love, and each of Sara Batkie’s beautiful sentences tethers them more deeply, to the reader’s heart and our collective human soul.”—Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley“In her debut collection, Sara Batkie displays the inventive brio of Karen Russell and the omnivorous range of Jim Shepard. Artfully crafted and tenderly told, these stories will break your heart and set fire to your imagination.”—Jon Michaud, author of When Tito Loved ClaraTable of ContentsAcknowledgments The Recent Past: When Her Father Was an Island Laika Foreigners No Man’s Land The Modern Age: Cleavage North Country, Early Morning Lookaftering The World to Come: Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed

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Book SynopsisIn this collection of short stories, Liz Breazealeexplores the connections between humans and the natural world by examining the processes and history of our planet. A myriad of extinction events large and small have ruptured the history of the earth, and so it is with the women of this book, who struggle to define themselves amid their own personal cataclysms and those igniting the world around them. They are a mother watching the islands of the world disappear one by one, a new bride using alien abduction to get closer to her estranged parent, a daughter searching for her mother among the lost cities of the world, a sister trying and failing to protect her mythical continent–obsessed brother. Here extinction events come in all sizes and shapes: as volcanic eruptions and devastating plagues and meteor impacts, as estrangements and betrayals and losses. Dark, angry, and apocalyptic, Extinction Events is a compendium of all the ways in which life can be annihilaTrade Review“In Breazeale’s world a climatologist anticipates the destruction of Kiribati, her island home: ‘We won’t let ourselves be eroded. You can’t disappear us.’ These stories pit our most intimate aspirations against cosmic extinctions—truly spellbinding, essential stories of our time.”—Wendell Mayo, author of Survival House “Extinction Events is a book for our times. Against the backdrop of environmental cataclysms past and future, the stories here bring to life the fractured worlds of artists and scientists, hucksters and hypnotists, all searching for those relationships that can connect and sustain us.”—Lawrence Coates, author of Camp Olvido “With a bold contemporary relevance, this collection captures the giddy wonder inside our panic. . . . Liz Breazeale stands her characters in the dusty history of the Chicxulub crater as they recite the poetry of humanity’s everyday aches, the breath of the dinosaurs on their necks. In the face of a mandatory evacuation, one is tempted to batten down the hatches and curl up with this marvel of a book.”—Jennifer Murvin, graphic narrative editor of Moon City ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgments1. Un-Discovered Islands2. Four Self-Portraits of the Mapmaker3. Survival in the Plague Years4. The Lemurians5. Extinction Events Proposed by My Father6. The Disaster Preparedness Guidebook7. How Cities Are Lost8. Devil’s Tooth Museum9. The Supernova of Irvin Edwards10. Ashcake11. ExperiencersSource Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in What Isn’t Remembered explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home. The characters yearn not only to redefine themselves and rebuild their relationships but also to recover lost loves—a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse, a partner. A young man longs for his mother’s love while grieving the loss of his older brother. A mother’s affair sabotages her relationship with her daughter, causing a lifelong feud between the two. A divorced man struggles to come to terms with his failed marriage and his family’s genocidal past while trying to persuade his father to start cancer treatments. A high school girl feels responsible for the deaTrade Review“In Russian Armenian Gorcheva-Newberry’s vibrant collection, a series of immigrants embrace their adopted culture while remaining rootless and shackled to the past. . . . Throughout, the situations are arresting and the images indelible. Gorcheva-Newberry’s luminous prose will remain vivid in the reader’s mind."—Publishers Weekly, starred review “Every reader who treasures powerful, surprising, and memorable short stories will find much to appreciate in this stunning first book.”—Lindsay Harmon, Booklist, starred review“The book excels at juxtapositions without resolutions, that stretch and linger long after their stories are finished. . . . The stories of What Isn’t Remembered run an emotional marathon. They are virtuosic, bold, and unsparing as they talk about ‘history and personal experiences, hunger and pain as [we continue] living through them, as though nothing ever ended but coexisted in parallel worlds.’”—Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers, Foreword Reviews, starred “Spanning ages and continents, the stories in Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s collection focus on complex people facing the greatest life challenges. In the best traditions of Russian and American classics, the stories are at times raw and heart-wrenching, at other times uplifting, but always a true pleasure to read!”—Lara Vapnyar, author of Divide Me by Zero“The stories in What Isn’t Remembered are what I call wayfaring. Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry is unafraid to wend her way through the experience of being alive in her time, and her people are given the great respect of full portrayals in prose that is both delicately rendered and tough. . . . These stories will be remembered by anyone fortunate enough to spend time with them. Congratulations to a new original and powerful voice.”—Richard Bausch, author of Something Is Out There“What Isn't Remembered is an extraordinary work of fiction: Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry has given us stories that are immersive and so richly imagined, alternately elegiac and slyly comic, always arresting and lyrical. I wanted to live in the worlds Gorcheva-Newberry has so skillfully created in one story after another. I loved this book.”—Christine Sneed, author of Little Known Facts“You can read Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s What Isn’t Remembered for a revealing look into the lives of Russian immigrants in the U.S., or for the fearless depiction of relationships between women; but most of all you should read her for the startlingly gorgeous language she employs to powerful effect in story after story, from the title piece, “What Isn’t Remembered,” with its lavish allusions to classical music and the convincing correlations between life and love and art, to the heartbreaking “Boys On the Moskva River,” with its portrait of a family struggling to survive during the slow collapse of the Soviet Union. What Isn’t Remembered may be a literary debut, but Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry is a writer who comes to us in full blossom. She has clearly traveled a long road to bring us this brilliant first collection of stories.”—Edward Falco, author of Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories“Short stories beg for brevity but can accommodate plenitude, demand velocity but can in one shaken snow globe reveal a whole winter. Skilled authors can startle us with stories of consequence, gravity, and comedy in modes both elegant and earthy. Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry is such a writer. Her passionate stories about desire, loss, longing, guilt, and displacement are stunning. Her characters have wrested their survival from all manner of entanglements with lyricism and force, empathy and recognition. Gorcheva-Newberry empowers them with her own impressive trove of knowledge—the language of medicine, food, music, anatomy, apple gathering. She reveals life in the raw. Yet these are love stories, too, and can crack the heart. What Isn’t Remembered is an enthralling, beautifully conceived collection by a gifted writer.”—R. T. Smith, author of Doves in FlightTable of ContentsBoys on the Moskva River All of Me The Heart of Things A Lullaby for My Father Heroes of Our Time Simple Song #9 Nepenthe Beloveds The Suicide Note Second Person Gene Therapy And What Rough Beast No Other Love Pictures of the Snow Champions of the World What Isn’t Remembered Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisThe stories collected in This Is Not the Tropics come from the geographic center of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a split personalityone half submerged in America's own diehard mythology, the other half searching to escape tradition.Trade Review“[These stories] brim with timeless truths about love, insecurity, and the glue that holds relationships together. . . . Randolph gets each and every character just right.”—Booklist“Ladette Randolph’s stories sink their teeth into the deep Nebraska Midwest the way that Flannery O’Connor tore into the heart of Georgia. There’s a wonderfully sly, deadpan sweetness at work here, so that it may take a moment to realize how odd and twisty the stories are. . . . These are beautifully crafted, beguiling stories: witty, wise, and wicked.”—Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me“Ladette Randolph’s stories have the sly, subtle intensity of a snake gliding through grass. They sneak up on their characters and the reader alike, invoking humor, grace, and wisdom before pouncing on us with exhilarating epiphanies that are as dark and brutal as they are hopeful.”—Meghan Daum, author of The Quality of Life Report“These are stories of compassion and surprising generosity, as characters who have been trapped find escape, who have been lonely find company, and who have endured loss face not sorrow, but transformation.”—Erin McGraw, author of The Good Life: Stories“A clear-eyed portrait of the plains.”—Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments What She Knows A Member of the Family The Boy in the Band Uniform The Shouting Woman Miss Kielbasa It's Cheaper to Live in the Dark Hyacinths The Girls The Picture in Her Dream Billy This Is Not the Tropics After Canaan The Sensitive Man Dill The Blue Room

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Book SynopsisSusan Kalter presents seventeen previously unpublished short stories by John Joseph Mathews and skillfully intertwines literary analysis, author biography, and archival research from the short stories themselves with Mathews's journals and personal correspondence.Trade Review"Composed of seventeen unpublished short stories written mostly between 1945 and 1951, this remarkable collection that Susan Kalter has brought together reveals a fascinating and unexpected side of John Joseph Mathews."—Alexander Steele, Western American Literature“Susan Kalter’s work brings to life the wider world of Mathews beyond his well-known Osage works. . . . Mathews remains a towering figure, and the short stories will only add to his reputation.”—Blue Clark, professor of law at Oklahoma City University and author of Indian Tribes of Oklahoma: A Guide“This book deftly weaves literary analysis, author biography, archival work, and historical context into literary recovery. . . . It is thoroughly researched and communicates that research in clear and accessible prose.”—Alyssa Hunziker, assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State UniversityTable of ContentsIntroductionWesterns The Thinkin’ Man Too Small for a Horse Old Bob (Unpublished and unedited version) Old Bob (Manuscript antecedent to the published version)Travel Stories Lady of the Inn Allah’s Guest Yellow Hair Only a BlondeStories from Indian Country The Apache Woman The Talk of the Face The Flower on Cadron Creek Moccasin Prints Bad MedicineStories of World War II and the Cold War No Time The Liberal View What Thing Is Fairest Natural Science The Meek Shall Inherit? Source Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography

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Book SynopsisSusan Kalter presents seventeen previously unpublished short stories by John Joseph Mathews and skillfully intertwines literary analysis, author biography, and archival research from the short stories themselves with Mathews's journals and personal correspondence.Trade Review"Composed of seventeen unpublished short stories written mostly between 1945 and 1951, this remarkable collection that Susan Kalter has brought together reveals a fascinating and unexpected side of John Joseph Mathews."—Alexander Steele, Western American Literature“Susan Kalter’s work brings to life the wider world of Mathews beyond his well-known Osage works. . . . Mathews remains a towering figure, and the short stories will only add to his reputation.”—Blue Clark, professor of law at Oklahoma City University and author of Indian Tribes of Oklahoma: A Guide“This book deftly weaves literary analysis, author biography, archival work, and historical context into literary recovery. . . . It is thoroughly researched and communicates that research in clear and accessible prose.”—Alyssa Hunziker, assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State UniversityTable of ContentsIntroductionWesterns The Thinkin’ Man Too Small for a Horse Old Bob (Unpublished and unedited version) Old Bob (Manuscript antecedent to the published version)Travel Stories Lady of the Inn Allah’s Guest Yellow Hair Only a BlondeStories from Indian Country The Apache Woman The Talk of the Face The Flower on Cadron Creek Moccasin Prints Bad MedicineStories of World War II and the Cold War No Time The Liberal View What Thing Is Fairest Natural Science The Meek Shall Inherit? Source Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Vanished tells the stories of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen by the people around them. The characters range from an aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she has to teach, to a young girl who becomes the victim of a cruel prank in a swimming pool, to a television producer who regrets allowing her coworkers into her mother’s bird-filled house to film a show about animal hoarding because it will reveal too much about her family and past. Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character’s life; each deals with something or someone who has vanished—a person close to her, a friendship, a relationship—as she seeks to make sense of the world around her in the wake of that loss. Trade Review“Lin-Greenberg’s flawless and insightful prose gives an acute sense of the characters’ perspectives as they change. This accomplished work is full of surprises.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review“In this compassionate, unapologetic, and hilarious collection, Karin Lin-Greenberg’s unmistakably unique voice shines. The human struggle for connection guides us through each story’s surprising world of art, pop culture, school, difficult relationships, and weird animals. I fell in love with these edgy, lost characters who bump into enlightenment by accident, and only after wading through oceans of denial and terrible choices. Vanished is a celebration of our flawed humanity.”—Erika Krouse, author of Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation“The stories in Karin Lin-Greenberg’s Vanished do not shy away from our current moment of division and estrangement. Like Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness or Stephanie Vaughn’s Sweet Talk, Lin-Greenberg’s Vanished is peopled with characters who are bitter and funny and who do questionable things—and who are, as a result, imminently human, unquestioningly alive on the page. An engrossing and extraordinary book by a true master of the form.”—Nick White, author of Sweet and LowTable of ContentsStill Life Housekeeping Roland Raccoon Vanished Perspective for Artists Since Vincent Left Aquatics Lost or Damaged Mrs. Whitson’s Face Migration Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisNamed a Public Picks 2023 by Public Books Long List forthe 2024 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Boundless Deep, and Other Stories is a portrait of a family that holds together despite everything. By turns introspective, surreal, and bitingly funny, this collection of linked short stories spans seven decades across Japan and the United States and shows the tenacity of relationships fractured by language and distance. At the funeral of her old boss, a grandmother confronts the legacy of the draft letters she delivered as a girl during World War II. Facing the loss of his job, a father becomes the caricature strangers have always believed him to be. A graduate student living far from home is worn down by the reality of what it takes to save even a small piece of the world. Along the way, we meet communist revolutionary Shigenobu Fusako hiding out in a Tokyo hoteTrade Review"Del Raye's thoughtful collection explores loss, relationships, racial tensions, and war, and its aftermath, in surreal, tender, and often humorous ways that will keep readers captivated until the end."—Booklist, starred review“Gen Del Raye’s Boundless Deep, and Other Stories is a moving, shape-shifting collection that examines life at the margins of belonging. Haunted by war, ghosts, sea creatures, and existence itself, Del Raye’s characters are straddling worlds, wedging themselves into whatever space they can fit. With the emotional precision and imagery of a poet, and the nimble ear of a translator, Del Raye’s prose is charming, surprising, and abundant in empathy.”—Cecily Wong, author of Diamond Head and KaleidoscopeTable of Contents1 Hideto, in Motion and at Rest Hideto Worn Down in Gainesville, 2001 My Mother Takes Me to a Public Bath Yukari Kneeling in My Mother’s Garden, 1994 Chie and George, 2015 Half-Blind My Father Will Not Admit He Has Become a Clown 2 The Mystery of Animal Grief Nishina Sekio in a Tunnel Alone Preparations, 2015 Home Burial Housefire Suicide Drills, 1945 The Grandma Invasion We Are a Woman Bombed / A Picture of Grace Nishina Sekio in a Broken Machine Harvest Mouse Hack Science A Shark Is an Animal That Blushes When You Touch Its Face Synonyms for Climate Change Boundless Deep My Grandmother Stops Some Nights on Her Way to the Outhouse to Watch a Ghost Climb Down to the Sea Nishina Sekio Imprisoned in Dreams 3 My Father and Shigenobu Fusako in the Hallway of the Hotel New Otani, 1980 Or Go Further Back Elastico What My Mother Doesn’t Say The Failings of Our Fathers Incredible Lifelike Whale Comes Up for Air, Again and Again Acknowledgments Selected Sources

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Book SynopsisWith this newly translated version of The Running Boy, the fiction of Megumu Sagisawa makes its long-overdue first appearance in English. Lovingly rendered with a critical introduction by the translator, this collection of three stories, written in 1989, sits on the thinnest part of Japan''s economic bubble and provides and cautionary glimpse into the malaise of its impending collapse.From the aging regulars of a shabby snack bar in Galactic City to the mental breakdowns of A Slender Back, and the family secrets lurking within the title story between them, Sagisawa offers a trilogy of laser-focused character studies. Exploring dichotomies of past versus present, young versus old, life versus death, and countless shades of meaning beyond, she elicits vibrant commonalities of the human condition from some of its most ennui-laden examples. A curious form of affirmation awaits her readers, who may just come out of her monochromatic word paintings with more colorful realizaTrade ReviewThis collection of stories captures the essence of boyhood in all its sadness and solitude. * Bungakukai *Table of ContentsRunning on Water: A Translator's Introduction Galactic City The Running Boy A Slender Back

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Book SynopsisI Love Bill and Other Stories showcases the work of Wang Anyi, one of China''s most prolific and highly regarded writers, in two novellas and three short stories. A young artist''s life spirals out of control when she drops out of school to pursue a series of unfulfilling relationships with foreign men. A performance troupe struggles to adapt to a changing China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. The head of an isolated village arranges a youth''s posthumous marriage to an unknown soldier, only to have the soldier''s former lover unexpectedly turn up. A fun trip takes an unexpected turn when two young women are kidnapped and sold off as brides. A boy''s bout with typhoid provides an intimate look at family life in Shanghai''s longtang alleys.In this thoughtful translation by Todd Foley, I Love Bill and Other Stories offers poignant and nuanced portrayals of life during China''s economic and cultural transition at the turn of the m

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Book SynopsisI Love Bill and Other Stories showcases the work of Wang Anyi, one of China''s most prolific and highly regarded writers, in two novellas and three short stories. A young artist''s life spirals out of control when she drops out of school to pursue a series of unfulfilling relationships with foreign men. A performance troupe struggles to adapt to a changing China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. The head of an isolated village arranges a youth''s posthumous marriage to an unknown soldier, only to have the soldier''s former lover unexpectedly turn up. A fun trip takes an unexpected turn when two young women are kidnapped and sold off as brides. A boy''s bout with typhoid provides an intimate look at family life in Shanghai''s longtang alleys.In this thoughtful translation by Todd Foley, I Love Bill and Other Stories offers poignant and nuanced portrayals of life during China''s economic and cultural transition at the turn of the m

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Book SynopsisNineteenth-century French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, is one of the earliest leading practitioners of realism, his stories filled with sharp analyses of his characters’ psychology. This translation of Stendhal’s Chroniques italiennes is a collection of nine tales written between 1829 and 1840, many of which were published only after his death. Together these collected tales reveal a great novelist working with highly dramatic subject matter to forge a vision of life lived at its most intense.The setting for these tales is a romanticized Italy, a place Stendhal viewed as unpolluted by bourgeois inhibitions and conformism. From the hothouse atmosphere of aristocratic convents to the horrors of the Cenci family, the tales in Italian Chronicles all feature passionate, transgressive characters engaged in “la chasse au bonheur”—the quest for happiness. Most of the tragic, violent tales are based on historical events, with Stendhal using history to validate his characters’ extreme behaviors as they battle literal and figurative oppression and try to break through to freedom.Complete with revenge, bloody daggers, poisonings, and thick-walled nunneries, this new translation of Italian Chronicles includes four never-before-translated stories and a fascinating introduction detailing the origins of the book. It is sure to gratify established Stendhal fans as well as readers new to the writer.Trade Review"Italian Chronicles remains rugged rather than polished in MacKenzie’s arch rendering. But as the author insists, the intensity of these reimagined Italian lovers, fighters, and plotters is best captured bluntly."—PopMatters"Italian Chronicles nevertheless throws down a timely challenge to our plague of political correctness, that grimly self-inflicted version of what he called ‘popery’."—London Review of BooksTable of ContentsContentsTranslator’s IntroductionStendhal’s PrefacesItalian Chronicles (1855)Vanina Vanini; or, Particulars concerning the Most Recent Gathering of a Cell of the Carbonari—Discovered in the Papal StatesVittoria Accoramboni: Duchess of BraccianoThe Cenci: 1599The Duchess of PallianoThe Abbess of CastroItalian Stories The JewSan Francesco a RipaToo Much Favor Is Deadly: A Tale of 1589Suora Scolastica: A Story That Shocked All Naples in 1740Translator’s Notes

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Book SynopsisTold through a series of quirky, irreverent short stories and letters home during the early 1980s, The Deaf Heart chronicles a year in the life of Dempsey "Max" McCall, a Deaf biomedical photography resident at a teaching hospital on the island of Galveston, Texas. Max strives to become certified as a Registered Biological Photographer while straddling the deaf and hearing worlds. He befriends Reynaldo, an impoverished Deaf Mexican, and they go on a number of unusual escapades around the island. At the hospital, Max has to contend with hearing doctors, nurses, scientists, and teachers. While struggling through the rigors of his residency and running into bad luck in meeting women, Max discovers an ally in his hearing housemate Zag, a fellow resident who is also vying for certification. Toward the end of his residency, Max meets Maddy, a Deaf woman who helps bring balance to his life. Author Willy Conley's stories, some humorous, some poignant, reveal Max's struggles and triumphs as he attempts to succeed in the hearing world while at the same time navigating the multicultural and linguistic diversity within the Deaf world.

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Book SynopsisA handbook to Hemingway's famous collection of short stories that emphasizes its status as a modernist masterwork. The volume of collected short stories and vignettes In Our Time was Ernest Hemingway's first commercial publication. Its appearance in 1925 launched the full-fledged literary career of this century's most famous American fiction writer. And while other later works of Hemingway have eclipsed In Our Time's fame, none of Hemingway's subsequent works would again carry the degree of experimentation found in this distinctly modernist masterwork. Modernism and Tradition in Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time: A Guide for Students and Readers is a well-paced, lucidly written handbook intended to guide university students and teaching faculty towards a better understanding of this complex work. It provides a reading of each story and vignette, while simultaneously stressing the status of In Our Time as a discrete volume. Included are discussions of the book's biographical and historical background, and considerations of Hemingway's prose style, theories of writing, formal achievements, his literary mentors and influences, and the relation between In Our Time and his later works. Matthew C. Stewart isAssociate Professor of Humanities and Rhetoric at Boston University.

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Book SynopsisThe first anthology of critical interpretations of major Canadian short stories. Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. Itcontinues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Clark Blaise, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genreand the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This book redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain completes it. Geared both to specialists in and students of Canadian literature, the volume is of particular benefit to the latter because it provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Contributors: Reingard M. Nischik, Martina Seifert, Heinz Antor, Julia Breitbach, Konrad Gross, Paul Goetsch, Dieter Meindl, Nina Kück, Stefan Ferguson, Rudolf Bader, Fabienne C. Quennet, Martin Kuester, Jutta Zimmermann, Sylvia Mergenthal, Caroline Rosenthal, Wolfgang Klooss, Lothar Hönnighausen, Heinz Ickstadt, Heinz Ickstadt, Gordon Bölling, Christina Strobel, Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Nadja Gernalzick, Eva Gruber, Brigitte Glaser, Georgiana Banita. Reingard M. Nischik is Professor of American Literature at the University of Konstanz, Germany.Trade ReviewRemarkably accessible, ... generally shies away from unnecessary verbosity or jargon.... ideal for scholars interested in introductory overviews ... and for undergraduate courses... though it also extends beyond introductions....Shows the breadth and depth of the Canadian short story from a wide range of perspectives, theories, and approaches. * H-NET REVIEWS *Canadian critics ... should welcome ... a big, handsomely produced book, [evidence of the international appreciation of the Canadian short story, appreciation that has often been touted but never demonstrated].... Impressive throughout is each contributor's knowledge of the writer and the amount of research done in secondary criticism.... * AMERICAN REVIEW OF CANADIAN STUDIES *The interpretations ... are careful, compelling, accessible, and attentive to previous critics. * CHOICE *A welcome addition to any library and a good point-of-departure for any student interested in one of the authors it includes. * ANGLISTIK *With this thoughtfully designed and researched collection, Reingard M. Nischik and her CanLit team from the European German-speaking countries make a major contribution to the undeservedly small canon of literary criticism on Canadian short fiction. * DALHOUSIE REVIEW *A magisterial, formidable volume . . . a milestone in Canadian Studies worldwide. * ZEITSCHRIFT FUER KANADA-STUDIEN *[W]ill help students and scholars to refresh and complete their knowledge of the stories as well as discover their originality. Offers a panoramic view . . . highly welcome as a reference book. . . Very useful as a truly informative overview gifted with extremely perceptive approaches to the stories which make us 'feel the road' as we read on. * CANADIAN LITERATURE *Table of ContentsThe Canadian Short Story: Status, Criticism, Historical Survey - Reingard M. Nischik Canadian Animal Stories: Charles G.D. Roberts, "Do Seek Their Meat from God" (1892) - Martina Seifert Tory Humanism, Ironic Humor, and Satire: Stephen Leacock, "The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" (1912) - Heinz Antor The Beginnings of Canadian Modernism: Raymond Knister, "The First Day of Spring" (written 1924/25) - Julia Breitbach From Old World Aestheticist Immoralist to Prairie Moral Realist: Frederick Philip Grove, "Snow" (1926/32) - Konrad Gross Psychological Realism, Immigration, and City Fiction: Morley Callaghan, "Last Spring They Came Over" (1927) - Paul Goetsch Modernism, Prairie Fiction, and Gender: Sinclair Ross, "The Lamp at Noon" (1938) - Dieter Meindl "An Artful Artlessness": Ethel Wilson, "We Have to Sit Opposite" (1945) - Nina Kuck Social Realism and Compassion for the Underdog: Hugh Garner, "One-Two-Three Little Indians" (1950) - Stefan Ferguson The Perils of Human Relationships: Joyce Marshall, "The Old Woman" (1952) - Rudolf Bader The Social Critic at Work: Mordecai Richler, "Benny, the War in Europe, and Myerson's Daughter Bella" (1956) - Fabienne C. Quennet Myth and the Postmodernist Turn in Canadian Short Fiction: Sheila Watson, "Antigone" (1959) - Martin Kuester The Modernist Aesthetic: Hugh Hood, "Flying a Red Kite" (1962) - Jutta Zimmermann Doing Well in the International Thing?: Mavis Gallant, "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street" (1963) - Silvia Mergenthal (Un-) Doing Gender: Alice Munro, "Boys and Girls" (1964) - Reingard M. Nischik Collective Memory and Personal Identity in the Prairie Town of Manawaka: Margaret Laurence, "The Loons" (1966) - Caroline Rosenthal "Out of Place": Clark Blaise, "A Class of New Canadians" (1970) - Wolfgang Klooss Realsim and Parodic Postmodernism: Audrey Thomas, "Aquarius" (1971) - Lothar Honnighausen "The Problem Is to Make the Story": Rudy Wiebe, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" (1971) - Heinz Ickstadt The Canadian Writer as Expatriate: Norman Levine, "We All Begin in a Little Magazine" (1972) - Gordon Bolling Canadian Artist Stories: John Metcalf, "The Strange Aberration of Mr. Ken Smythe" (1973) - Reingard M. Nischik "A Literature of a Whole World and of a Real World": Jane Rule, "Lilian" (1977) - Christina Strobel Failure as Liberation: Jack Hodgins, "The Concert Stages of Europe" (1978) - Waldemar Zacharasiewicz Figures in a Landscape: William Dempsey Valgardson, "A Matter of Balance" (1982) - Maria Loschnigg Figures in a Landscape: William Dempsey Valgardson, "A Matter of Balance" (1982) - Martin Loschnigg "The Translation of the World into Words" and the Female Tradition: Margaret Atwood, "Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother" (1983) - Reingard M. Nischik "Southern Preacher": Leon Rooke, "The Woman Who Talked to Horses" (1984) - Nadja Gernalzick Nativeness as Third Space: Thomas King, "Borders" (1991) - Eva Gruber Digressing to Inner Worlds: Carol Shields, "Our Men and Women" (1999) - Brigitte Glaser A Sentimental Journey: Janice Kulyk Keefer, "Dreams:Storms:Dogs" (1999) - Georgiana Banita Further Reading on the Canadian Short Story Time Chart: The Short Story in the USA, Canada, and Great Britain Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisWinner of FC2's Catherine L. Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize.Stories that explore the potent and captivating boundaries between the real and the imaginary. Aurelie Sheehan's Once into the Night is a collection of 57 brief stories—a fictional autobiography made of assumed identities and what-ifs. What is the difference between fiction and a lie? These stories dwell in a netherworld between memory and the imagination, exploring the nature of truthtelling. Here the inner life is granted pride of place with authenticity found in misremembered childhood notebooks, invisible tattoos, and the love life of icemen. Radical in its conception of story, this collection blurs the line between fiction, poetry, and essay, reconceiving contemporary autofiction in its own witty, poignant vernacular. The stories intersect with and deviate from a ""provable"" life—a twin distinction that becomes the source of their power.Trade ReviewAurelie Sheehan must have gotten her poetic prose license at an elusive shop of glittering perceptions. Her enchantingly quirky, surprise-a-millisecond chapters are fabulous - I wished to go Two, Three, Many more times into the Night, but, alas, these original micro-stories of fables, foibles, and family ended quickly. Please pick them up where I left off, wishing to read them again. How did she do it? Aurelie Sheehan made Oscar Wilde wake Calvino with a start and a glass of bubbly - not in her book, but no kidding, Once into the Night propelled me with its witty, associative voice into a cosmos of magic and memory that I haven't experienced since those guys woke me with a start and a glass of . . ."" - Jane Miller, author of Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions""Aurelie Sheehan writes eerie legends, intimate stories, and beguiling personal confessions that chase after the bottomless mystery inside our everyday lives. These are fictions stamped with truth, or they are true accounts suffused with the clear magic of fiction, crafted by a writer who is a gifted and lyrical seer, shrewdly attuned to what is most worth calling out from our complicated and contested reality."" - Ben Marcus, author of Notes from the Fog "With a casual and wounding intelligence presiding over every story, Once into the Night feels like a seance of emotions that you're sometimes embarrassed to be feeling, sometimes can't wait to feel again, and sometimes feel relieved to know that you can." - John D'Agata, author of About a Mountain

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Book SynopsisA selection of short stories set in a future where America has become a channel-surfing nation, where pain has become home theatre and, with so many channels, watching TV beats sex.

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Book SynopsisHarrowing short stories that range from horror to humor; Brian Evenson's fifth story collection constructs a human landscape as unearthly as it is mundane. Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to readers of his earlier works, Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it. In the title story an obsessive consciousness folds back on itself, creating a vertiginous melange of Poe and Borges, both horrific and metaphysical. Here, as in ""Moran's Mexico,"" and ""Greenhouse,"" the solitary nature of reading and writing leads characters beyond human limits, making the act of putting words to paper a monstrous violation opening onto madness. In ""White Square"" the representation of humans by dimly colored shapes confirms our feeling that something lies behind these words, while seeming to mock us with the futility of seeking it. Evenson's enigmatic names - Thurm, Bein, Hatcher, Burlun - placeable landscapes, and barren rooms all combine to create a semblance of conceptual abstraction, as though the material universe had come to exist inside someone's head. Small wonder that Evenson's work has attracted so much attention among philosophers, literary critics, and other speculative intelligences, for it continuously projects a tantalizing absence, as though there were some key or code that, if only we knew it, would illuminate everything. However, the blade of discernment wavers, and we are left to our own groping interpretations.Trade ReviewThese tales by a modern Poe occur under an immense pressure of language, insight, and observation. Harrowing (Evenson makes us want to check the word's literal meaning) as they are, they take place just beyond the numbed moment where cruelty and craziness grow banal. -Samuel R. Delany, author of The Mad Man

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Book SynopsisA monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate?a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird. Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the fC2 Catherine doctorow innovative fiction Prize.A new collection of stories by bestselling author Michelle Richmond, Hum presents a cautionary political fable, a celebration of the complexities of marriage, and a meditation on modern-day alienation.Thirteen years after the publication of her first story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond returns with Hum, a collection of ten stories that examine love, lust, and loyalty from surprising angles.In “Hum,” a young couple that is paid to live in a house filled with surveillance equipment becomes “quietly lost to each other,” as the wife’s infatuation with the subject of their surveillance turns to obsession.In “Medicine,” a woman grieving over the death of her sister finds her calling as a manual medical caregiver. In “Boulevard,” a couple who has been trying to have a child for seven years finds themselves in an unnamed country at the height of a revolution, summoned there by the enigmatic H. “Scales,” the story of a woman who falls in love with a man whose body is covered with scales, parses the intersection of pain and pleasure. The narrator of “Lake” must choose whether to walk in the foot- steps of her famous grandfather, The Great Amphibian, who disappeared while performing a feat of daring in Lake Michigan. What does it mean to be heroic? How much should one sacrifice in the name of love? These questions and more are explored with tenderness, wit, and unerring precision in Hum.

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF FC2’s CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZEA gathering of luminescent stories that illustrates how fraught and contingent the simplest of lives can be, and the often unexpected means available to each of us for our own salvation.The truths revealed and the lives upended in the 13 stories that make up Yannick Murphy’s By the Time You Read This are at once singularly foreign and uncannily familiar. A wife pens a series of suicide notes to her family that verge on the comic, hovering between the tyrannical and the absurd. A mother obsesses over what her child eats. A young girl left with caretakers in New York draws on her potent imagination with consequences in real life that are both liberating and disastrous. In a college application essay a young woman finally begins to make sense of the troubling vicissitudes of her existence. A young French girl departs for America with her reprehensible beau to find she’s as much a stranger to herself abroad as she was at home. As with her previous novels and story collections, Murphy’s keen rendering of these disparate, complex lives illuminate in ways both quiet and startling our capacity for deliverance and devastation through daring acts of self-invention.Trade Review“Darkly funny, brilliantly absurd, insightful, poignant, and often heartbreaking, the stories in Yannick Murphy’s career-spanning collection, By the Time You Read This, affirm her place among the best of our writers. Each is a wry, sparkling testimony to our struggles to connect in family, love, and friendship. Her narrators reach for ‘the speech of the heart,’ whether from the depths of a submarine, or in an extended suicide note. Like Rachel Cusk, Murphy has invented a language all her own.”- Kate Walbert, author of His Favorites and A Short History of Women;“Murphy’s canny collection (after This Is the Water) serves up an intriguing and illuminating mix of character studies. As always, Murphy’s cool, minimalist style is undeniably appealing.”- Publishers Weekly;“Rhythmic and razor sharp, Murphy’s writing deftly catches hold of the lives of her characters in a glance and then, before you know it, delicately reveals them in all their pain and wonder. Whether she’s talking about a young man struggling with life on a submarine, a woman on the verge of turning her life upside down, or a neighbor watching the same video of his wife over and over again, she cuts quickly and deeply to the heart of what it means to be human and yet, even after that surgery, her characters remain whole and astonishingly alive.”- Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World;“A magic word is an elixir of happiness and there’s a rich little girl with a doll her size and an outsized dog who mothers kittens and a mother who jumps on a bed for fun- what’s not to like?- in these bewitching stories from the one and only Yannick Murphy! By the Time You Read This: read it soon.”- Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood.

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Book SynopsisWinner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize.A stunning look at the labor of obsession and the industry of self-destruction.In her lush, lyrical, and unflinching short fiction debut, JoAnna Novak examines the restless throb of desire amid the rote work of jobs and obligations, from the walk-ins of a New York banquet kitchen to the pier of Venice Beach. Fueled by jellyfish pad Thai and Necco wafers, Mountain Dew and Xiaolongbao, the characters in these stories defy boundaries and mores: In “MEMO 19,” a former anorectic, bored of recovery and her clerical job, invites an unparalleled act of sexual defilement and in “Rio Grande, Wisconsin,” a fleshly preteen fantasizes about Bill Murray on a family vacation to Wisconsin. Celebrating the grueling beauty of the shift and the ticking virtues of self-restraint, Meaningful Work is a pageant of formal experimentation, in fearless, glittering prose.Trade Review“An incandescent debut by an incandescent talent. The stories in Meaningful Work are truly marvelous, radiant with wit, beauty, and hard-earned truths. Novak does soul-work in these pages––you will find yourself mesmerized, thrilled, renewed.”- Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her;“Devouring, yearning, erasing, grabbing- these stories pulse with intensity and Novak’s scalpel-precise prose cuts to the core again and again. A startling and exciting collection that does not shirk from pretty much anything.”- Aimee Bender, author of Willful Creatures and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt;“I can’t remember the last time I had as much fun reading a new collection of stories as I did JoAnna Novak’s Meaningful Work. Every sentence is delectable- an appropriate word choice, given that Novak writes so gorgeously about food. (When you read these, make sure you have something good to eat at hand. They will make you hungry.) Acerbic, touching, graceful, and eccentric, Meaningful Work pays homage to Donald Barthelme and Grace Paley, even as it adds a fresh, unique, inimitable voice to our national literary conversation.”- David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place;“In Meaningful Work, JoAnna Novak shows us what this world makes us swallow: shit jobs and Hostess Snowballs, the nuclear family, our own fulvous tongues. Language-glutted, her starveling girls and hollowed mothers gag on everything and nothing. Novak spreads it: a mangled smorgasboard of harms. This is a book of jagged mouthfuls, of candy-shell sentences with hot, gloppy cores. There’s no purging it. Read and the stories stay with you, like cuts rubbed with Sharpie in the fat of your heart.”- Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan.

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Book SynopsisMeditations on the ways grief is felt and harvested—the funny, the sorrowful, the surreal, and the unmentionable Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize The stories in My Haunted Home delve in startling ways into the lives of the obsessed, the grieving, and the truly haunted. Victoria Hood conjures a shifting range of narrators through an unstable range of worlds where mothers might be dead, girls compulsively shove peanuts inside their ears, agoraphobia traps people inside their houses, and cats won’t eat your soup. In “The Teeth, the Way I Smile,” a daughter who looks like her dead mother manifests grief both in her house and her body. In “Smelly Smelly,” a woman slowly comes to realize her boyfriend has been dead for weeks. In “You, Your Fault,” we explore the unfolding love of two women who love every part of each other—including the parts that fixate on arson and murder. Each story is a bite-size piece of haunting candy on a necklace of obsession holding them together. Hood probes the worlds of what can be haunted, unpacking the ways in which hauntings can be manifested in physical forms, mentally harvested and lived through, and even a change in what is haunting. Trade Review“These are stories about death, about grieving, about obsession and loss. But they’re also language-rich, experimental, strange, brilliant, and compulsively readable. I have never enjoyed being haunted as much as I did reading this amazing debut!”— Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You; Stories and Other Revenges

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Book SynopsisThe short stories in this rich debut collection embody in their complexity Alice Munro’s description of the short story as “a world seen in a quick, glancing light.” In chiseled and elegant prose, Lieberman conjures wildly disparate worlds. A middle aged window washer, mourning his wife and an estranged daughter, begins to grow attached to a young woman he sees through the glass; a writer, against his better judgment, pursues a new relationship with a femme fatale who years ago broke his heart; and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor struggles with the delicate decision of whether to finally ask her aging mother how it was that she survived. It is all here—the exigencies of love, of lust, the raw, unlit terrain of grief. Whether plumbing the darker depths or casting a humorous eye on a doomed relationship, these stories never force a choice between tragedy and redemption, but rather invite us into the private moments and crucibles of lives as hungry and flawed as our own.Trade Review“Quiet, moving, masterfully crafted. Such are the nine stories in Venus in the Afternoon. Tehila Lieberman writes with precision, restraint, with a compassionate heart. She inhabits her characters, young or old, men or women, honestly, but without judgment, until they rise off the page and stand before us breathing and alive. New York, the Atacama desert, Amsterdam or Cuzco in Peru, the settings in Venus in the Afternoon are just as varied as the lives which they contain. A wonderful collection, one that will stay in your mind long after you have bid it goodbye.” —Miroslav Penkov, author of East of the West and judge|“Having taught college students many contemporary short stories, I can attest to the power of this collection: Tehila Lieberman’s extraordinary use of language I get lost in, her words that stir my senses … ‘the smell of honeysuckle in the untended gardens that offer up flowers, voluptuous, bursting, grass that reaches, snake-like, upward, weaving quietly between people’s quarrels and midday naps.’ (‘Into the Atacama’). These stories are to be read with pleasure, with awe.”—Carol Dine, author of Van Gogh in Poems

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Book SynopsisLee Montgomery's surprising stories capture moments in women's lives when, pushed to the edge, they teeter between the complete bewilderment of loss and the lurking possibility of found. These are not stories about diets, designer jeans, and bad boyfriends; these are stories that dismantle the fabric of convention to reveal the raw interior worlds of women who have come of age on the heels of Betty Crocker and in the hem of Betty Friedan. Montgomery's characters blow drugs and boys, advise friends who are dying of AIDS about pennies in penny loafers, write letters to Caroline Kennedy, and fall in love with movie stars. Some lose themselves to ambivalence while contemplating motherhood; others find themselves soothed when, after hearing of the sudden death of a dear friend, they seduce a stranger. In the story ""We Americans,"" a woman abandoned by her husband grows so vulnerable, she internalizes TV news tragedies by developing hives in the shapes of foreign countries. In the title story, ""Hannah"", a speed freak working the graveyard shift in a nursing home, falls in love with a quadriplegic who, void of feeling in his limbs, feels things that Hannah cannot. In ""Avalanche,"" an editor to movie stars in Beverly Hills struggles with how to reconcile her own story with the fairy-tale endings of celebrity culture. Tender, poignant, and at times hilarious, the women in ""Whose World Is This?"" turn common notions of love, compassion, and tradition upside down as they show us how vulnerability, although dangerous, is what makes life astonishingly beautiful and reality strangely unreal. 2007 John Simmons short fiction award

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Book SynopsisUnited in their fierce sense of place and infused with the fading echoes of a lost homeland, the stories in Jennine Capó Crucet's striking debut collection do for Miami what Edward P. Jones does for Washington, D.C., and what James Joyce did for Dublin: they expand our ideas and our expectations of the city by exposing its tough but vulnerable underbelly. Crucet's writing has been shaped by the people and landscapes of South Florida and by the stories of Cuba told by her parents and abuelos. Her own stories are informed by her experiences as a Cuban American woman living within and without her community, ready to leave and ready to return, 'ready to mourn everything.' Coming to us from the predominantly Hispanic working-class neighborhoods of Hialeah, the voices of this steamy section of Miami shout out to us from rowdy all-night funerals and kitchens full of plátanos and croquetas and lechón ribs, from domino tables and cigar factories, glitter-purple Buicks and handed-down Mom Rides, private homes of santeras and fights on front lawns. Calling to us from crowded expressways and canals underneath abandoned overpasses shading a city's secrets, these voices are the heart of Miami, and in this award-winning collection Jennine Capó Crucet makes them sing.

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Book SynopsisSafe as Houses, the debut story collection of Marie-Helene Bertino, proves that not all homes are shelters. The titular story revolves around an aging English professor who, mourning the loss of his wife, robs other people's homes of their sentimental knick-knacks. In ""Free Ham,"" a young dropout wins a ham after her house burns down and refuses to accept it. “Has my ham done anything wrong?” she asks, when the grocery store manager demands that she claim it.In ""Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph,"" a failed commercial writer moves into the basement of a convent and inadvertently discovers the secrets of the Sisters of Saint Joseph. A girl, hoping to talk her brother out of enlisting in the army, brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner in the quiet, dreamy ""North Of."" In “The Idea of Marcel,” Emily, a conservative, elegant girl, has dinner with the idea of her ex-boyfriend, Marcel. In a night filled with baffling coincidences, including Marcel having dinner with his idea of Emily, she wonders why we tend to be more in love with ideas than with reality. In and out of the rooms of these gritty, whimsical stories roam troubled, funny people struggling to reconcile their circumstances to some kind of American Ideal and failing, over and over. The stories of Safe as Houses are magical and original and help answer such universal and existential questions as: How far will we go to stay loyal to our friends? Can we love a man even though he is inches shorter than our ideal? Why doesn’t Bob Dylan ever have his own smokes? And are there patron saints for everything, even lost socks and bad movies?All homes are not shelters. But then again, some are. Welcome to the home of Marie-Helene Bertino.

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Book SynopsisAt once playfully dark and slyly hopeful, Stories No One Hopes Are about Them explores convergences of power, privilege, and place. Characters who are ni de aquí, ni de allá—neither from here nor there—straddle competing worlds, disrupt paradigms, and transition from objects of other people’s stories to active subjects and protagonists of their own. Narratives of humanity and environment entwine with nuanced themes of colonization, queerness, and evolution at the forefront. Big things happen in this collection. But it’s also a collection of small intimacies: misremembered names, chipped teeth, and private rituals; unexpected alliances and barely touched knees beneath uniform skirts; minutiae of the natural world; incidents that quietly, achingly, and delightfully transgress the familiar.Trade Review“Stories No One Hopes Are about Them is an absolutely brilliant collection, so of the moment formally and politically yet timeless in its pursuit of human contradiction. These stories move across geography, mode, and tone, linked not by common characters or shared locales but by the sly wit and stylistic virtuosity of their author. A. J. Bermudez’s debut left me in awe.”—Anthony Marra, judge, Iowa Short Fiction Award“In Bermudez’s captivating and mischievous debut collection, protagonists search for meaning and deal with other people’s entitlement. Bermudez eloquently and powerfully writes of objectification and exploitation. This is a must-read.”—starred review, Publishers Weekly“The haunting stories collected in A. J. Bermudez’s Stories No One Hopes Are about Them comment on qualities of the Anthropocene and center apathy’s hand in violence. Volleying between the beauty of final moments and the thrill of crimes, these stories are not to be ignored.”—Foreword Reviews“A. J. Bermudez’s dazzling debut is a riveting collection of stories filled with memorable characters whose acerbic wit in the face of an absurd world haunts and delights. Each incredible story contains a world in miniature brought to the page with maximum impact, revealing a fragile surface that nonetheless is too tempting not to be shattered. There is an exhilarating breadth of characters, events, and places in these stories, showcasing a promising new writer who mixes the daily and the outlandish in a vision that is often wrenching and always surprising.”—Michael Nye, author, All the Castles Burned“With Stories No One Hopes Are about Them, A. J. Bermudez explores what makes us us. Twenty brief tales poke at our assumptions of who we are and why we make our decisions. These are moments of living laid out over parties, plane tickets, rooms, and lives; they fold, unfold, and refold; paper airplanes cradling small insights. Pause in the frozen moments, breathe in the now of here and what comes next.”—Derek Beaulieu, director of literary arts, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity“In moments I almost hoped these wildly intelligent and wholly electric stories were about me. Was it recognition of those Bermuda Triangle-like moments when what we are running toward becomes what we are running from? Or pure admiration for the simultaneous swagger and patience of Bermudez’s turns of phrase? Maybe it’s the urge to be at the mercy of her formal range, from delightful lists to moments that gesture toward pure myth? It’s all of this, but mostly it’s how these heroes and fools still believe in metaphor as a site of human transformation, if not of our circumstances, then at least of our understanding of how we got from there to here.”—Jenny Browne, author, Fellow Travelers, State of Texas poet laureate ". . . sly and sharp-edged collection. . . . Bermudez deploys language with precision and panache (keep a dictionary handy) and is the kind of author whose work you want to devour."—The A. V. Club

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Book SynopsisThe Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas—a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds, grappling with problems—worried about their careers, their marriages, their children, their ambitions—they also sift through the happiness they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape. What do we find in the woods? An uplifting of spirit or a quieting of sorrow. A sense of being haunted by the past. Sometimes rougher, more violent things: abandoned quarries and feral cats, black bears, brothers caught up in an escalating war, a ghost who wishes to pass on her despair, monsters who boom with hollow ecstatic laughter. But also songbirds: the hermit thrush and the winter wren. Rushing rivers glossy with froth. A nineteenth-century inn that’s somehow gotten by all these years. And far within, a vegetal twilight and constant dusk that feels outside of time. This remarkable debut illuminates the ways we all carry within ourselves aspects stark, beautiful, wild, and unknowable. Trade Review“In Janice Obuchowski’s stories, the woods surrounding a Vermont college town are as suffused with mystery and dread as any forest found in the Brothers Grimm. The characters adrift in these woods are viscerally alive and heartbreakingly real as they search for a route back to the world they knew. By situating the universal experience of bewilderment within one specifically observed woods, Obuchowski has crafted a genuine work of art.”—Anthony Marra, judge, John Simmons Short Fiction Award “The Woods is a smart, moving collection—descriptive, evocative—with rich and believable worlds for readers to immerse themselves in.”—Megan Mayhew Bergman, author, How Strange a Season “I was happy to be lost in the shadows, clearings, and tangled vines of these stories—each is generous, funny, and beautifully precise, and together they make something gorgeous. I am Janice Obuchowski’s great big fan.”—Ramona Ausubel, author, Awayland “Janice Obuchowski’s stories place us in a very particular world, the world of college town Vermont, where intellect rules but The Woods summon, her narrators like woodland sirens. We meet people at both ends of life—young academics and those looking back from retirement—as well as locals making sense of their changing communities, all of them lured to the liminal space of the woods. In beautiful, compelling, precise prose, Obuchowski observes the human ability to go on in the face of the unknown, the regretted, the unexpected, and, perhaps most important, the unchangeable. As with all the best fables, one thinks: don’t go into the woods. But of course you must.”—Lori Ostlund, author, After the Parade“Janice Obuchowski’s voice—deliberate, lucid, arrestingly authoritative—is a pleasure; with a careful eye and generous measured style she renders a Vermont landscape and its inhabitants. With its cast of recurring characters, and exquisite attention to place, this collection calls to mind Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge”—Amanda Coplin, author, The Orchardist“These are such richly inhabited storyworlds, tottering between the wild and the civilized, peeking into places made stunningly lucid with language but still mysterious in the way the natural world is mysterious. What a thrilling debut!”—Aimee Bender, author, The Butterfly Lampshade"Obuchowski’s lucid debut collection digs into the isolation and complexities of her characters’ inner worlds... evocative interior descriptions and subtle revelations about the characters’ relationships to place.”—Publishers Weekly“When you look closely enough at a place, you might begin noticing things that don’t quite mesh with your understanding of the world. Think most folk horror; think Twin Peaks. Janice Obuchowski’s new collection The Woods heads into a suburban Gothic space, with some of its stories populated by ghosts and strange creatures.”—Tor.com

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Book SynopsisThe characters in these stories have been forced into conditions of life that they find unbearable, and the stories chart their often tragically misguided attempts to relieve their suffering via connections with other people or through the pursuit of addictive attachments (to opiates in one story, to sleep in another). This collection encompasses diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism to a Kafkaesque fairy tale, from fabulist “weird fiction” to an episode from The Odyssey that becomes a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals. These stories invite the reader to reconsider moral and ideological certainties, to take a fresh look at such issues as fracking and drone warfare. In one story, a petroleum engineer discovers that one of his wastewater wells may be causing earthquakes, and in another the pilot of an Air Force drone seeks to reconcile his conflicting roles as protector and executioner, husband and soldier. The scientist and the serviceman are both presented with problems that have no easy or obvious solutions, situations that force them to confront the messy, compromising complexity of being human.Trade ReviewA story can contain multitudes, and an author too, as Thomas Dodson shows us over and over in this astonishingly varied collection. As at home in a bee yard as a Greek epic, he cannot but dazzle us with the enormity of his range, and yet he does not paint with broad strokes. Quite the contrary, he fills his stories with loving detail and quiet wisdom. No Use Pretending is a joy." - Gish Jen, judge, Iowa Short Fiction Award"No Use Pretending is a remarkable debut. I marveled at the range of emotions and voices—from beekeepers to drone pilots, an ancient Greek sailor to a hungry ghost—that Thomas Dodson is able to conjure in this terrific, capacious collection of short stories." - Jess Walter, author, The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories"Thomas Dodson is a writer wonderfully aware of the resources of fiction and the necessities of the world. His vividly imagined characters seldom act in their own best interests. They keep bees, fly drones, lose loved ones, and in general suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But Dodson never loses sight of their complicated humanity—he is too canny a writer for that—and of their desire for something larger. In the midst of darkness there are moments of light, grace, and accidental wisdom. No Use Pretending is an arresting and exhilarating debut." - Margot Livesey"Thomas Dodson’s inventive and beautifully crafted stories take us deep into the heart of the human dilemma: We dream—of an ideal world, an ideal way of living—we fall short, and then what? Dynamic, deeply visual, and with an extraordinary array of characters and settings, No Use Pretending immerses the reader in a captivating vision of hope, regret, and resilience. It leaves me meditating on some of its central questions: ‘What principles should we use to organize society? What is the right way to live?" - Tom Drury, author, Pacific

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Book SynopsisThe Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth was originally released in 1994 and was the first published book from acclaimed writer Ron Rash. This twentieth anniversary edition takes us back to where it all began with ten linked short stories, framed like a novel, introducing us to a trio of memorable narrators - Tracy, Randy, and Vincent - making their way against the hardscrabble backdrop of the North Carolina foothills. With a comedic touch that may surprise readers familiar only with Rash's later, darker fiction, these earnest tales reveal the hard lessons of good whiskey, bad marriages, weak foundations, familial legacies, questionable religious observances, and the dubious merits of possum breeding, as well as the hard-won reconciliations with self, others, and home that can only be garnered in good time. The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth shows us the promising beginnings of a master storyteller honing his craft and contributing from the start to the fine traditions of southern fiction and lore. This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction from the author and a contextualizing preface from series editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer, director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies.Trade ReviewA substantial contribution to recent southern fiction." - Georgia Review

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Book SynopsisTrigger Man is a superb collection of stories capturing the gritty spirit of Detroit and the sometimes grim circumstances of the characters shaped by its industry and economics. Grounded on the bleak streets of the Motor City, these stories also explore the mythical “Up North,” the idealised country of many Detroit workers’ fantasy — an escape from the concrete and metal reality of their daily lives. Daniels’ characters are resilient and defiant, inhabiting a world that has often placed them on the margins of society, scouring a declining region for spiritual providence. Building on Daniels’ earlier collections of stories, Trigger Man brings vivid life to individuals struggling both to remain in and to flee the city that once sustained them.

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Book SynopsisThis volume comprises French versions and English translations of seven short stories written by Marie-Magdeleine Carbet, Martinique’s most prolific woman writer. Four of these stories are previously unpublished, culled from documents obtained from Carbet’s niece.While analyses of the literature of the French Caribbean have tended to portray these people typically as suffering from pathologies of colonial oppression, the situations and reflections presented in these stories offer different perspectives on the lives and concerns of ordinary Martinicans and thus provide insight into some of the missing links of the sociocultural scene.This unique, multifaceted text fills an important pedagogical and scholarly need, and allows the reader to access the daily lives of French Caribbeans in a significantly authentic way.

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Book SynopsisIn his debut collection, The Fight for Space, Roberto Ontiveros explores the modes of art and obsession with eleven stories that run from fabulist comedy to surrealist noir. The tales-focusing on the inner lives of adult caregivers, deliver drivers, and painters-trace how the ubiquity of media (the world of sitcoms, talk radio, and superhero comics) comes to flood the working class with a dream-like dread. In this book, a budding con artist tries to sell a house that does not belong to her, an anti-social memoirist pens the fates of his friends, and a comic book-obsessed warehouse employee follows a man who wears a gas mask. Atmospheric and erotic, the stories in The Fight for Space, recall the literary mysteries of James M. Cain by way of Twin Peaks.

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Book SynopsisJohn Perryman’s latest collection of stories, Wait at Wood’s Edge, dramatizes varieties of reckonings familiar to Texans, and Americans, in the early twenty-first century. In his stories, flawed but earnest figures struggle to come to terms with the unexpected: betrayal, murder, shattered dreams, failed efforts at redemption, and—even worse—failure to recognize opportunities for redemption. In these deftly written pages, Perryman’s characters seek various forms of reconciliation between conflicting forces across a wide spectrum of the American landscape, navigating the economic, religious, social, and cultural tensions of today. From a pair of desperate grandparents trying their best to raise a haunted granddaughter, who early one morning bears a strange witness at wood’s edge, to a reimagining of the final days of the life of the skeptical Henry Adams, these tales dramatize the unexpected face of redemption with which we are sometimes met. And, as is often the case in the real world, these attempts at reconciliation, though honestly ventured, are not always welcomed or successful. But in this collection of tales, these all-too human lives always strive after a measure of dignity. And in that alone, perhaps, there is reason for hope.

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Book SynopsisInadequacies is a collection of stories, small in scope and large in impact. Each of Morris’ short stories question identity, and examine the ways in which we are unavoidably ourselves. Spanning a range of stories and narrative approaches, the characters in these stories are unable to move forward without first coming to terms with the identities they struggle against. Inadequacies focus on themes of identity and self, while also incorporating a conflict against the elements for each story’s protagonist.

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Book SynopsisSohrab Homi Fracis’s innovative new collection tells a spectrum of stories under a paradoxical new umbrella category: True Fiction. Monotony is banished from this book. At a Florida coffee shop, an immigrant’s voice opens up even as a hipster musician’s shuts down. An underpaid bank teller in the age of ATMs is fired and goes postal. In the title story, on whose premise the book pivots away from realism, a professor recalls his favorite communication ever—and it’s utterly silent. A loving husband and father finds himself inexplicably transformed into a woman. In another world, the protagonist simultaneously faces his end and a new beginning. A budding female messiah confronts a non-gendered godhead. And a bastard prince of ancient Turkey (whose legendary Persian name lives on in the author’s) invades Persia to seek his father. Yet we can see ourselves in them all. Even as the resident magician in Five Points Coffee & Spice regales his fellow customers, Fracis’s literary dexterity takes us on a darkly beguiling magic-carpet ride. “Sohrab Homi Fracis’s new collection, True Fiction, is a tour de force. Showcasing his great gifts as a stylist and his deliciously unfettered imagination, the collection ranges across genres, transgresses expectation, creates with beauty, grace, humor, and insight a compassionate portrait of our essential humanness in these eight eclectic stories that surprise and delight.” —Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah (American Book Award) and Kind of Kin "Fracis is the keen voice of the outsider looking in, telling stories that we all need to hear." —E.C. Osondu, author of Alien Stories (BOA Short Fiction Prize) and Voice of America (Caine Prize for African Writing)

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Book SynopsisExploring the vagaries of life, human connection, and desire, the twelve stories of Safe Places navigate the fault lines of existence. Shifting from New York and Chicago to the American West and the Australian outback, Kerry Dolan's characters move through an uncertain and unpredictable world, confronting situations that are alternately menacing, tragic, and funny. An aspiring anthropologist falls under the sway of her fortuneteller. An American tourist catches opal fever in an Australian mining town and binds herself to a man she despises. Two hitchhiking teens take a ride with a mysterious stranger, while an unstable graduate student stalks the object of his affections across Berkeley. Assured and distinctive, the voice-driven stories of this debut collection capture the restless heart of characters in a state of flux, as they try—and frequently fail—to move beyond chance and circumstance.

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