Short Stories

"Berlin probably deserved a Pulitzer Prize." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE. Named one of the Best Books of 2018 by The Boston Globe, Kirkus, and Lit Hub. Named a Fall Read by Buzzfeed, ELLE, TIME, Nylon, The Boston Globe, Vulture, Newsday, HuffPost, Bustle, The A.V. Club, The Millions, BUST, Reinfery29, Fast Company and MyDomaine.

A collection of previously uncompiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation Lucia Berlin

In 2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Manual for Cleaning Women, a posthumous story collection by a relatively unknown writer, to wild, widespread acclaim. It was a New York Times bestseller; the paper's Book Review named it one of the Ten Best Books of 2015; and NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other outlets gave the book rave reviews.

The book's author, Lucia Berlin, earned comparisons to Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, and Anton Chekhov. Evening in Paradise is a careful selection from Berlin's remaining stories--twenty-two gems that showcase the gritty glamour that made readers fall in love with her. From Texas to Chile, Mexico to New York City, Berlin finds beauty in the darkest places and darkness in the seemingly pristine. Evening in Paradise is an essential piece of Berlin's oeuvre, a jewel-box follow-up for new and old fans.

In Ayse Papatya Bucak's dreamlike narratives, dead girls recount the effects of an earthquake and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. The anguish of an Armenian refugee is "performed" at an American fund-raiser. An Ottoman ambassador in Paris amasses a tantalizing collection of erotic art. And in the masterful title story, the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war.

A joy and a provocation, Bucak's stories confront the nature of historical memory with humor and humanity. Surreal and poignant, they examine the tension between myth and history, cultural categories and personal identity, performance and authenticity.

A collection of Christmas stories written by African-American journalists, activists, and writers from the late 19th century to the modern civil rights movement.

Back in print for the first time in over a decade, this landmark collection features writings from well-known black writers, activists, and visionaries such as Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, and John Henrik Clarke along with literary gems from rediscovered writers. Originally published in African American newspapers, periodicals, and journals between 1880 and 1953, these enchanting Christmas tales are part of the black literary tradition that flourished after the Civil War.

Edited and assembled by esteemed historian Dr. Bettye Collier-Thomas, the short stories and poems in this collection reflect the Christmas experiences of everyday African Americans and explore familial and romantic love, faith, and more serious topics such as racism, violence, poverty, and racial identity. Featuring the best stories and poems from previous editions along with new material including "The Sermon in the Cradle" by W. E. B. Du Bois, A Treasury of African American Christmas Stories celebrates a rich storytelling tradition and will be cherished by readers for years to come.

Library of America launches a definitive collected edition of one of the most original and electric writers of our time with a volume gathering her five iconic books of the 1960s & 70s

Joan Didion's influence on postwar American letters is undeniable. Whether writing fiction, memoir, or trailblazing journalism, her gifts for narrative and dialogue, and her intimate but detached authorial persona, have won her legions of readers and admirers. Now Library of America launches its multi-volume edition of Didion's collected writings, prepared in consultation with the author, that brings together her fiction and nonfiction for the first time. Collected in this first volume are Didion's five iconic books from the 1960s and 1970s: Run River, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, and The White Album. Whether writing about countercultural San Francisco, the Las Vegas wedding industry, Lucille Miller, Charles Manson, or the shopping mall, Didion achieves a wonderful negative sublimity without condemning her subjects or condescending to her readers. Chiefly about California, these books display Didion's genius for finding exactly the right language and tone to capture America's broken twilight landscape at a moment of headlong conflict and change.

In these wildly imaginative, devilishly daring tales of the macabre, internationally bestselling author Mariana Enriquez brings contemporary Argentina to vibrant life as a place where shocking inequality, violence, and corruption are the law of the land, while military dictatorship and legions of desaparecidos loom large in the collective memory. In these stories, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortázar, three young friends distract themselves with drugs and pain in the midst a government-enforced blackout; a girl with nothing to lose steps into an abandoned house and never comes back out; to protest a viral form of domestic violence, a group of women set themselves on fire.

But alongside the black magic and disturbing disappearances, these stories are fueled by compassion for the frightened and the lost, ultimately bringing these characters--mothers and daughters, husbands and wives--into a surprisingly familiar reality. Written in hypnotic prose that gives grace to the grotesque, Things We Lost in the Fire is a powerful exploration of what happens when our darkest desires are left to roam unchecked, and signals the arrival of an astonishing and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections--now with a new epilogue

The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like "a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them." For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world.

Franzen's great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one's prejudices, he writes, literature "invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you." Whatever his subject, Franzen's essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He's frank about birds, too (they kill "everything imaginable"), but his reporting and reflections on them--on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica--are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love.

Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection ever printed of her short fiction, featuring the pioneering feminist masterpiece of the title, her stories contemporary with The Yellow Wallpaper, the fiction from her neglected California period (1890-95), and her later explorations of "the woman of fifty." Together, these impressive works throw new light on Gilman as a writer of fiction.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKER AWARD

ONE OF TIME'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019

"All the tawdry details I'm dying for are in these stories, but they're given out like old sweaters--without shame, without guile. Amy Hempel is the writer who makes me feel most affiliated with other humans; we are all living this way--hiding, alone, obsessed--and that's ok." --Miranda July

From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection--her first in over a decade.

Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first since her Collected Stories published more than a decade ago, is a literary event.

These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In "A Full-Service Shelter," a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In "Greed," a spurned wife examines her husband's affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in "Cloudland," the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel's singular, startling, inimitable sentences.

Henry James led a wandering life, which took him far from his native shores, but he continued to think of New York City, where his family had settled for several years during his childhood, as his hometown. Here Colm Tóibín, the author of the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Master, a portrait of Henry James, brings together for the first time all the stories that James set in New York City. Written over the course of James's career and ranging from the deliciously tart comedy of the early "An International Episode" to the surreal and haunted corridors of "The Jolly Corner," and including "Washington Square", the poignant novella considered by many (though not, as it happens, by the author himself) to be one of James's finest achievements, the nine fictions gathered here reflect James's varied talents and interests as well as the deep and abiding preoccupations of his imagination. And throughout the book, as Tóibín's fascinating introduction demonstrates, we see James struggling to make sense of a city in whose rapidly changing outlines he discerned both much that he remembered and held dear as well as everything about America and its future that he dreaded most.

Stories included:
The Story of a Masterpiece
A Most Extraordinary Case
Crawford's Consistency
An International Episode
The Impressions of a Cousin
The Jolly Corner
Washington Square
Crapy Cornelia
A Round of Visits

"A near-miraculous, brilliant debut."--George Saunders, Man Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

"In one exquisitely crafted story after the next, Will Mackin maps the surreal psychological terrain of soldiers in a perpetual war."--Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment

WINNER OF THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION

The eleven stories in Will Mackin's mesmerizing debut collection draw from his many deployments with a special operations task force in Iraq and Afghanistan. They began as notes he jotted on the inside of his forearm in grease pencil and, later, as bullet points on the torn-off flap of an MRE kit. Whenever possible he incorporated those notes into his journals. Years later, he used those journals to write this book.

Together, the stories in Bring Out the Dog offer a remarkable portrait of the absurdity and poetry that define life in the most elite, clandestine circles of modern warfare. It is a world of intense bonds, ancient credos, and surprising compassion--of success, failure, and their elusive definitions. Moving between settings at home and abroad, in vivid language that reflects the wonder and discontent of war, Mackin draws the reader into a series of surreal, unsettling, and deeply human episodes: In "Crossing the River No Name," a close call suggests that miracles do exist, even if they are in brutally short supply; in "Great Circle Route Westward Through Perpetual Night," the death of the team's beloved dog plunges them into a different kind of grief; in "Kattekoppen," a man struggles to reconcile his commitments as a father and his commitments as a soldier; and in "Baker's Strong Point," a man whose job it is to pull things together struggles with a loss of control.

Told without a trace of false bravado and with a keen, Barry Hannah-like sense of the absurd, Bring Out the Dog manages to capture the tragedy and heroism, the degradation and exultation, in the smallest details of war.

Praise for Bring Out the Dog

"Cuts through all the shiny and hyped-up rhetoric of wartime, and aggressively and masterfully draws a picture of the brutal, frightening, and even boring moments of deployment. . . . The Things They Carried, Redeployment, and now Bring Out the Dog: war stories for your bookshelf that will last a very long time, and serve as reminders of what America was, is, and can still become."--Chicago Review of Books

A teenage girl encounters the shocks of first love at the height of the summer holidays in Greece. A young filmmaker celebrates her first moment of recognition by impulsively buying a Chanel dress she can barely afford. Both halves of a longstanding couple fall in love with others and shed their marriage in the space of a morning. In all of these sparkling stories, characters take risks, confront fears, and step outside their boundaries into new destinies.
Tracing the contours of the modern Italian diaspora, Francesca Marciano takes us from Venetian film festivals to the islands off Tanzania to a classical dance community in southern India. These stories shine with keen insights and surprising twists. Driven by Marciano's vivid takes on love and betrayal, politics and travel, and the awakenings of childhood, The Other Language is a tour de force that illuminates both the joys and ironies of self-reinvention.

This wonderfully original collection proves once again that Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet is "the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves" (Chicago Tribune). In Fight No More, Nina, a lonely real-estate broker estranged from her only relative, is at the center of a web of stories connecting a community through the houses they inhabit. With crackling satire and surprising tenderness, Millet introduces an indelible cast of untidy teens, beastly men, and strong-minded women whose stories begin to outline the fate of one particular family being torn apart by forces they recognize but cannot control. Millet's intellect and beautiful prose deliver profound insight into human behavior, from the ordinary to the bizarre, and draws startling contrasts between house and home.

A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize-winning "Undocumented Alien"

The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance.

"Fleuve Bleu" exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates's prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results.

In "Big Burnt," set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, "Les beaux jours" examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a "master" artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic "Undocumented Alien" depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage.

In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior--until the hour when they do not.

The Iron Bridge delivers an inspired inquiry into the early lives of the 20th century's most notorious tyrants. Anton Piatigorsky pushes at the boundaries of the unexpected as he breathes fictionalized life into the adolescents who would grow up to become the most brutal dictators the world has ever known.

We discover a teenaged Mao Tse-Tung refusing an arranged marriage; Idi Amin cooking for the British Army; Stalin living in a seminary; and a melodramatic young Adolf Hitler dreaming of vast architectural achievements. Pol Pot and Rafael Trujillo are also subjects of separate stories. Piatigorsky explores moments that are nothing more than vague incidents in the biographies of these men, expanding mere footnotes into entire realities. The Iron Bridge, completely imagined yet captivatingly real, captures those crucial instants in time that may well have helped to deliver some of the most infamous leaders in history.

Long-listed for the 2016 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In The Givenness of Things, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite our errors and depredations.

Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and in her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. These seventeen essays examine the ideas that have inspired and provoked one of our finest writers throughout her life. Whether she is investigating how the work of the great thinkers of the past, Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer--and Shakespeare--can infuse our lives, or calling attention to the rise of the self-declared elite in American religious and political life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on display. Exquisite and bold, The Givenness of Things is a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in our cultural heritage, and to offer grace to one another.

FEATURING A BRAND NEW STORY

"What's special about 'Cat Person, ' and the rest of the stories in You Know You Want This, is the author's expert control of language, character, story--her ability to write stories that feel told, and yet so unpretentious and accessible that we think they must be true." --The New York Times Book Review

"Kristen Roupenian isn't just an uncannily great writer, she also knows things about the human psyche--things that I always supposed I would learn at some point, but never did...The world has made a lot more sense since reading this book." --Miranda July, New York Times bestselling author

"If you think you know what this collection will be like, you're wrong. These stories are sharp and perverse, dark and bizarre, unrelenting and utterly bananas. I love them so, so much." --Carmen Maria Machado, National Book Award Finalist and author of Her Body and Other Parties

A compulsively readable collection of short stories that explore the complex--and often darkly funny--connections between gender, sex, and power across genres.

Previously published as You Know You Want This, "Cat Person" and Other Stories brilliantly explores the ways in which women are horrifying as much as it captures the horrors that are done to them. Among its pages are a couple who becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex...until they can't have sex without him; a ten-year-old whose birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for "something mean"; a woman who finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart's desire: a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed "biter" who dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker.

Spanning a range of genres and topics--from the mundane to the murderous and supernatural--these are stories about sex and punishment, guilt and anger, the pleasure and terror of inflicting and experiencing pain. These stories fascinate and repel, revolt and arouse, scare and delight in equal measure. And, as a collection, they point a finger at you, daring you to feel uncomfortable--or worse, understood--as if to say, "You want this, right? You know you want this."

The "original, first-rate, serious, and beautiful" short fiction (New York Times Book Review) that introduced J. D. Salinger to American readers in the years after World War II, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and the first appearance of Salinger's fictional Glass family.
Nine exceptional stories from one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and frequently affecting, Nine Stories sits alongside Salinger's very best work--a treasure that will passed down for many generations to come. The stories:

A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut

Just Before the War with the Eskimos

The Laughing Man

Down at the Dinghy

For Esmé--with Love and Squalor

Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes

De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period

Teddy

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal!

 

A dazzling collection of short fiction

 

Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving eleven completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Unionis a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.

 

Nothing is off limits, and everything--when captured by Smith's brilliant gaze--feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced and utterly original, Grand Union highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do.

Roxanne says: Several magical universes all in one book of gorgeous short stories!

The Believer, a five-time National Magazine Award finalist, is a bimonthly literature, arts, and culture magazine based in Las Vegas, Nevada. In each issue, readers will find journalism, essays, intimate interviews, an expansive comics section, poetry, and on occasion, delightful and unexpected bonus items. Our poetry section is curated by Jericho Brown, Kristen Radtke selects our comics, and Joshua Wolf Shenk is our editor-in-chief. All issues feature a regular column by Nick Hornby and a symposium, in which several writers expound on a theme of contemporary interest.

An irresistible new volume of affectionate missives about our feline companions from Charles Dickens, Anne Frank, Raymond Chandler, Elizabeth Taylor, and more, from the author of the bestselling Letters of Note collections

Florence Nightingale sends care instructions to the woman who has just adopted her angora tomcat Mr. White. T. S. Eliot issues a rhyming birthday party invitation to all Jellicle cats for his four-year-old godson. Jack Kerouac's mother grieves at the death of the family cat. Jack Lemmon winkingly suggests to Walter Matthau that they go in on a cat ranch in Mexico. This utterly charming collection offers a warm and friendly look at the place that cats occupy in our hearts and lives. These thirty letters capture the profound delight of having or observing a cat, and they reveal a keen insight into feline nature as well as our own.

From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations, a brilliant collection of stories that showcases why he is one of the best writers--in any language--working today.

Lovers on All Saints' Day is an emotional book that haunts, moves, and seduces. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the brilliant novelist, now brings his keen eye and rich prose to the themes of love and memory in these seven powerful stories.

Vásquez achieves an extraordinary unity of emotion with these fragmented lives. A Colombian writer is witness to a murder that will mark him forever. A woman sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return from an expedition to find wood for their stove, while he lies in another woman's bed a few miles away, unable to heal the wound in his own marriage. In these stories, there are love affairs, revenge, troubled pasts, and tender moments that reveal a person's whole history in a few sentences.

Set in Europe (the scene of Vásquez's own self-imposed exile from Latin America) and never before available in English, this collection evokes a singular mood and a tone, and showcase Vásquez's hypnotic writing. Vásquez is a humane, deeply insightful writer, and these stories leave one feeling transformed from the experience of reading them, with a greater vision of humanity and society, a greater understanding of relationships and of love.