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.
With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time.
"[Carver's stories] can ... be counted among the masterpieces of American Literature." --The New York Times Book Review "One of the great short story writers of our time--of any time." --The Philadelhpia Inquirer "The whole collection is a knock out. Few wriers can match Raymond Carver's entiwining style and language." --The Dallas Morning News
A landmark new collection of stories from Richard Ford that showcases his brilliance, sensitivity, and trademark wit and candor
In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss.
"Displaced" returns us to a young man's Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator's sorrow after his father's death. "Driving Up" follows an American woman's late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. "The Run of Yourself," a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife's death. And "Nothing to Declare" follows a man and a woman's chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what's left of love for them.
Typically rich with Ford's emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers.
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.
A new collection of immersive essays from the most acclaimed editor of the second half of the twentieth century
This new collection from the legendary editor Robert Gottlieb features twenty or so pieces he's written mostly for The New York Review of Books, ranging from reconsiderations of American writers such as Dorothy Parker, Thornton Wilder, Thomas Wolfe ("genius"), and James Jones, to Leonard Bernstein, Lorenz Hart, Lady Diana Cooper ("the most beautiful girl in the world"), the actor-assassin John Wilkes Booth, the scandalous movie star Mary Astor, and not-yet president Donald Trump.
The writings compiled here are as various as they are provocative: an extended probe into the world of post-death experiences; a sharp look at the biopics of transcendent figures such as Shakespeare, Molière, and Austen; a soap opera-ish movie account of an alleged affair between Chanel and Stravinsky; and a copious sampling of the dance reviews he's been writing for The New York Observer for close to twenty years. A worthy successor to his expansive 2011 collection, Lives and Letters, and his admired 2016 memoir, Avid Reader, Near-Death Experiences displays the same insight and intellectual curiosity that have made Gottlieb, in the words of The New York Times's Dwight Garner, "the most acclaimed editor of the second half of the twentieth century."
One of the most terrifying stories of the twentieth century, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. Today it is considered a classic work of short fiction, a story remarkable for its combination of subtle suspense and pitch-perfect descriptions of both the chilling and the mundane.
The Lottery and Other Stories, the only collection of stories to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery" with twenty-four equally unusual short stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the horrible, the unsettling to the ominous--and her power as a storyteller.
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
In an isolated region of Idaho, Montana, and eastern Oregon, an armed occupation of a wildlife refuge escalates into civil war. Against this backdrop, Maxim Loskutoff shatters the myths of the West: a lonesome trapper falls in love with a bear; a newly married woman hatches a plot to murder a tree; and an unemployed millworker joins a militia after returning home. Written with "blade-sharp prose" (Electric Literature), the twelve stories in this debut collection expose the simmering rage and resentments of small-town America "with extraordinary eloquence and compassion" (National Book Review).
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.
Fifty years after the Vietnam War, this anthology by descendants of Vietnam veterans and refugees--American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese Diaspora, Hmong, Australian, and others--confronts war and its aftermath. What emerges is an affecting portrait of the effects of war and family--an intercultural, generational dialogue on silence, memory, landscape, imagination, Agent Orange, displacement, postwar trauma, and the severe realities that are carried home. Including such acclaimed voices as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Karen Russell, Terrance Hayes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Nick Flynn, and Ocean Vuong, Inheriting the War enriches the discourse of the Vietnam War and provides a collective conversation that attempts to transcend the recursion of history.
"Each unique work in Inheriting the War embraces a collective that aims to engage through some daring and passionate truths calibrated by bravery." --Yusef Komunyakaa, from the foreword
"Poetic, insightful, and deeply moving. David Means is one of my very favorite writers." --Tara Westover, author of Educated
Following the publication of his widely acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia, David Means here returns to his signature form: the short story. Thanks to his four previous story collections, Means has won himself an international reputation as one of the most innovative short fiction writers working today: an "established master of the form." (Laura Miller, The Guardian). Instructions for a Funeral--featuring work from The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, and VICE--finds Means branching out beyond the explorations of violence and trauma with which he is often identified, prominently displaying his sly humor and his inimitable way of telling tales that deliciously wind up to punch the reader in the heart. With each story Means pushes into new territory, writing with tenderness and compassion about fatherhood, marriage, a homeless brother, the nature of addiction, and the death of a friend at the hands of a serial-killer nurse. Means transmutes a fistfight in Sacramento into a tender, life-long love story; two FBI agents on a stakeout in the 1920s into a tale of predator and prey, paternal urges and loss; a man's funeral instructions into a chronicle of organized crime, real estate ventures, and the destructive force of paranoia.
Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.
"David Means is a master of tense, distilled, quintessentially American prose. Like any artist who has finely honed his talent to its strongest expression he is a brilliant craftsman whose achievement is to appear unstudied, even casual . . . Each story by Means which I have read is unlike the others, unexpected and an unnerving delight." --Joyce Carol Oates
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.
From the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling award-winning author of Serena and The Cove, thirty of his finest short stories, collected in one volume.
No one captures the complexities of Appalachia--a rugged, brutal landscape of exquisite beauty--as evocatively and indelibly as author and poet Ron Rash. Winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, two O Henry prizes, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Rash brilliantly illuminates the tensions between the traditional and the modern, the old and new south, tenderness and violence, man and nature. Though the focus is regional, the themes of Rash's work are universal, striking an emotional chord that resonates deep within each of our lives.
Something Rich and Strange showcases this revered master's artistry and craftsmanship in thirty stories culled from his previously published collections Nothing Gold Can Stay, Burning Bright, Chemistry, and The Night New Jesus Fell to Earth. Each work of short fiction demonstrates Rash's dazzling ability to evoke the heart and soul of this land and its people--men and women inexorably tethered to the geography that defines and shapes them. Filled with suspense and myth, hope and heartbreak, told in language that flows like "shimmering, liquid poetry" (Atlanta Journal Constitution), Something Rich and Strange is an iconic work from an American literary virtuoso.
Praise for The Dark Interval "Even though each of these letters of condolence is personalized with intimate detail, together they hammer home Rilke's remarkable truth about the death of another: that the pain of it can force us into a 'deeper . . . level of life' and render us more 'vibrant.' Here we have a great poet's reflections on our greatest mystery."--Billy Collins
"As we live our lives, it is possible to feel not sadness or melancholy but a rush of power as the life of others passes into us. This rhapsodic volume teaches us that death is not a negation but a deepening experience in the onslaught of existence. What a wise and victorious book!"--Henri Cole
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.
often funny, always moving stories that reveal
the complex workings of the human heart.
Bill Roorbach conjures vivid characters whose layered interior worlds feel at once familiar and extraordinary. He first made his mark as the winner of an O. Henry Prize for the title story of Big Bend, his first collection, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award. His new collection, The Girl of the Lake, captures a virtuoso in his prime.
Roorbach's characters are unforgettable: among them an adventurous boy who learns what courage really is when an aging nobleman recounts history to him; a couple hiking through the mountains whose vacation and relationship ends catastrophically; a teenager being pursued by three sisters all at once; a tech genius who exacts revenge on his wife and best friend over a stolen kiss from years past.
These moving and funny stories are as rich in scope, emotional, and memorable as Bill Roorbach's novels. He has been called "a kinder, gentler John Irving...a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style" (the Washington Post), and his work has been described as "hilarious and heartbreaking, wild and wise" (Parade magazine), all of which is evident in spades (and also hearts, clubs, and diamonds) in every story in this arresting new collection.
"Salaam treats words like the seductive weapons they are. She wields them to weave fierce, gorgeous stories that stroke your sensibilities, challenge your preconceptions and leave you breathless with their beauty."--Nalo Hopkinson, Author of the Nebula nominated novel The New Moon's Arms
Kiini Ibura Salaam's short stories (and the characters who inhabit them) are vital, fantastic in all senses of the word, audacious and tender."--Kelly Link, author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated collection Get In Trouble
In this eagerly-awaited collection, Kiini Ibura Salaam continues her exploration of the dark, the sensual, and the mysterious with fiction that disturbs, delights, and dazzles. The five stories and one novella collected in When the World Wounds examine the tumultuous nature of the human condition through such wild imaginings as sensual encounters with deer, escapism in a dystopic prison, and volcano women. In "The Taming," a lupine creature is trapped by beasts whose nefarious nature is beyond their prey's understanding. In "Hemmie's Calenture," a woman escaping enslavement is thrust into a war between gods. "The Pull of the Wing" is the prequel to Salaam's wildly popular Of Wings, Nectar, and Ancestors trilogy. "Because of the Bone Man" transports readers to the desolate landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans and the struggle of the city's culture bearers to carry on.
A welcome follow-up to Salaam's award-winning Ancient, Ancient, When the World Wounds is perceptive and engaging as it examines our world's callous and perilous landscapes while tickling the imagination and startling the senses."Kiini Ibura Salaam is a natural-born storyteller and a gorgeous writer who chooses her characters and words with the care and skill of a poet. Her stories are transformative, wise and vivid with the quality of fantasy and fable. I loved reading this!"--Sherre Renée Thomas, Editor of the World Fantasy Award winning anthology Dark Matter: Reading the Bones
"Salaam's collection... introduces readers to alternate worlds built around magic, sensuality, sexuality, and the search for emotional comfort, however tenuous. ... Salaam's unusual settings and lonely characters will call to readers who hunger for sex, identity, or just a place to belong."--Publishers Weekly
Kiini Ibura Salaam's first collection Ancient, Ancient (Aqueduct Press, 2012) won the James Tiptree Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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:
--The New York Times Book Review
With a career that spanned more than half a century, William Trevor is regarded as one of the best writers of short stories in the English language. Now, in Last Stories, the master storyteller delivers ten exquisitely rendered tales--nine of which have never been published in book form--that illuminate the human condition and will surely linger in the reader's mind long after closing the book. Subtle yet powerful, Trevor gives us insights into the lives of ordinary people. We encounter a tutor and his pupil, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they meet again years later; a young girl who discovers the mother she believed dead is alive and well; and a piano-teacher who accepts her pupil's theft in exchange for his beautiful music. This final and special collection is a gift to lovers of literature and Trevor's many admirers, and affirms his place as one of the world's greatest storytellers.
Eudora Welty wrote novels, novellas, and reviews over the course of her long career, but the heart and soul of her literary vision lay with the short story, and her National Book Award-winning Collected Stories, written when it was first published, confirmed her as a master of short fiction. With a new introduction by best-selling author Ann Patchett, the forty-one pieces collected in this new edition, written over a period of three decades, showcase Welty's incredible dexterity as a writer. Her style seamlessly shifts from the comic to the tragic, from realistic portraits to surrealistic ones, as she deftly moves between folklore and myth, race and history, family and farce, and the Mississippi landscape she knew so well, her wry wit and keen sense of observation always present on the page.