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Zona Gale was born on 26th August 1874 in Portage, Wisconsin. She was exceptionally close to her parents and later used them as the basis for characters in her works. She wrote and illustrated her first story at the age of 7.By 16 she was being paid for stories from the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin. After studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she received a degree and two masters she moved to New York and applied for jobs at every paper in the city. She was later hired as a secretary to Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, critic, essayist, banker, and scientist. and immersed herself in his literary circle.Gale returned to her hometown in 1903 and saw that her old world was full of new possibilities. She now dedicated herself to full-time writing.Her first novel ‘Romance Island'was published in 1906 and she also began the popular ‘Friendship Village'series of stories. In 1920 came ‘Miss Lulu Bett', which depicts life in the Mid-West. Adapted into a play it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. It was a stellar achievement.After the deaths of her parents her works, both fiction and non-fiction, drifted towards mysticism and her belief that problems could be solved through a kind of transcendentalist enlightenment.Gale was a suffragist, an activist, and a liberal Democrat as well as an active member of the National Woman's Party and pacifist. Much of her time was taken up with advancing opportunities for women both at school and as writers. It was a problem she repeatedly emphasized in her novels: women's frustration at their lack of opportunities.'In the mid 20's she began caring for a girl, a relative, Leslyn, and later adopted her. At age 54, she married William L Breese, a childhood friend and a widower. He was a wealthy banker and hosiery manufacturer. She also became a step mother to his daughter, Juliette. In mid-December 1938 she went to Chicago for medical treatment and contracted pneumonia a few days later. Zona Gale died of pneumonia in Passavant Hospital in Chicago on 27th December 1938.

Zona Gale was born on 26th August 1874 in Portage, Wisconsin. She was exceptionally close to her parents and later used them as the basis for characters in her works. She wrote and illustrated her first story at the age of 7.By 16 she was being paid for stories from the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin. After studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she received a degree and two master's she moved to New York and applied for jobs at every paper in the city. She was later hired as a secretary to Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, critic, essayist, banker, and scientist. and immersed herself in his literary circle.Gale returned to her hometown in 1903 and saw that her old world was full of new possibilities. She now dedicated herself to full-time writing.Her first novel ‘Romance Island'was published in 1906 and she also began the popular ‘Friendship Village'series of stories. In 1920 came ‘Miss Lulu Bett', which depicts life in the Mid-West. Adapted into a play it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. It was a stellar achievement.After the deaths of her parents her works, both fiction and non-fiction, drifted towards mysticism and her belief that problems could be solved through a kind of transcendentalist enlightenment.Gale was a suffragist, an activist, and a liberal Democrat as well as an active member of the National Woman's Party and pacifist. Much of her time was taken up with advancing opportunities for women both at school and as writers. It was a problem she repeatedly emphasized in her novels: women's frustration at their lack of opportunities.'In the mid 20's she began caring for a girl, a relative, Leslyn, and later adopted her. At age 54, she married William L Breese, a childhood friend and a widower. He was a wealthy banker and hosiery manufacturer. She also became a step mother to his daughter, Juliette. In mid-December 1938 she went to Chicago for medical treatment and contracted pneumonia a few days later. Zona Gale died of pneumonia in Passavant Hospital in Chicago on 27th December 1938.

Internationally bestselling author of The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger, and graphic artist Eddie Campbell, of such seminal works as From Hell by Alan Moore, collaborate on a wonderfully bizarre collection that celebrates and satirizes love of all kinds. With 16 different stories told through illustrated prose or comic panels, the couple explores the idiosyncratic nature of relationships in a variety of genres from fractured fairy tales to historical fiction to paper dolls. With Niffenegger's sharp, imaginative prose and Campbell's diverse comic styles, Bizarre Romance is the debut collection by two of the most important storytellers of our time.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • From the renowned author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, a spectacular volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, and other writings.Features “Family Treasures,” nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Short Story Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American writers of the last hundred years. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted. As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson's children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother's papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion. Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children's games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community—the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space.For the first time, this collection showcases Shirley Jackson's radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist. This volume includes a Foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.Praise for Let Me Tell You“Stunning.”—O: The Oprah Magazine“Let us now—at last—celebrate dangerous women writers: how cheering to see justice done with [this collection of] Shirley Jackson's heretofore unpublished works—uniquely unsettling stories and ruthlessly barbed essays on domestic life.”—Vanity Fair “Feels like an uncanny dollhouse: Everything perfectly rendered, but something deliciously not quite right.”—NPR “There are... times in reading [Jackson's] accounts of desperate women in their thirties slowly going crazy that she seems an American Jean Rhys, other times when she rivals even Flannery O'Connor in her cool depictions of inhumanity and insidious cruelty, and still others when she matches Philip K. Dick at his most hallucinatory. At her best, though, she's just incomparable.”—The Washington Post “Offers insights into the vagaries of [Jackson's] mind, which was ruminant and generous, accommodating such diverse figures as Dr. Seuss and Samuel Richardson.”—The New York Times Book Review“The best pieces clutch your throat, gently at first, and then with growing strength.... The whole collection has a timelessness.”—The Boston Globe“[Jackson's] writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has such enduring power—she brings out the darkness in life, the poltergeists shut into everyone's basement, and offers them up, bringing wit and even joy to the examination.”—USA Today“The closest we can get to sitting down and having a conversation with... one of the most original voices of her generation.”—The Huffington Post

A tribute to the author's mother Kitty, the gritty Chicago landscape of his youth, and the'ghost years, that time in your life you don't know won't never come again.'Barry Gifford has been writing the story of America in acclaimed novel after acclaimed novel for the last half-century. Almost all of the stories in Ghost Years takes place in the 1950s, examining the lives of women in that period—the suppression, the lack of opportunities, the dependency on men. Following his story collection, Roy's World, which inspired the documentary directed by Rob Christopher, narrated by Lili Taylor, Matt Dillon and Willem Dafoe, these stories show a childhood in mid-century America filled with innocence, grief, joy and wonder in equal measure.

A collection of stories that are off center in some way and range from the comic to the absurd to the relentlessly tragic.

Inspired by Victoria Kelly's experiences as the wife of a fighter pilot during three wartime deployments, this collection follows women whose lives have been impacted by war and military service as they struggle with their fragile ideas of home. In “Prayers of an American Wife,” a Navy wife grapples with loneliness when she discovers that her neighbor, also a Navy wife, is having an affair while their husbands are deployed on the same aircraft carrier. Tensions rise in “The Strangers of Dubai” as a soldier on leave tries to buy his wife a souvenir from an Afghan vendor. After attending eight funerals with fellow military wives whose husbands died in the Iraq war, the protagonist in “Finding the Good Light” divorces her Navy husband and tries to start a new life as a movie star. These, along with the eleven other stories in this collection, explore the emotional landscape of the resilient women who remain on the homefront. Kelly's stories offer readers an intimate, eye-opening look into the sacrifices and steadfastness of military family members.

Named a Public Picks 2023 by Public Books Long List for the 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 hotel, submariner and war criminal Nishina Sekio in his tortured dreams, and Edwin, a half-dolphin friend, wreaking havoc in a public pool. Written in the compressed style of Amy Hempel and Lucia Berlin, these stories examine characters whose struggles submerge them, weighing them down from every angle, until they can finally float free.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR • An emotionally rich collection of short stories, painting a fascinating portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora and a yearning rendering of the people and places we call home, from a major new literary talent.“A full-hearted, brilliant debut of necessary beauty.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars and New York Times bestseller Friday Black'Injam's stories made me want to cast all else aside and return home.” —Megha Majumdar, author of A BurningVivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world and in its American diaspora—all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home. Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Nishanth Injam's stories ques­tion what it means to have a home and to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as it is people who are ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus on the way to visit his parents as his fellow pas­sengers vanish into the restroom. A family, newly in America, determined to host a perfect luncheon for their son's white classmate—with no idea what to serve him. A woman who returns to a small vil­lage in India every summer to visit the grandfather who raised her, a man who lives with the ghosts of his son and his wife. And a man preparing for his green card interview with the American woman he has paid to marry him. A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to the United States from India in his twenties. The Best Possible Experience, his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal in­quiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing the home he left behind, before it was lost

A dazzling collection of short stories about North American outdoor life—both classic and contemporary—from James Fenimore Cooper and Jack London to Margaret Atwood and Anthony Doerr and many more.The North American landscape, in its rich and rugged variety, has inspired an equally wide and deep range of fiction over the past centuries. Diana Fuss has gathered a rich collection of timeless classics and contemporary discoveries summoning up our close and imagined encounters with all things wild.From the nineteenth century's Washington Irving (“Rip Van Winkle”) to the twenty-first century's Ted Chiang (“The Great Silence”)—a panoramic view of wilderness fiction, from Gothic tales of mystery and suspense (“The Heroic Slave” by Frederick Douglass), to tales of danger and survival (“Walking Out” by David Quammen); from modern tales of retreat and solitude (“Happiness” by Ron Carlson), to never-before-told tales of our new reality—of environment and extinction (“the river” by adrienne maree brown): these are stories that reveal the many ways in which the American literary landscape has shaped—and is shaped by—our conceptions of the wild. Diana Fuss nimbly shows, in her introductory text and commentary throughout, the development of the wilderness story, from its emergence in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Young Goodman Brown”) and James Fenimore Cooper (“A Panther Tale”), to the height of its popularity in the stories of Jack London (“To Build a Fire”), to the environmentally conscious writing of T. C. Boyle (“After the Plague”) and Karen Russell (“St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”).Among those whose work appears in the collection: Wallace Stegner, Annie Proulx, Ambrose Bierce, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, L. Frank Baum, Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and Ray Bradbury.

This “gorgeous, electric” collection of short stories is about the inner lives of young women during their transformative twenties, navigating relationships, nostalgia for the past, and the uncertainty of the future (Mary-Beth Hughes, author of The Ocean House). With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships—with friends, roommates, siblings—while trying to move forward into an uncertain future. In “That Is Shocking,” a college student relates a darkly funny story of romantic humiliation, one that skirts the parallel story of a friend she betrayed. In others, young women long for friends who have moved away, or moved on. In “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote” and other linked stories about siblings Helen, Evan, and Grace, their years of inside jokes and brutal tensions simmer over as the three spend a holiday season in an amusing whirl of rivalry and mutual attachment, and a generational gulf widens between them and their parents. Throughout, in stories both lyrical and haunting, young women search for ways to break free from the expectations of others and find a way to be in the world. Written with crystalline prose and sly humor, the stories in I Meant It Once build to complete a profoundly recognizable portrait of early adulthood and the ways in which seemingly incidental moments can come to define the stories we tell ourselves. For fans of Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, and Melissa Bank, these stories about being young and adrift in today's world go down easy and pack a big punch.

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America's most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, best-selling author of BlondeA brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection's longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates's standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.

“A powerful and provocative debut collection” (The New York Times Book Review) by “a startling talent who can seemingly do anything” (Anthony Marra) that explores the lives of ordinary people in Turkey to reveal how even individual acts of resistance have extraordinary repercussions.“I Am My Country employs many different literary styles and voices to dazzling effect.”—The AtlanticFINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE • AN ELECTRIC LIT AND LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Spanning decades and landscapes, from the forests along the Black Sea to the streets of Istanbul, Kenan Orhan's ​playful stories ​conjure dreamlike worlds—of talking animals, flying houses, and omniscient prayer-callers—to ​examine humanity's unfaltering pursuit of hope in even the darkest circumstances.A determined florist trains a neighborhood stray dog to blow up a corrupt president. A garbage collector finds banned instruments—and later, musicians—in the trash and takes them home to form a clandestine orchestra in her attic. A smuggler risks his life to bring a young woman claiming to be pregnant via immaculate conception across the border with Syria. A poor cage-maker tries to use his ability to talk to birds to woo his childhood love just before the 1955 Istanbul pogrom. These characters are united by a desperate yearning to break free from the volatile realities they face: rising authoritarianism, cultural and political turmoil, and staggering violence.Ranging from the absurd to the tenderhearted, the stories in I Am My Country illuminate the constant force amid one country's history of rampant oppression and revolutionary progress: the impulse to survive.

From “master of language” (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman, a reissue of the revered trilogy that launched his career—two novels and story collection all set in Wideman's own hometown.Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday provide a stunning introduction to the uncompromising work of John Edgar Wideman, whose literary achievements have inspired The New York Times to name him “one of America's premier writers of fiction.” Damballah's narratives examine the vexed history of Homewood, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania neighborhood whose origins are rooted in a time when slavery was still legal in the United States of America. The novels Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday personalize and interrogate that history's presence in the contemporary lives of Homewood people and all Americans. Deeply concerned that designations such as “economically oppressed” or “Black” continue to dismiss and marginalize rather than embrace communities like the one in which he was raised, John Edgar Wideman—employing words on the page as his weapon—has dedicated himself to recording the weight, beauty, complexity, and justice that he believes Homewood's voices, stories, and lives have earned and deserve. In 1983, The Homewood Trilogy signaled the arrival of a major voice in American literature. Forty years later, this edition of the Trilogy celebrates Wideman's ongoing contribution by offering these masterworks to a new generation of readers.

A carefully curated selection of stories from'one of the foremothers of 20th-century literature and feminist thought'(The New York Times), known for her deep emotional acuity and nuanced depictions of womenToday, Kate Chopin is widely considered a pioneering and influential feminist voice in American letters. Her fiction, though not embraced in her day, has endured into our own, and grapples with fundamental questions of marriage, sexuality, race, and the role of women in a modern society. The nine stories collected here elaborate on Chopin's timeless themes while evoking the rich Louisiana setting so often featured in her work.

A thrilling new story collection from acclaimed writer Don Lee exploring Asian American identity, spanning decades and continents'Don Lee is one of those masterful storytellers who is both classic and modern, who can transport you into any setting, with any character.'—The TODAY Show, recommended by author Weike Wang'The organizing conceit of all [Lee's] fiction has remained consistent: Asian Americans are not monoliths... Lee narrates from a collective perspective, his stories offering a kaleidoscopic vision of all the ways it feels to be yellow.'—New York Times Book Review'Nine stories feature complicated Asian American characters living insightfully depicted lives in the worlds of moviemaking, restaurants, and bedrooms.'—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review'Familiar joy is immediate as one reenters Lee's signature worlds of brilliant resonance and quiet depth. In his first short story collection since his lauded Yellow debut, Lee again questions identity, unlikely relationships, and fleeting connections... While Lee's devotees will joyfully relish casually dropped references to previous titles, new readers should savor plenty of first-time delight.'—Booklist, STARRED review'The Partition is flat-out brilliant: a witty, kaleidoscopic tear through questions of race and identity in America today by a writer who has wrought luminous fiction from these issues for years. Don Lee's collection offers vivid, entertaining proof that ethnicity is never straightforward or easy—no matter who we are, or where we stand.'—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad Twenty-one years after the publication of his landmark debut collection Yellow, Don Lee returns to the short story form for his sixth book, The Partition.The Partition is an updated exploration of Asian American identity, this time with characters who are presumptive model minorities in the arts, academia, and media. Spanning decades, these nine novelistic stories traverse an array of cities, from Tokyo to Boston, Honolulu to El Paso, touching upon transient encounters in local bars, restaurants, and hotels.Culminating in a three-story cycle about a Hollywood actor, The Partition incisively examines heartbreak, identity, family, and relationships—the characters searching for answers to universal questions: Where do I belong? How can I find love? What defines an authentic self?

'We are all now writing stories. Sometimes in memory, sometimes in air. The wind lifts and passes us in gusts. Our stories scatter over continents, camouflaged histories we cannot share.'In Being Here, Manini Nayar brings together a finely crafted collection of interconnected stories that follow'the daily miracle'of her characters'inner lives. Nayar brings to the forefront immigrant women making their way in the world as mothers, as wives, as outliers, and as rebels. She writes about their insistence on autonomy, the absurdity of the struggles they face, and their occasional triumphs.These stories loop and double back across time and locales, linking characters through memory while illumining lives forever changed by an offhand phrase, an act of will, or an unsought encounter. Readers will meet a wide array of characters, but it is Nina with whom they will become most familiar, as she appears throughout the collection: first, as a young wife brought to the US by her husband, Siddharth Vellodi; second, as an older sister; and third, as a divorced mother whose daughter's fateful rebellion remains the mysterious and incandescent center of the stories. Nayar's exploration of inward lives as the locus of dramatic action and events allows both characters and readers to grapple with simply being. In doing so, Nayar reveals the performative aspects of language—particularly its ability to create, destroy, and heal connections.In poetic and eloquent prose, Being Here constructs a luminous collage of restless immigrants united by their shared deference to a brave new journey. In their burgeoning voices another America is found, both latent and radiantly alive.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The prestigious annual story anthology includes prize-winning stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lorrie Moore, Olga Tokarczuk, Joseph O'Neill, and Samanta Schweblin.'Widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction.'—The Atlantic MonthlyContinuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence, this year's edition contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Guest editor Valeria Luiselli has brought her own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and emerging voices and including stories in translation from Bengali, Greek, Hebrew, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Luiselli, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL.THE WINNING STORIES:“Screen Time,” by Alejandro Zambra,translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell“The Wolves of Circassia,” by Daniel Mason“Mercedes's Special Talent,” by Tere Dávila,translated from the Spanish by Rebecca Hanssens-Reed“Rainbows,” by Joseph O'Neill“A Way with Bea,” by Shanteka Sigers“Seams,” by Olga Tokarczuk,translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft “The Little Widow from the Capital,” by Yohanca Delgado“Lemonade,” by Eshkol Nevo,translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston “Breastmilk,” by ‘Pemi Aguda“The Old Man of Kusumpur,” by Amar Mitra,translated from the Bengali by Anish Gupta“Where They Always Meet,” by Christos Ikonomou,translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich“Fish Stories,” by Janika Oza“Horse Soup,” by Vladimir Sorokin,translated from the Russian by Max Lawton“Clean Teen,” by Francisco González“Dengue Boy,” by Michel Nieva,translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer“Zikora,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie“Apples,” by Gunnhild Øyehaug,translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson “Warp and Weft,” by David Ryan“Face Time,” by Lorrie Moore“An Unlucky Man,” by Samanta Schweblin,translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Transformation, identity, and speech that conceals and misleads as much as it explains form the core of these fourteen linked stories and novelettes. We are guided through them by “Iris” and her friend “Jacob,” who, over the course of the book, appear in a variety of guises. They introduce, interact with, or inhabit various characters, each with their own stories to tell. In the romantic, dark, and sometimes surreal worlds they occupy, the commonplace is beautiful and often absurd, reality is a mutually agreed upon illusion, and life is painful, comic, paradoxical, and brief. A young American woman treks through Europe's great cities working as a living statue; a renowned Chekhov tale is at last translated into Pig Latin; a house full of surrealists compete for love on a reality TV show; a list of fortune cookie messages reveals the inner world of the young man employed to write them. And a story of love and heartbreak is told through sentence diagrams on a fifth grader's grammar test. Romantic, ironic, with notes of the surreal, Droll Tales is a winning entertainment in Smyles's singular style, enriched by art history, philosophy, literature, and pop culture, with the mystery of the human heart at its center.

A childhood in the 1950s and ‘60s among grifters, show girls, and mob enforcers who embraced the boy and made him who he is.“These stories make for one of the most important and moving American bildungsromans of all time.” —William Boyle, The Southwest Review Roy tells it the way he sees it, shuttled between Chicago to Key West and Tampa, Havana and Jackson MS, usually with his mother Kitty, often in the company of lip-sticked women and fast men. Roy is the muse of Gifford's hardboiled style, a precocious child, watching the grown-ups try hard to save themselves, only to screw up again and again. He takes it all in, every waft of perfume and cigar smoke, every missed opportunity to do the right thing. And then there are the good things too. A fishing trip with Uncle Buck, a mother's love, advice from Rudy, Roy's father: “Roy means king. Be the king of your own country. Don't depend on anyone to do your thinking for you.” The stories in The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea are together a love letter and a tribute to the childhood experiences that ground a life. In the Author's note, Gifford writes,“I have often been asked if I were interested in writing my memoirs or an autobiography. Given that the Roy stories come as close as I care to come regarding certain circumstances, I remain comfortable with their verisimilitude. They all dwell within the boundary of fiction. As I have explained elsewhere, these are stories, I made them up. Roy ages from about five years old to late adolescence. After that, with the exception of a sighting in Veracruz, I have no idea what happened to him.” “The way Barry Gifford lets people talk articulates everything about their unfamiliar inner lives, and ours.'—Boston Globe

Thirteen O'Clock: Stories of Several Worlds is a collection of Benét's finest and most famous short stories, including “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936), “By the Waters of Babylon” (1937), and “The King of the Cats” (1929). The complete contents consists of: By the Waters of BabylonThe Blood of the MartyrsThe King of the CatsA Story by Angela PoeThe Treasure of Vasco GomezThe Curfew TollsThe Sobbin'WomenThe Devil and Daniel WebsterDaniel Webster and the Sea SerpentGlamourEverybody was Very NiceA Death in the CountryBlossom and Fruit Introduction by Karl Wurf.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS'CHOICEAn incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longingIn fifteen masterful stories, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires—Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau—a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most. Whether set in Tuten's beloved Lower East Side, Rome's Borghese Gardens, or a French seaside resort, these stories shift seamlessly between the poignancy of memory into the logic of fairytales or dreams, demonstrating Tuten's exceptional ability to transmute his passion for art and life to the page.

Named a book of the year 2022 by the Sunday Times, The Times, Guardian, Irish Times, New Statesman, BBC and Waterstones'One of the best science fiction short stories to be published in the 21st century so far'SFX Review'Saunders is funny and kind as ever, and his narrative virtuosity puts him up there with the best'Anne Enright, Guardian'A triumph of storytelling'i paper'A joy. Effortlessly stylish, funny and smart'Daily Mail____________The first short story collection in ten years from the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the BardoMacArthur genius and Booker Prize-winner George Saunders returns with a collection of short stories that make sense of our increasingly troubled world, his first since the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist Tenth of DecemberThe'best short story writer in English'(Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose - wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned - Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.'Love Letter'is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the not-too-distant future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and each other.'Ghoul'is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado, and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his'reality.'In'Mother's Day', two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. And in'Elliott Spencer', our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed - his memory'scraped'- a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention as Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.____________'The only way to experience Saunders's oblique, farcical, tragic world is to dive right in. It will take the top of your head off, but it's worth it'The Times'The world's best short story writer … Liberation Day is great art'Daily Telegraph

A short fiction collection that deconstructs whiteness by retelling Greek, Roman, and Christian myths, concepts, and characters through a contemporary lens that reads whiteness into history as a force of destruction for white characters.

Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean's reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States. Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a decent life. Here you'll find stolen children living life to the fullest on the run and on the road, soldiers guarding empty frontiers, and rugged individualists brought low by an uncaring nature. You'll find prehistoric beasts rubbing talons with hustlers as well as death machines lurking beneath the bucolic countryside. Here you'll find hatred, friendship, and pitch-black humor all seething in the same stew. Get'em Young, Treat'em Tough, Tell'em Nothing marries the sardonic moral and political explorations of a Flannery O'Connor to the surreal, scuzzy wit of a Denis Johnson. It is a brazen State of the Union for a nation on the edge.

“A knockout short story collection...Each one of these 10 dizzyingly immersive stories offers up a heady and visceral portrait of what ails us, from isolation and self-doubt, to unrequited love and regret over what might have been, to what it means to be (and to be considered) an American.'-- San Francisco ChronicleMeng Jin's critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories.Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly endless access to knowledge, and little actual power.Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who “reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it” (Paris Review).

In Admit This to No One, we meet a group of women connected to a central figure either personally or professionally, and for better or for worse—an all-powerful and elusive Speaker of the House, whose political career has only stopped short of being Presidential due to his myriad extra-marital affairs. The Speaker's daughters from his several failed marriages have a complicated relationship with him to say the least—alternating between longing for his affection or bristling with resentment, and occasionally relief at being left out of the spotlight. His oldest daughter Lexie, from his “real family, the first one,” once his favorite who knew the real him, is now an adult who has blown up her career due to a sex scandal of her own. His long-time fixer and keeper of secrets, Mary-Grace, is relentless and uncompromising in her devotion to him, making the lives of the interns and aides under her purview in the Capitol miserable. When the Speaker's life is in danger, the disparate women in his life will collide for the first time, but can their relationships be repaired? These stories show us how Washington, D.C.'s true currency is power, but power is inextricable from oppression— D.C. is a city divided, not just by red or blue, right or left, but Black and white. Segregated by income and opportunity, but also physically by bridges and rivers, and police vehicles, Leslie Pietrzyk casts an unflinching and exacting gaze on her characters, as they grapple with the ways they have upheld white supremacy and misogyny. Shocking and profound, Pietrzyk writes with an emotional urgency about what happens when the bonds of family and duty are pushed to the limit, and how if individuals re-evaluate their own beliefs and actions there is a path forward.

Zona Gale was born on 26th August 1874 in Portage, Wisconsin. She was exceptionally close to her parents and later used them as the basis for characters in her works. She wrote and illustrated her first story at the age of 7 and by 16 she was being paid for stories from the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin. After studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she received a degree and two master's, she moved to New York and a job at the New York World newspaper. She was later hired as a secretary to Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, critic, essayist, banker, and scientist. and immersed herself in his literary circle.Gale returned to Portage in 1903 and realized her old world was full of new possibilities. She now dedicated herself to full-time writing.Her first novel ‘Romance Island'was published in 1906 and she also began the popular ‘Friendship Village'series of stories. In 1920 came ‘Miss Lulu Bett', which depicts life in the Mid-West. Adapted into a play it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. It was a stellar achievement.After the deaths of her parents her works, both fiction and non-fiction, drifted towards mysticism and her belief that problems could be solved through a kind of transcendentalist enlightenment.Gale was a suffragist, a liberal Democrat, an active member of the National Woman's Party and a pacifist. Much of her time was taken up with advancing opportunities for women both at school and in careers. It was a cause she repeatedly emphasized in her novels: women's frustration at their lack of opportunities.In the mid 20's she began caring for a young girl relative, Leslyn, and later adopted her. At age 54, she married William L Breese, a childhood friend. Now a widower, he was a wealthy banker and hosiery manufacturer. She also became a step-mother to his daughter, Juliette. In mid-December 1938 she went to Chicago for medical treatment and contracted pneumonia a few days later. Zona Gale died of pneumonia in Passavant Hospital in Chicago on 27th December 1938. She was 64.

WINNER OF FC2's CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE A 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.

Cabbages and Kings (1904) is a novel by American writer O. Henry. Inspired by his experiences as a fugitive in Honduras, the interconnected stories that make up Cabbages and Kings—the title refers to a line from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass—address themes of revolution, imperialism, exploitation, and greed. The novel is significant not only for launching O. Henry's career as a successful professional writer, but for coining the term “banana republic,” now frequently used to describe the influence of American fruit companies over such nations as Honduras. In the fictional nation of Anchuria, the political reality and social life of its people are under attack—from within and without. An American businessman in the coastal town of Coralio receives a telegram from the capital city of San Mateo announcing that there has been a revolution. President Miraflores has fled to the coast, taking with him $100,000 from the federal reserve. Sensing opportunity, Goodwin gathers a posse to hunt down the fugitive leader, tracking him to a nondescript inn in Coralio. Cornered, Miraflores kills himself, and Goodwin elopes with the President's lover, taking the money with them. Although a liberal government has successfully risen to power, widespread corruption and deep poverty threaten to thrust Anchuria into further chaos. Cabbages and Kings is a collection of stories centered on this troubled tropical nation, where greed supersedes honor and the interests of the people are sold to the highest bidder. Despite or perhaps because of its critique of American influence in Latin America, Cabbages and Kings was a critical and commercial success for O. Henry, establishing his reputation as a master storyteller with a profound sense of right and wrong, and everything in between. This edition of O. Henry's Cabbages and Kings is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Whirligigs (1910) is a collection of short stories by American writer O. Henry. Inspired by his experiences as a fugitive and in prison, these stories address themes of poverty and provincial life with humor and abundant empathy. “The Ransom of Red Chief,” the most notable of the collection's twenty-four stories, is considered one of Henry's finest works and has been adapted numerous times for television and film. “The Ransom of Red Chief” follows two petty criminals named Bill and Sam, who devise a plan to hold an influential citizen's son for ransom. They kidnap Johnny Dorset, a ten-year-old boy who soon takes a liking to the pair and gives himself the name “Red Chief.” As Bill and Sam attempt to collect their ransom money, the Red Chief subjects them to tiring games and pranks, causing the two criminals to regret their hasty decision. In “The Whirligig of Life,” a story set in a frontier settlement near the Cumberland Mountains, a Justice of the Peace officiates a divorce between two quarreling settlers. He charges them five dollars for the ceremony, but when the husband realizes he has no money left for alimony, the judge looks for ways to hold onto his hard-earned wages. Whirligigs is a collection of humorous stories by O. Henry, an icon of short story writing. This edition of O. Henry's Whirligigs is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Three of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novels of the Jazz Age in one volume.F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories are emblematic of the Lost Generation, which came of age in the years following World War I. Along with The Great Gatsby—Fitzgerald's most well-known novel—this volume also includes his earlier works, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. Each novel presents the aura of the Jazz Age in a different context, painting a wide-ranging picture of the uncertainty and upheaval faced by Americans at the time. This classic collection also includes a scholarly introduction about Fitzgerald's life and work, offering insights into his creative genius.

Love, ambition, and wealth take center stage in this collection of classic stories from the Jazz Age.Often described as the “Great American Novel,” F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is the quintessential story of love, ambition, and wealth in the Roaring Twenties. In the Long Island village of West Egg, the rich and mysterious Jay Gatsby pursues the now-married Daisy Buchanan, whom he last saw five years ago, before amassing his fortune. Along with the eleven short stories from Fitzgerald's collection Tales of the Jazz Age—including “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”—this Word Cloud edition makes a fine addition to anyone's bookshelf.

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation.

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation.

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation.

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation.

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation.

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation.

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation.

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation.

With Death and So Forth, esteemed writer and editor Gordon Lish returns with a new book of scintillating short fiction. With his trademark precision, wit, and wiliness, Lish writes outside the margins and around the edges of the death, loss, and the fractiousness and fragmentation of language. Death and So Forth collects a number of Lish's acclaimed stories and introduces eight new fictions, including a tribute to Denis Johnson and so many others lost in the course of a long life. Brilliant and sharp-eyed, this is a treasure for fans of Gordon Lish, new and lifelong.

“Here is how monstrous humans are.” A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men: of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson's award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.

African futurism, gothic romance, ghost story, parable, psychological thriller, inner-space fiction—Dumas's stories form a vivid, expansive portrait of Black life in America. Henry Dumas's fabulist fiction is a masterful synthesis of myth and religion, culture and nature, mask and identity, the present and the ancestral. From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on real, magical, and mythic quests. Humming with life, Dumas's stories create a collage of mid-twentieth-century Black experiences, interweaving religious metaphor, African cosmologies, diasporic folklore, and America's history of slavery and systemic racism.

“Culled from 30 years as one of America's most distinctive fictional voices... 36 affecting and inventive stories that dance around the Faulknerian world she's created.... Within these stories there exist Erdrich's poetic sentences and humane sensibility—and always another surprise on the next page.” — Boston GlobeA collection of breathtaking power and originality by one of the most innovative and exciting writers of our dayIn Louise Erdrich's fictional world, the mystical can emerge from the everyday, the comic can turn suddenly tragic, and violence and splendor inhabit a single emotional landscape. The fantastic twists and leaps of her imagination are made all the more meaningful by the deeper truth of human feeling that underlies them. These thirty-six short works selected by the author herself—including five previously unpublished stories—are ordered chronologically as well as by theme and voice, each tale spellbinding in its boldness and beauty. The Red Convertible is a stunning literary achievement, the collected brilliance of a fearless and inventive writer.

The Sadness of Whirlwinds explores the world as we know it but tinged with magical possibilities that challenge our expectations. A small dog leads a man into the backyard of a blind woman who has drawn him forth from a forgotten past. A man becomes trapped between walls in his favorite restaurant. The author of a book of questions meets the author of a book that has the answers. An encounter with Mr. Death offers insights into Mrs. Birth. A woman unhappy with her life enters into an exploration of the world of whirlwinds. A man decides he must leave his dog lying beside him on the couch in order to enter the Inward City. A man travels to the remote and eccentric country of Fallada and meets the beautiful, bewildering woman known as Keeva. A woman must break through the boundaries of her comfortable grief in order to face an irascible man and unravel the mystery of her stolen dog. These and other explorations into the unknown make up the character of this new collection by Jim Peterson. Mysterious and challenging, these tales invite readers to their own inquiries into the nature of reality.

From the author of the “enthralling” (New York Times Book Review) and “beautiful” (Washington Post) debut novel The Vexations comes an exciting new story collection that is “perfect for fans of George Saunders and Karen Russell” (Booklist), moving boldly between the real and the surrealA New York Times Book Review Editors'ChoiceLonglisted for the Joyce Carol Oates PrizeFollowing her “marvelous” (Wall Street Journal) first novel, Caitlin Horrocks returns with a much-anticipated collection of short stories. In her signature, genre-defying style, she explodes our notions of what a story can do and where it can take us. Life Among the Terranauts demonstrates all the inventiveness that won admirers for Horrocks's first collection. In “The Sleep,” reprinted in Best American Short Stories, residents of a town in the frigid Midwest decide to hibernate through the bitter winters. In the title story, half a dozen people move into an experimental biodome for a shot at a million dollars, if they can survive two years. And in “Sun City,” published in The New Yorker, a young woman meets her grandmother's roommate in the wake of her death and attempts to solve the mystery of whether the two women were lovers.As the Boston Globe noted of her first collection, Horrocks is a master of “wild yet delicately handled satire,” a “sprightly heartbreak” in which she is able to “mingle a note of tenderness in the desolation.” With its startling range—from Norwegian trolls to Peruvian tour guides—Life Among the Terranauts once again dazzles readers, cementing Horrocks's reputation as one of the premier young writers of our time.

A collection of the year's best stories selected by celebrated two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn WardIn her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2021, guest editor Jesmyn Ward says that the best fiction offers the reader a “sense of repair.” The stories in this year's collection accomplish just that, immersing the reader in powerfully imagined worlds and allowing them to bring some of that power into their own lives. From a stirring portrait of Rodney King's final days to a surreal video game set in the Middle East, with real consequences, to an indigenous boy's gripping escape from his captors, this collection renders profoundly empathetic depictions of the variety of human experience. These stories are poignant reminders of the possibilities of fiction: as you sink into world after world, become character after character, as Ward writes, you “forget yourself, and then, upon surfacing, know yourself and others anew.'The Best American Short Stories 2021 includes GABRIEL BUMP • BRANDON HOBSON • DAVID MEANS• JANE PEK • TRACEY ROSE PEYTON • GEORGE SAUNDERS • BRYAN WASHINGTON • KEVIN WILSON • C PAM ZHANG and others

A fearless, darkly playful debut exploring the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness. What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? Gender dysphoria? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness?Finding themselves in disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls, women, and non-binary characters in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition.Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, Girls of a Certain Age captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work.

Twenty prizewinning stories selected from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year—continuing the O. Henry Prize's century-long tradition of literary excellence.'Widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction.'—The Atlantic Monthly.Now entering its second century, the prestigious annual story anthology has a new title, a new look, and a new guest editor. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has brought her own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and young emerging voices. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Adichie, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction.Featured in this collection: Daphne Palasi Andreades • David Means • Sindya Bhanoo • Crystal Wilkinson • Alice Jolly • David Rabe • Karina Sainz Borgo (translator, Elizabeth Bryer) • Jamel Brinkley • Tessa Hadley • Adachioma Ezeano • Anthony Doerr • Tiphanie Yanique • Joan Silber • Jowhor Ile • Emma Cline • Asali Solomon • Ben Hinshaw • Caroline Albertine Minor (translator, Caroline Waight) • Jianan Qian • Sally Rooney