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Muyu, a seventeen-year-old from a small village, came to Beijing for his piece of the dream: money, love, a good life. But in the city, daily life for him and his friends—purveyors of fake IDs and counterfeit papers—is a precarious balance of struggle and guile. Surveying the neighborhood from the rooftop of the apartment they all share, the young men play cards, drink beer, and discuss their aspirations, hoping for the best but expecting little more than the comfort of each other's company. In these connected stories translated from Chinese by Eric Abrahamsen and Jeremy Tiang, Xu's characters observe as others like them—workers, students, drifters, and the just plain unlucky—get by the best ways they know how: by jogging excessively, herding pigeons, building cars from scraps, and holding their friends close through the miasma of so-called progress.

Sixteen irreverent and inventive fictions that riff on rock and rap mythology to envisage alternate paths for music legends who died young.What if Biggie Smalls had survived the assassin's bullets and reinvented hip-hop with the help of an avant-garde luminary? If Amy Winehouse had shaken off her demons and channeled her inner Barbra Streisand into a new life on a tropical island? If Jeff Buckley had been pulled alive from the Mississippi by a devilish hand and become a pioneer of Southern black metal?With accompanying illustrations by Jeb Loy Nichols, Mark Swartz's stories imagine what might have happened to these stars and more—including Jimi Hendrix, Gram Parsons, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, Lhasa de Sela, Lil Peep, and Jim Morrison—if their untimely deaths had been averted, or somehow had not been the end of their lives. Booklist praised Mark Swartz's fiction for its “lithe satirical humor, impressive intellectual dimension, and sly provocation,” and these qualities are on full display in these at once heartfelt and borderline absurd tales.

The story of one village, nestled in the Thai jungle, that has fallen under the spell of a mysterious religious leader—and the story of a family's defiance. In the village of Praeknamdang, a ten-year-old boy has big dreams of becoming a renowned shadow puppeteer. He and his parents, however, are the objects of a powerful man's rancor as they alone dare to doubt his claim of being the local goddess's medium. One summer day, while out in the fields grazing his beloved oxen and putting on a show for his friends, the boy finds himself locked in a struggle with a giant king cobra, a snake the influential pretender would claim was sent by the goddess to punish him and his family. Set in the same world as Sangsuk's beloved novel The Understory, Venom is a parable about an underdog's fight in a world that conspires against him.

Candid and unfettered, Sven Popović's Last Night is a playfully existential meditation on youth and the search for the self. Acclaimed in his native Croatia, Popović's unique blend of intimacy and contemplation has garnered him a following in the alternative literary scene of Zagreb—and beyond. With an intellectualism that never takes itself too seriously, an unaffected fluidity of form, and a keen eye for the smallest, strangest moments that color our lives, his stories weave an offbeat tapestry of urban life. Last Night is the first short story collection from Sven Popović, whose writing was previously featured in Dalkey Archive Press's Best European Fiction 2017, and his first full work to be released in English. Slickly translated by Vinko Zgaga, Popović's sometimes-dreamlike, sometimes-conversational vignettes offer a shrewd, original outlook on life's absurdities.

DeMisty D. Bellinger's debut story collection covers queer liaisons and trysts, love bordering on the absurd, and awe-worthy finds in the familiar, the familial, and the mundane. These stories'protagonists, mostly women, often unexpectedly redefine themselves in intimate circumstances.

Korean writer Ch'oe Myŏngik was a lifelong resident of Pyongyang, a city his short stories masterfully evoke in exquisite modernist prose. His career spanned decades of tumult, from his debut in the 1930s while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule through the Asia-Pacific and Korean Wars and the early years of the Democratic People's Republic. As Pyongyang transformed from Korea's second city, peripheral to the Seoul-centered literary scene, into a socialist capital in the late 1940s, Ch'oe briefly ascended to the center of North Korean culture. Despite the vitality and originality of Ch'oe's writing, Cold War politics and censorship, including South Korea's anticommunist laws, consigned his work to obscurity.Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories presents a selection of Ch'oe's short fiction in translation, including later works from hard-to-find North Korean publications. These cinematic, keenly observed tales explore Pyongyang in meticulous detail, depicting the city's transformations and the conflicts between old and new. They pay close attention to the lives of the disaffected and the marginalized: a drifter confronts a former revolutionary dying of opium addiction; a sex worker is trafficked across the border aboard a train, amid the indifference of her fellow passengers. Later stories provide a striking glimpse of the Korean War—the occupation of Pyongyang, U.S. fighter jets bombing civilian refugees, guerrilla heroics—from a North Korean perspective. Hidden treasures of world literature, these stories offer new perspectives on Korea's turbulent twentieth century, across political divides still in place today.

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024 • From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor Zach Williams comes a striking and savage debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life's broken promises.A couple awakens in a home in the woods to find themselves rapidly aging as their toddler remains unchanged. A work-worn employee navigates conspiracy theories and the threat of violence in an abandoned office. A tour guide leads a troublesome group to an ancient structure, apparently nonhuman in origin, discovering along the way that the most mysterious creatures of all are right beside him.These ten stories show the fallibility of time and how reality reveals itself behind the gauze of a dream—or a nightmare. Throughout, Williams illustrates how quickly we come to the edges of our patience and endurance, the hidden damages lurking in the shadows of the everyday, the distances we must travel to protect our families, and the tenuousness of even our deepest relationships. Williams sees the perversity in the mundane and dares readers to confront the power—and beauty—of time's relentless movement.With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of being human and refuses to let us look away.

An office worker who has no one to eat lunch with enrolls in a course that builds confidence about eating alone. A man with a pathological fear of bedbugs offers up his body to save his building from infestation. A time capsule in Seoul is dug up hundreds of years before it was intended to be unearthed. A vending machine repairman finds himself trapped in a shrinking motel during a never-ending snowstorm.In these and other indelible short stories, contemporary South Korean author Yun Ko-eun conjures up slightly off-kilter worlds tucked away in the corners of everyday life. Her fiction is bursting with images that toe the line between realism and the fantastic. Throughout Table for One, comedy and an element of the surreal are interwoven with the hopelessness and loneliness that pervades the protagonists'decidedly mundane lives. Yun's stories focus on solitary city dwellers, and her eccentric, often dreamlike humor highlights their sense of isolation. Mixing quirky and melancholy commentary on densely packed urban life, she calls attention to the toll of rapid industrialization and the displacement of traditional culture. Acquainting the English-speaking audience with one of South Korea's breakout young writers, Table for One presents a parade of misfortunes that speak to all readers in their unconventional universality.

A runaway circus lion haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages. A junket to Cuba and an ambassador's dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. “I've always had a knife,” says the unstable stepson to his parents. Inventive, dark, and absurd, the stories in The Long Swim capture Terese Svoboda's clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Her characters strive for escape—through romance, travel, or more self-destructive pursuits—and collide with the constraints of family and home, their longing for freedom and autonomy often at odds with the desire for safety and harmony. Cynical, irreverent, and formally daring, Svoboda's stories in The Long Swim are a deft exploration of womanhood and humanity. Waves of provocation and wonder toss the reader and leave them wanting more.

Professional Lola is a collection of short stories that blend literary fiction with the surreal to present the contemporary Filipino American experience and its universal themes of love, family, and identity. A family hires an actress to play their beloved grandmother at a party; a couple craving Filipino food rob a panaderya; a coven of Filipino witches cast a spell on their husbands; a Lolo transforms into a Lola. These are just a few of the stories in the collection that represent its roster of stories beautifully grounded in culture and vividly and meticulously painted to make the absurd seem mundane and the commonplace, sinister. Professional Lola embodies the joy, mystery, humor, sadness, hunger, and family that inhabit modern-day Filipino American virtues.

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in FictionThanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capitol, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went “okay”). Grouped by types of riot—external riots, internal riots, and laugh riots—Thanks for This Riot is a poignant and mordantly funny collection with a distinctly feminist viewpoint.

Eight authors'works of personal nonfiction join with ten stories by Karen Tei Yamashita to illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small.Faced with a scant historical record, Karen Tei Yamashita turns to fiction to animate the secrets of Santa Cruz, the city she's called home for nearly three decades. Her characters come alive through her signature witty humor and surreal premises, transcending the past and urging themselves into the present to illuminate a hidden geography of this California coastal city unseen in textbooks.Alongside these stories, eight nonfiction writers chart their own counternarratives of place through the greater United States. Diverging and converging in their scale and scope, from an unnamed lot on the bank of the Ohio River to the territory of Guam, their essays use language as an instrument of excavation, uncovering layers of hurt and desire concealed in the land.

An abandoned construction site. Glowering pits and furnaces. A lone man in a bungalow. Widely considered to be one of the great German writers of the twentieth century, Wolfgang Hilbig's dark visions have long held readers aloft with their musical language and uncompromising vision of the modern world. In Under the Neomoon, his debut short story collection originally published in East Germany in 1982, Hilbig's persistent fixations—factory pits, rampant nature, and split identities—are at their most visceral and brilliant. Rendered into English by Hilbig's longtime translator Isabel Fargo Cole, these short tales apply fluorescent language (“garlands of cast-iron flowers,” “tall dark-green water grasses”) to lives and spaces of foreclosed dreams. An electric collection that evokes the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingeborg Bachmann, Under the Neomoon is a neon-bright reminder of humanity's folly and the importance of storytelling from down below, where the workers toil.

Eclectic, experimental, and wildly imaginative climate fictions from a familiar world hauntingly transformed Climate disaster–induced fugue states, mutinous polar bears, support groups for recently displaced millionaires, men who hear trees, and women who lose their wives on environmental refugee resettlement trips. In these dispatches from a weirding world, the absurd and fantastic are increasingly indistinguishable from reality. Exploring this liminal moment, Ashley Shelby's collection of climate fictions imagines a near future that is both unnervingly familiar and subversively strange. Set in the same post-climate-impact era, these stories range from playfully satirical to poignantly humane, bending traditional narrative forms and coming together into a brilliant and unusual contemplation of our changing world. Featuring the Hugo-nominated novelette “Muri,” Honeymoons in Temporary Locations processes the unthinkable through riotous inventions like guided tours of submerged cities, Craigslist ads placed by climate refugees, and cynical pharmaceutical efforts to market a drug to treat solastalgia, the existential distress caused by environmental change. Shelby reengineers the dystopic bleakness that characterizes so much climate fiction by embracing an eclectic experimentalism leavened with humor, irony, and the inevitable bathos that characterizes the human experience. Unexpected and clever, this innovative collection confirms her status as a visionary writer whose work expands the forms, attitudes, and possibilities of climate fiction.

A carpenter does verbal battle with God over his son's early death. A young man haunted by his cousin's suicide has an opportunity to redeem himself of his former negligence; an alcoholic reunites with the man who ruined his marriage, and discovers more than he bargained for in the child he may or may not have fathered. A mother attempts to comfort her daughter after her son-in-law drowns in the Gulf of Mexico and finds herself strangely implicated. After a school shooting, a college professor becomes obsessed with vengeance, but not for the first time. A veteran tasked with driving his daughter to an abortion clinic is forced to acknowledge painful truths about his own history of love; a woman recalls night-hikes to a rescue zoo with the troubled boy who shifted the arc of her life; a widow has the foundation torn out from beneath her when she discovers her husband's long-term infidelity. And in the title story, a pair of cousins flee the Vietnam draft only to find that there is no escape from what they most fear. The characters in Palindrome find themselves boomeranged into situations for which they weren't prepared, and they have no choice but to confront their emotional and spiritual challenges if they wish to move forward with their lives.

The landmark first story collection from internationally acclaimed author Alejandro Zambra, now featuring five additional stories and an introduction by his longtime collaborator, Megan McDowellAn early desktop computer becomes the third partner in a doomed relationship; an older brother figure whose father lives in exile imparts hilarious life lessons to his young protégé. A man attempts to quit smoking despite the fact that he's very good at it; another masquerades as the family man he'll never be. Throughout, Pinochet's dictatorship casts a long shadow, and men in relationships exhibit their profound capacity for both love and harm.In these unforgettable stories—which span religion, romance, technology, soccer, solitude, and more—Alejandro Zambra unfolds a radical literary reflection on life, relationships, and the tender and brutal dimensions of masculinity in Chile from the 1980s to the present. Intimate and playful, provocative and profound, and brilliantly rendered by National Book Award winning translator Megan McDowell, My Documents a testament to the necessity of literature even—and especially—in times of political and personal crisis.

From Kurdish poet and writer Farhad Pirbal, a heartbreaking collection of short stories. Each tale in The Potato Eaters underlines “otherness”, or isolation and displacement in contemporary society. His characters are at once resonant and shocking, his ability to decry trauma reminiscent of American greats like Morrison and Hurston. The title story from this collection is one of the most acclaimed Kurdish short stories; it features a town that, due to famine, only survives on potatoes. The community comes to appreciate the base cuisine and abandon currency for their coveted starch. When the story's protagonist returns from his travels, he brings gold home and he is met with utter apathy; he is a stranger in his own country. “Lamartine” tells the story of a struggling poetry expert with a PhD on Lamartine's lines in search of a lucrative career. He has trouble finding the right words to get a job. He visits a local career agency and in plain verse, asks for a career; he and the agent imagine a world wherein poets are paid by the line instead of the hour, a world in which artists always have a steady income. After the encounter, he says to a statue of his hero, “we really do live pitifully, us all like us, artists and poets. Often I have thought that a demon, at the beginning of time, must have nursed us: misfortune our first milk.” “The Deserter” spotlights a forgetful soldier struggling to find his lost leg in 1989. He hobbles for nearly ten days until his Corporal informs him to prepare for war. “How?”, he wonders. The two go in search for a new leg, scavenging through piles of human body parts. In war, all warriors lose pieces of themselves: legs, arms, minds, hearts and souls. He reflects on his station: “My generation and I…we are the sacrifice of our era; the sacrifice to war and the dirty battles of those fools and frauds we call today's leaders.” The story ends there—without resolution. This finality parallels the ramifications of war: stories and lives cut short, questions left unanswered.

MONARCH: Stories subverts the reader's common perceptions about how love can heal, how loss and suffering can transform, and how every character deserves a second chance. America's city scars, sewers, alleyways, and bars are landscape to their wars, as characters heal and transform under wind turbines and on open roads, in golden cornfields and with the wails of Chicago blues. Heroes in this collection are the marginalized, the sufferers, the down-trodden, the misfits, the wanderers, and the wounded, shaped by grief but not defined by their scars.

Michele Tracey Berger has a voice like no one else. —Julia Rios, Hugo Award Winning EditorDoll Seed: Stories by Michele Tracy Berger is a dazzling debut collection of speculative short fiction. The stories span horror, fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism, but are always grounded in very real characters and beautifully rendered, distinctive communities. Often thematically centered on the lives of women and girls, especially women of color and their experiences of vulnerability and outsider status, these stories are often playful and always provocative.Fifteen stories invite you to get comfortable in the dark, to consider freedom and sacrifice, trust and betrayal, otherness, and safety. Marisol, an aspiring jewelry artist is haunted by a fast-food icon. Chevella, a self-aware doll, finds herself in 1950s America playing a key role in the Civil Rights Movement. Lindsay, a Black girl in 1970s America “wins” an extraterrestrial in a national contest only to find her family's life upended. Chelsea and Jessa, two sisters, fight about what a strange child means for their family. A meat grinder appears in a magical forest and chaos ensues. All this and more....Off-key music boxes, a masterclass of atmospheric wonder and dread. —Jen Julian, author of Red Rabbit GhostThis is Black Mirror with the emphasis on Black. —Vincent Tirado, author of We Came to Welcome You: A Novel of Suburban Horror

A dazzling debut collection of ten powerful, feminist, and queer short stories from bestselling author Zoe Whittall“Absorbing and wrenchingly intimate, with a rare balance of wit and tenderness.”—Jenny Fran Davis, author of DyketteIn Wild Failure, characters encounter feelings of shame, desire, attachment, and disconnection as they find themselves navigating their way through bad decisions, unusual situations, and fraught relationships.In “Oh, El,” a dominant woman can't stop herself from toying with the tender heart of her co-worker. The title story, “Wild Failure,” is a doomed love story between an agoraphobic and a wilderness hiker. In “Half-Pipe,” a teen girl's heterosexual ambivalence results in chaos at a skate park. A group of idealistic roommates find themselves the subject of a true crime podcast in “Murder at the Elm Street Collective House.” In “The Sex Castle Lunch Buffet,” a woman reflects on her brief stint at a nineties strip club after she learns of the death of a former client.Wild Failure is replete with Whittall's perceptive humor and acute insights into human nature. It's also a dynamic and vibrant collection of poetic fiction that contend with the meaning of desire in a world that devalues femininity and queerness.

The winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, Double-Check for Sleeping Children is the newest work by award-winning writer Kirstin Allio

From the “terrifyingly talented” (London Times) author of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG-IN THE NIGHT-TIME and THE PORPOISE, eight mesmerizingly imaginative, deeply-humane stories that use Greek myths and contemporary dystopian narratives to examine mortality, moral choices and the many variants of love.Greek myths have fascinated people for millenia, seeing in them lessons about fate and hubris and the contingency of existence. Mark Haddon digs into the heart of these ancient fables and sees them anew. The dawn goddess Eos asked asks Zeus to give her lover Tithonus eternal life, but forgets to ask for eternal youth. In “The Quiet Limit of the World” Haddon imagines Tithonus'life as he slowly ages over thousands of years, turning the cautionary tale of tempting the gods into a spellbinding meditation on witnessing death from the outside, and ultimately, how carnal love evolves into something richer and more poignant with time. In “The Mother's Story,” Haddon takes the myth of the minotaur in his labyrinth, in which the beast is the spawn of the monstrous lust of the king's wife Pasiphae, and turns it into a wrenching parable of maternal love for a damaged child, and the more real monstrosities of patriarchy. In “D.O.G.Z.” the story of Actaeon, who was turned into a stag after glimpsing the naked goddess Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about the continuum of human and animal behavior.Other stories play with contemporary mythic tropes – genetic engineering, trying to escape the future, the viciousness of adolescent ostracism – to showcase how modern humans are subject to the same capriciousness that obsessed the Greeks. Haddon's tales cover a vast range, from the mythic to the domestic, from ancient Greece to the present day, from stories about love to stories about cruelty, from battlefields to bed and breakfasts, from dogs in space to doors between worlds, all of them bound together by a profound sympathy and an understanding of how human beings act and think and feel when pushed to the very edge. Throughout Haddon's supple prose showcases his astonishing powers of observation, of both the physical world and the workings of the psyche. His vision is clear-eyed, but always resolutely empathetic.

A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships—Tessa Hadley is'one of the greatest stylists alive'(Ron Charles, Washington Post).A Best Book of the Year: TIME, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vogue“Hadley is pure magic and After the Funeral is a triumph.”—Lily King, New York Times best-selling author of Writers & Lovers and EuphoriaIn each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie's own age—everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. A vital addition to Tessa Hadley's celebrated body of work, After the Funeral and Other Stories showcases what Colm Tóibín describes as'Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive.'

A stunning new collection featuring fresh translations of Bruno Schulz's 15 most captivating short stories, in a beautiful Pushkin Collection editionIncludes a new translation of a recently discovered story, believed to be the first-ever published work by this legendary cult writerThe stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms.Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the 15 stories in his collection showcases Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his essential status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical:August, A Visitation, Birds, Pan, Cinnamon Shops, The Street of Crocodiles, Cockroaches, The Gale, The Night of the Great Season (from Cinnamon Shops)The Book, The Age of Genius, A July Night, My Father Joins the Firefighters, Father's Final Escape (from Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass)Undula--a new translation of Schulz's recently discovered first published story

A wide-ranging collection, including two novellas and ten stories exploring complex identities, from the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing, and Palmares“Gayl Jones's work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable... and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humor, and incisiveness, is unmatched.”—Imani Perry, author of, Looking for Lorraine and BreatheGayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career, and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones's legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyper-realist to the mystical, in intricate multi-part stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.Her narrators are women and men, Black, Brown, Indigenous; her settings are historical and contemporary, in South America, Mexico and the US; her themes center on complex identities, unorthodox longings and aspirations. She writes about spies, photographers, playground designers, cartoonists, and baristas, about workers and revolutionaries, about environmentalism, feminism, poetry, film and love, but above all about our multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial society.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS'CHOICE • “The Brothers Grimm meet Black Mirror meets Alice in Wonderland.... In seven remixed fairy tales, Link delivers wit and dreamlike intrigue.”—Time FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD, THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD, WORLD FANTASY AWARD, CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE, AND KIRKUS PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD • “Thought-provoking and wonderfully told... so seamlessly entwines the real with the surreal that the stories threaten to slip into reality, resonating long after reading.”—BuzzFeed A new collection from one of today's finest short story writers, MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow Kelly Link, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble—featuring illustrations by award-winning artist Shaun Tan A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Public Library, Shondaland, Slate, The Globe and Mail, Electric Lit, Tordotcom, Polygon, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus ReviewsFinding seeds of inspiration in the stories of the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers—characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.In “The White Cat's Divorce,” an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which child will become his heir. In “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear,” a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In “Skinder's Veil,” a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers—or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.Twisting and turning in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable—these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the realm of short fiction.

A surprising and exciting new collection of speculative and experimental stories that explore animal intelligences, gender, and the nature of stories. The Privilege of the Happy Ending collects award-winning writer Kij Johnson's speculative fiction from the last decade. The stories explore gender, animals, and the nature of stories, and range in form from classically told tales to deeply experimental works. The collection includes the World Fantasy Award-winning “The Privilege of the Happy Ending” and “The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe,” as well as two never-before published works.

“I binge-read this book, savoring the gothic creepiness at the heart of each tale. Packed with compelling, nuanced lives and the deaths that haunt them, each story is a séance—an invitation for unsettled spirits to let their presence be known, ‘desperate for someone to supply the narrative.'Murray supplies it with great style and an uncanny knowingness, leaving room for our imagination to fill in the suggestive spaces with our own dark dread.”—Mona Awad, author of All's WellSabina Murray has long been celebrated for her mastery of the gothic. Now in Muckross Abbey and Other Stories, she returns to the genre, bringing readers to haunted sites from a West Australian convent school to the moors of England to the shores of Cape Cod in ten strange tales that are layered, meta, and unforgettable. From a twisted recasting of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, to an actor who dies for his art only to haunt his mother's house, to the titular “Muckross Abbey,” an Irish chieftain burial site cursed by the specter of a flesh-eating groom—in this collection Murray gives us painters, writers, historians, and nuns all confronting the otherworldly in fantastically creepy ways. With notes of Wharton and James, Stoker and Shelley, now drawn into the present, these macabre stories are sure to captivate and chill.

Winner of the 2022 Mary McCarthy Prize in Poetry, judged by Susan Minot.Set amid wholly unique and fabulist worlds, the stories of The Book of Disbelieving present a cast of characters tangled in challenges of faith, whether in god, in nature, in memory, or even in reality. These are stories of villages built atop fish, of holidays designed to encourage literal leaps of faith, of widows left to make sense of memories both real and imagined. Steeped in the existential crises of our era, The Book of Disbelieving is a modern book of fables and lore. Behold this book with wonder.

This collection is a compilation of novels and short stories by some of the greatest masters of fiction literature. The collection includes works spanning over 150 years from the beginning of the 19th century to the second half of the 20th century. The works vary in genre, including humorous, lyrical, psychological, romantic, detective, fantastic, adventurous, and mystical prose. It features classics of American, British, Irish, French, German, and Russian literature. Some of the outstanding authors included in this collection: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Guy de Maupassant, Arthur Conan Doyle, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, H. P. Lovecraft, John Galsworthy, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, and many more. This book is intended for teachers and true literature enthusiasts. Contents: Washington Irving. Rip van Winkle Charlotte Bronte. Napoleon and the Spectre Mary Shelley. The Mortal Immortal Edgar Allan Poe. The Cask of Amontillado Edgar Allan Poe. The Black Cat Ivan Turgenev. First Love Charles Dickens. Nobody's Story Herman Melville. Bartleby, The Scrivener Mark Twain. A Complaint about Correspondents, Dated in San Francisco Mark Twain. Answers to Correspondents Mark Twain. Among the Fenians Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The Cold Embrace Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Parson's Horse Race Joel Chandler Harris. The Wonderful Tar Baby Story Guy de Maupassant. The Piece of String Leo Tolstoy. The Death Of Ivan Ilyich Leo Tolstoy. God Sees The Truth, But Waits Oscar Wilde. The Happy Prince Jerome K. Jerome. Three Men in a Boat Kate Chopin. The Awakening H. G. Wells. The Star Anton Chekhov. Gooseberries Anton Chekhov. A Malefactor Arthur Conan Doyle. Lot No. 249 Arthur Conan Doyle. The Crime Of The Brigadier Rudyard Kipling. The Cat That Walked By Himself Jack London. To Build A Fire H. H. Munro, or Saki. Gabriel-Ernest O. Henry. The Caballero's Way Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Cottagette James Joyce. The Dead Franz Kafka. In the Penal Colony Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Christmas Tree And The Wedding John Galsworthy. The Broken Boot F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Offshore Pirate G. K. Chesterton. The Blue Cross Ivan Bunin. The Grammar Of Love Ivan Bunin. Gentle Breathing Aleksandr Kuprin. The Outrage - A True Story Ernest Hemingway. Up in Michigan Ernest Hemingway. Out of Season Ernest Hemingway. My Old Man Ray Bradbury. A Little Journey Ray Bradbury. Zero Hour H. P. Lovecraft. The Shadow over Innsmouth Mikhail Bulgakov. The Cup Of Life Mikhail Bulgakov. The Beer Story Mikhail Bulgakov. Moonshine Springs Agatha Christie. The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge Agatha Christie. The Million Dollar Bond Robbery Agatha Christie. The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb

This collection is a compilation of novels and short stories by some of the greatest masters of fiction literature. The collection includes works spanning over 150 years from the beginning of the 19th century to the second half of the 20th century. The works vary in genre, including humorous, lyrical, psychological, romantic, detective, fantastic, adventurous, and mystical prose. It features classics of American, British, Irish, French, German, and Russian literature. Some of the outstanding authors included in this collection: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Guy de Maupassant, Arthur Conan Doyle, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, and many more. This book is intended for teachers and true literature enthusiasts. Washington Irving. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Prosper Mérimée. Mateo Falcone Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Ambitious Guest Edgar Allan Poe. The Masque of the Red Death Edgar Allan Poe. The Gold-Bug Ivan Turgenev. The District Doctor Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol Herman Melville. The Lightning-Rod Man Mark Twain. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County Mark Twain. Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man Bret Harte. The Luck of Roaring Camp Robert Louis Stevenson. The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Leo Tolstoy. Kholstomer, The Story Of A Horse Leo Tolstoy. Alyosha The Pot Guy de Maupassant. The Necklace Oscar Wilde. The Selfish Giant Ambrose Bierce. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Thomas Hardy. The Three Strangers Ambrose Bierce. The Magic Shop Anton Chekhov. The Darling Arthur Conan Doyle. The Case of Lady Sannox Rudyard Kipling. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi Jack London. The Law of Life Rainer Maria Rilke. How Old Timofei Died Singing H. H. Munro, or Saki. The Music On The Hill O. Henry. The Gift of the Magi O. Henry. The Ransom of Red Chief Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Yellow Wallpaper Katherine Mansfield. The Fly Willa Cather. A Wagner Matinée James Joyce. Araby James Joyce. Eveline D. H. Lawrence. The Prussian Officer Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka. Jackals and Arabs Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Dream Of A Ridiculous Man Sherwood Anderson. The Egg Virginia Woolf. The Mark On The Wall Ring Lardner. The Golden Honeymoon John Galsworthy. The Broken Boot Joseph Conrad. Heart Of Darkness F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises Ray Bradbury. Asleep In Armageddon Isaac Asimov. Youth E.M. Forster. The Machine Stops H. P. Lovecraft. The Call of Cthulhu Agatha Christie. The Adventure of “The Western Star” Agatha Christie. The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor Agatha Christie. The Adventure of the Cheap Flat

A luminous collection of dryly humorous stories that revel in the surreal and fantastic, from the pen of José Eduardo Agualusa, winner of the International Dublin Literary AwardPerfect for readers of Haruki Murakami, Julio Cortázar, and Namwali Serpell's The Old DriftVividly translated into English for the first time by long-time Agualusa collaborator Daniel Hahn, the jewel-like tales gathered in this collection are an exuberant celebration of story-telling in all its various forms.On the sands of Itamaracá, an old fisherman dreams of fish: shad in the morning, when the water's smooth and silvery, the Atlantic tarpon after it rains, and a jack when the sea goes blue. Elsewhere, Borges sulks away in a plantation of neverending banana tree, and the president of the United States wakes from a coma speaking only Portuguese.With “the lyrical experimentalism and unabashed weirdness of the surrealist” (The Arts Desk), Agualusa offers a sly wink to the fictional quality inherent in all narratives, whether they're fishermen's tales, national histories, or the stories we tell ourselves.

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.

Exploring the diverse landscape of American life, the stories in Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories capture the lives of people caught between circumstance and their own natures or on the run from fate, from a Jewish couple encountering a dealer in Nazi memorabilia to the troubled family of a Gulf Coast fisherman awaiting a hurricane. Tom Piazza's debut short story collection, originally published in 1996, heralded the arrival of a startlingly original and vital presence in American fiction and letters. Set in Memphis, New Orleans, Florida, Texas, New York City, and elsewhere, the stories echo voices from Ernest Hemingway to Robert Johnson in their sharp eye for detail and their emotional impact. New to this volume is an introduction written by the author. Drawing themes, forms, and stylistic approaches from blues and country music, these stories present a tough, haunting vision of a landscape where the social and spiritual ground shifts constantly underfoot.

Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Short FictionIn ten vividly told stories, Shimmer follows characters through relationships, within social norms, and across boundaries of all kinds as they shimmer into and out of each other's lives. Outside a 7-Eleven, teen boys Veeper and Wendell try to decide what to do with their night, though the thought of the rest of their lives doesn't seem to have occurred to them. In Laurel Canyon, two movie stars try to decide if the affair they're having might mean they like each other. When Byron, trying to figure out the chords of a song he likes, posts a question on a guitar website, he ends up meeting Jessica as well, a woman with her own difficult music. And when the snide and sharp-tongued Twyla agrees to try therapy, not even she would have imagined the results.

“Lovers of the short story, rejoice! There's something for everyone in this anniversary collection... The collection makes the argument that time and again, it is stories that save us.” —Booklist Thirty-five literary luminaries come together in this stunning collection of all-new works. A must-have for any lover of literature, Small Odysseys sweeps the reader into the landscape of the contemporary short story, featuring never-before-published works by many of our most preeminent authors as well as up-and-coming superstars. On their journey through the book, readers will encounter long-ago movie stars, a town full of dandelions, and math lessons from Siri. They will attend karaoke night, hear a twenty-something slacker's breathless report of his failed recruiting by the FBI, and travel with a father and son as they channel grief into running a neigh­borhood bakery truck. They will watch the Greek goddess Persephone encounter the end of the world, and witness another apocalypse through a series of advertise­ments for a touchless bidet. And finally, they will meet an aging loner who finds courage and resilience hidden in the most unexpected of places—the next generation. Published in partnership with beloved literary radio program and live show Selected Shorts in honor of its thirty-fifth anniversary, this collection of thirty-five stories captures its spirit in print for the first time.FEATURING Rabih Alameddine • Jenny Allen • Lesley Nneka Arimah • Aimee Bender • Marie-Helene Bertino • Jai Chakrabarti • Patrick Cottrell • Elizabeth Crane • Michael Cunningham • Patrick Dacey • Edwidge Danticat • Dave Eggers • Omar El Akkad • Lauren Groff • Jacob Guajardo • A.M. Homes • Mira Jacob • Jac Jemc • Etgar Keret • Lisa Ko • Victor LaValle • J. Robert Lennon • Ben Loory • Carmen Maria Machado • Juan Martinez • Maile Meloy • Joe Meno • Susan Perabo • Helen Phillips • Namwali Serpell • Rivers Solomon • Elizabeth Strout • Luis Alberto Urrea • Jess Walter • Weike Wang

From “a marvelous new voice” (Rebecca Makkai), these “extraordinarily imaginative” (Sigrid Nunez), “revelatory” (Nicole Krauss), “superb” (Kiran Desai) stories transcend borders as they render the intimate lives of people striving for connection.WINNER OF THE AJL JEWISH FICTION AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE WINGATE PRIZEThe Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land announces the arrival of a natural-born storyteller of immense talent. Warm, poignant, delightfully whimsical, Omer Friedlander's gorgeously immersive and imaginative stories take you to the narrow limestone alleyways of Jerusalem, the desolate beauty of the Negev Desert, and the sprawling orange groves of Jaffa, with characters that spring to vivid life. A divorced con artist and his daughter sell empty bottles of “holy air” to credulous tourists; a Lebanese Scheherazade enchants three young soldiers in a bombed-out Beirut radio station; a boy daringly “rooftops” at night, climbing steel cranes in scuffed sneakers even as he reimagines the bravery of a Polish-Jewish dancer during the Holocaust; an Israeli volunteer at a West Bank checkpoint mourns the death of her son, a soldier killed in Gaza.These stories render the intimate lives of people striving for connection. They are fairy tales turned on their head by the stakes of real life, where moments of fragile intimacy mix with comedy and notes of the absurd. Told in prose of astonishing vividness that also demonstrates remarkable control and restraint, they have a universal appeal to the heart.

Almost 100 years after Hans Fallada committed himself to prison, previously unpublished and rewritten stories by the bestselling mid-century German author have been discovered. It was the turning point before he became a bestselling author: Hans Fallada handed himself in to the police in September 1925, following repeated cases of embezzlement to finance his alcohol and morphine addiction. At the time, a court-appointed doctor was assigned to assess the extent to which Fallada could be made accountable. This expert opinion, thought to have been lost, was only recently rediscovered. It is an extraordinary find, because it includes unpublished and rewritten stories by Fallada that reveal his early, unparalleled insight into the female psyche, and that focus on hitherto taboo topics such as rape and abortion. The title character, Lilly, is a young, untamed, headstrong girl. She sets out to ‘play'with a young man, but ends up losing control of the situation. Barely able to hide her questionable actions, she ends up in a sanatorium, where she engages in a bizarre duel of reciprocal manipulation with another patient. In the end, it is impossible to tell who is victorious. Marie and Thilde, the protagonists of two other stories, are strong women who rebel against the pre-established patterns imposed on them by society, while two male outsiders, Pogg and Robinson, seek refuge and hope in a prison cell. These stories — written while the author was relishing the opportunity in prison to free himself of his addictions — reveal to a new generation of readers Fallada's immense gifts and his intense battles with the dynamics of human relationships.

Winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated LiteratureA blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the 3 time International Booker Prize finalist,'lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon.” –O, the Oprah magazineThe seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But in Samanta Schweblin's tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back inside: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child's first encounter with darkness or the fallibility of parents.In each story, twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin, revealing surreal truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others. This is a masterwork from one of our most brilliant modern writers.

'Chelsea T. Hicks'deadpan dexterous wit can make you laugh and cry in the space of a heartbeat. A Calm and Normal Heart is the book I've been waiting for— audacious, tender, and fiercely committed.'—Louise Erdrich, author of The Sentence'A Calm & Normal Heart is sharp, sexy, and endlessly surprising. An electric blend of playfulness and intensity in Hicks's prose ignites her characters'desires. Their stories dazzle and are to be savored. This is a gorgeous collection!'—Deesha Philyaw, National Book Award finalist and author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies'The stories in Chelsea Hicks's A Calm & Normal Heart are full of quiet truths and wry, soulful secrets. It is a book that doesn't at all feel like a debut story collection, but rather written with startling beauty and the flawless precision of a master storyteller. It is a genuine page-turner full of sentences so beautiful they demand re-reading.'—Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The RemovedFrom Oklahoma to California, the heroes of A Calm & Normal Heart are modern-day adventurers—seeking out new places to call their own inside a nation to which they do not entirely belong. A member of the Osage tribe, author Chelsea T. Hicks'stories are compelled by an overlooked diaspora happening inside America itself: that of young Native people. In stories like “Superdrunk,” “Tsexope,” and “Wets'a,” iPhone lifestyles co-mingle with ancestral connection, strengthening relationships or pushing people apart, while generational trauma haunts individual paths. Broken partnerships and polyamorous desire signal a fraught era of modern love, even as old ways continue to influence how people assess compatibility. And in “By Alcatraz,” a Native student finds herself alone on campus over Thanksgiving break, seeking out new friendships during a national holiday she does not recognize. Leaping back in time, “A Fresh Start Ruined” inhabits the life of Florence, an Osage woman attempting to hide her origins while social climbing in midcentury Oklahoma. And in “House of RGB” a young professional settles into a new home, intent on claiming her independence after a break-up, even if her ancestors can't seem to get out of her way. Whether in between college semesters or jobs, on the road to tribal dances or escaping troubled homes, the characters of A Calm & Normal Heart occupy a complicated and often unreliable terrain. Chelsea T. Hicks brings sharp humor, sprawling imagination, and a profound connection to Native experience in a collection that will subvert long-held assumptions for many readers, and inspire hope along the way.

The stories in The Getting Place spring from the places Frank Soos loved best: the coal hills of southwest Virginia, the coves of coastal Maine, and the rivers and tundra around Fairbanks, Alaska. They ask, “Who can know the why of his own life, the why of what he does?” We join his characters when their lives spin beyond their control, when they face unexpected upheavals that change their lives utterly. By turns quirky, heartbreaking, profound, and witty, these brilliant stories open the hidden rooms inside us.—Peggy Shumaker

“Fiercely intelligent, warm in their own way, and absolutely absorbing.... Excellent excellent excellent.”—Roxane Gay“Ladee Hubbard is a true original, and this book is a unique beauty.”—Mary GaitskillThe critically acclaimed author of The Rib King returns with an eagerly anticipated collection of interlocking short stories including the title story written exclusively for this volume, that explore relationships between friends, family and strangers in a Black neighborhood over fifteen years.The thirteen gripping tales In The Last Suspicious Holdout, the new story collection by award-winning author Ladee Hubbard, deftly chronicle poignant moments in the lives of an African American community located in a “sliver of southern suburbia.” Spanning from 1992 to 2007, the stories represent a period during which the Black middle-class expanded while stories of'welfare Queens,''crack babies,'and'super predators'abounded in the media. In “False Cognates,” a formerly incarcerated attorney struggles with raising the tuition to keep his troubled son in an elite private school. In “There He Go,” a young girl whose mother moves constantly clings to a picture of the grandfather she doesn't know but invents stories of his greatness. Characters spotlighted in one story reappear in another, providing a stunning testament to the enduring resilience of Black people as they navigate the “post-racial” period The Last Suspicious Holdout so vividly portrays.

A stunning new edition featuring fresh translations of six of this classic Russian writer's most thrilling short stories in a beautiful Pushkin Collection edition.This vivid collection of new translations by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater illuminates Dostoevsky's dazzling versatility as a writer. His remarkable short fiction swings from wickedly sharp humour to gripping psychological intensity, from cynical social mockery to moments of unexpected tenderness. The stories in this collection range from impossible fantasy to scorching satire.A civil servant finds a new passion for his work when he's swallowed alive by a crocodile. A struggling writer stumbles on a cemetery where the dead still talk to each other.An arrogant but well-intentioned gentleman provokes an uproar at an aide's wedding, and in the marital bed.A young boy finds unexpected salvation on a cold and desolate Christmas Eve.

Stories of characters who face tragedies alongside their canine companions. Noley Reid's fourth book, Origami Dogs, is a testament to her mastery of the form. Here, dogs rove the grounds of their companions'emotions. The creatures in this short story collection often act subtly, serving as witnesses without language, exacerbating tension and providing relief to the human characters. Sometimes they are central to the stories'plots, such as in the lead story, “Origami Dogs,” which focuses on Iris Garr, a dog breeder's teenage daughter, as she begins noticing odd birth defects in new litters and realizes she must confront her mother, whom she loves yet cannot help but resent. In some stories, teens struggle toward womanhood or wrestle with sexuality and queerness, confronting parents who are unable to provide the care or support they need. In other stories, Reid's characters are adults striving to be better spouses, parents, or both, and are often grappling with life-changing events—like a new disability or the loss of a child. Despite the gravitas of these tragedies, with Reid's touch, they feel alive, present, and painfully close. Reid brings us to her characters in the fierce damp aftermath of calamity and asks us to dwell with them until new possibilities arrive. At these tipping points, the characters of Origami Dogs stand ready with their dogs (or memories of them), to take the next step. By turns tender, moving, and devastating, this story collection is a celebration of the bond of devotion possible between humans and dogs, and it presents an intimate rendering of the lives we share.

Moving between Cuba and the U.S., the stories in Are We Ever Our Own trace the paths of the women of the far-flung Armando Castell family. Related but unknown to each other, these women are exiles, immigrants, artists, outsiders, all in search of a sense of self and belonging. The owner of a professional mourning service investigates the disappearance of her employees. On the eve of the Cuban revolution, a young woman breaks into the mansion where she was once a servant to help the rebels and free herself. A musician in a traveling troupe recounts the last day she saw her father. Linked by theme and complex familial bonds, these stories shift across genres and forms to excavate the violence wreaked on women's bodies and document the attempt to create something meaningful in the face of loss. They ask: who do we belong to? What, if anything, belongs to us?

Winner of the O. Henry Prize for the story'The Mad People of Paris'These revelatory short stories tread the line between surrealism and realism with strange, appealing characters who take on a sacrifice in spite of themselves.A followup to his first novel, The Night (winner of the Rive Gauche à Paris Prize for foreign books in 2016), this collection of short stories by Venezuelan literary star Rodrigo Blanco Calderón features a taxidermist painter, a blind man lost in Mexico City, a female motorcyclist who rides naked through the night, a foreigner who learns a language making confessions in Paris churches, and a dying pilot who finds peace in a reading of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Impeccable and masterful in his storytelling, Blanco Calderón constructs a nocturnal cast of characters who become the victims and executioners of a sacrifice in the midst of a floundering Venezuela, others with the threat of terrorism in France, or in a Mexico symbolizing the first shots of the revolution.

LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL PRIZE 2022SHORTLISTED FOR SHORT STORY OF THE YEAR AT THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2022SHORTLISTED FOR ALCS TOM-GALLON TRUST AWARD'Unsettling, unpredictable, and brilliant'Roddy Doyle'In sumptuous and evocative prose, Sheila Armstrong writes stories that are unnerving and unsettling. Stories which make you go, wait, wait, what was that?'Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled GroundOn a boat offshore, a fisherman guts a mackerel as he anxiously awaits a midnight rendezvous.Villagers, one by one, disappear into a sinkhole beneath a yew tree.A nameless girl is taped, bound and put on display in a countryside market.A man returning home following the death of his mother finds something disturbing among her personal effects.A dazzling and disquieting collection of stories, how to gut a fish places the bizarre beside the everyday and then elegantly and expertly blurs the lines. An exciting new Irish writer whose sharp and lyrical prose unsettles and astounds in equal measure, Sheila Armstrong's exquisitely provocative stories carve their way into your mind and take hold.'Dark, devilishly well written and full of atmosphere, How to Gut a Fish is one of the most original and affecting short story collections I've read in years'Jan Carson, author of The Fire Starters

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “One of our most inventive purveyors of the form returns with pitch-perfect, genre-bending stories that stare into the abyss of our national character.... An exquisite work from a writer whose reach is galactic.”—Oprah Daily Booker Prize winner George Saunders returns with his first collection of short stories since the New York Times bestseller Tenth of December. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, NPR, Time, USA Today, The Guardian, Esquire, Newsweek, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library JournalThe “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 exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic, 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, all too believable) future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and one another. “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. 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. And “My House”—in a mere seven pages—comes to terms with the haunting nature of unfulfilled dreams and the inevitability of decay.Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.

'You go through life convinced you're going to get diabetes like your old man and one day you choke to death on chicken gristle, and the autopsy shows your blood sugars were perfect.'The seventeen stories in Elaine McCluskey's latest collection, Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, follow characters who have reached a four-way stop in life; some are deciding whether to follow the signs or defy them; others find a sinkhole forming beneath their feet.A former fast-talking, big-bucks radio host now lives as a divorced payday loaner working in a strip mall; a football wide receiver at a small Canadian university works the night shift as a bouncer while recovering from his third concussion; a well-liked city councilor is arrested on a packed bus. As one character puts it,'life is just one extended series of anecdotes strung together until they kill you.'Set in the Maritimes but transcending regional boundaries, McCluskey's stories are experimental, sometimes provocative, and often about those living on the margins. Smart, compassionate and unsparing, Rafael Has Pretty Eyes explores the absurdity and interconnectedness of a life adrift.

Finalist for the Republic of Consciousness PrizeFamily Album is Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán's rollicking follow-up to her acclaimed English-language debut, Poso Wells.Alemán is known for her spirited and sardonic take on the fatefully interconnected—and often highly compromised—forces at work in present-day South America, and particularly in Ecuador. In this collection of eight hugely entertaining short stories, she teases tropes of hardboiled detective fiction, satire, and adventure narratives to recast the discussion of national identity. A muddy brew of pop-culture and pop-folklore yields intriguing, lesser-known episodes of contemporary Ecuadorian history, along with a rich cast of unforgettable characters whose intimate stories open up onto a vista of Ecuador's place on the world stage.From a pair of deep-sea divers using Robinson Crusoe's map of a shipwreck to locate sunken treasure in the Galápagos Archipelago, to a night with the husband of Ecuador's most infamous expat, Lorena Bobbitt, this series of cracked “family portraits” provides a cast of picaresque heroes and anti-heroes in stories that sneak up on a reader before they know what's happened: they've learned a great deal about a country whose more well known exports—soccer, coffee and cocoa—mask an intriguing national story that's ripe for the telling.One of The Millions Most Anticipated Books for 2022!'Ecuadorian writer Alemán's sparkling collection (after the novel Poso Wells) brims with humor and adventure.'—Publishers Weekly'Plays with tropes ranging from the Robinson Crusoe story to the classic betrayed-wife setup to wrestle with the impossible-to-decode oddness of human life, which old stories can only hide for so long.'—Lily Meyer, NPR'It takes a rare and talented writer to create a cast of characters who each feel so unique, distinct, and whose stories unravel unexpectedly while also feeling inevitable, exactly right. Thoughtful and subversive, with Family Album, Alemán has given us a gift.'—Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl'Divers, adventurers, wrestlers, athletes: a diverse array of people come to light in these stories to insist again and again in challenging the weight of the written letter. Gabriela Alemán's stories inhabit the past to work through its possible versions. Her characters understand that History is a form of desire and the truth is not a house but a patina covering a place that has ceased to exist.'—Yuri Herrera, author of A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire'Gabriela Alemán's stories unravel a rich and intriguing universe in which nothing, and no one, is what it seems.'—Pilar Quintana, author of The Bitch'These stories are like lizards lying on rocks in the sun. When you try to pick one up it darts away and disappears. Sometimes a tail comes off in your hand or the thing bites your fingers and drops of blood decorate the rock. Best read while listening to Julio Jaramillo sing'Amor sin Esperanza'and'Hojas Muertas.''—Barry Gifford, author of Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels'Gabriela Alemán writes beautiful, sly, enigmatic stories originating in a rogues gallery of real life legends, including El Santo and John Wayne Bobbitt, as well as lesser known and invented souls, all of them struggling against the silent—or is it hostile?—backdrop of Ecuador's past and present. Family Album is a mordantly funny and haunting collection.'—Zachary