Now, she reaches new, uncanny heights with And I Do Not Forgive You. In “Mildly Happy, With Moments of Joy,” a friend is ghosted by a simple text message; in “Everyone’s a Winner at Meadow Park,” a teen precariously coming of age in a trailer park befriends an actual ghost. At once humorous and unapologetically fierce, these stories shine an interrogating light on the adage that “history likes to lie about women”— as the subjects of “A Short and Speculative History of Lavoisier’s Wife” and “You Won’t Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women” (it’s true, you won’t) will attest. Blending fairy tales and myths with apocalyptic technologies, all tethered intricately by shades of rage, And I Do Not Forgive You offers a mosaic of an all-too-real world that fails to listen to its silenced goddesses.Mildly unhappy, with moments of joy --You won't believe what really happened to the Sabine women --A place for hiding precious things --Everyone's a winner in Meadow Park --A short and slightly speculative history of Lavoisier's wife --We destroy the Moon --In which Athena designs a video game with the express purpose of trolling her father --Is the future a nice place for girls --Our mutual (theater) friend --The dry cleaner from Des Moines --The eyes of Saint Lucy --We were a storybook back then --Rabbit by rabbit --Through the looking-glass --The noises from the neighbors upstairs --Our geographic history --Death deserves all caps --A wholly new and novel act, with monsters --When the husband grew wings --The language of the stars --Mildly joyful, with moments of extraordinary unhappiness --Tour of the cities we have lost

    Across thirteen stories, this collection explores the thin border between magic and grief.

    But when people are pushed—by a coworker’s taunt, a face-to-face encounter with a woman in free fall from a bridge—cracks appear, revealing alienation, casual cruelty, madness, and above all a simultaneous hunger for and fear of the unknown.Daniel Orozco leads the reader through the hidden lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. He reveals the secret pleasures of late-night supermarket trips for cookie binges, exceptional data entry, and an exiled dictator’s occasional piss on the U.S. embassy. A love affair blooms between two officers in the impartially worded pages of a police blotter; a new employee’s first-day office tour includes descriptions of other workers’ most private thoughts and actions; during an earthquake, the consciousness of the entire state of California shakes free for examination.Orientation introduces a writer at the height of his powers, whose work surely invites us to reassess the landscape of American fiction.Orientation is a Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 Short Story Collections title.

    In her Selected Stories, Alice Munro makes lives that seem small unfold until they are revealed to be as spacious as prairies and locates the moments of love and betrayal, desire and forgiveness, that change those lives forever. To read these stories--about a traveling salesman and his children on an impromptu journey; an abandoned woman choosing between seduction and solitude--is to succumb to the spell of a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.Walker brothers cowboy --Dance of the happy shades --Postcard --Images --Something I've been meaning to tell you --The Ottawa Valley --Material --Royal beatings --Wild swans --The beggar maid --Simon's luck --Chaddeleys and Flemings --Dulse --The turkey season --Labor Day dinner --The moons of Jupiter --The progress of love --Lichen --Miles City, Montana --White dump --Fits --Friend of my youth --Meneseteung --Differently --Carried away --The Albanian virgin --A wilderness station --Vandals.

    Some are darkly humorous—from two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids’ backpacks, to the young girl contemplating how best to notify her Facebook friends of her impending suicide—while others are devastatingly poignant—a new mother and funeral singer who is driven to madness with grief for the young black boys who have fallen victim to gun violence, or the teen who struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with black culture.Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Her stories are exquisitely rendered, satirical, and captivating in turn, engaging in the ongoing conversations about race and identity politics, as well as the vulnerability of the black body. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an original and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

    A literary event of the highest order. Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three much-lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar. Virtually all American writers have their favorite Joy Williams stories, as do many readers of all ages, and each one of them is available here.

    In one afterlife, you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. In another version, you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple, or that the universe is running backward, or that you are forced to live out your afterlife with annoying versions of who you could have been. With a probing imagination and deep understanding of the human condition, acclaimed neuroscientist David Eagleman offers wonderfully imagined tales that shine a brilliant light on the here and now.

    . . Bradbury?You might see rockets to Mars. Or bizarre circuses where otherworldly acts whirl in the center ring. Perhaps you travel to a dystopian future, where books are set ablaze . . . or to an out-of-the-way sideshow, where animated illustrations crawl across human skin. Or maybe, suddenly, you're returned to a simpler time in small-town America, where summer perfumes the air and life is almost perfect . . . "almost."Ray Bradbury--peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors--is a literary giant whose remarkable career has spanned seven decades. Now twenty-six of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.TABLE OF CONTENTSSam Weller and Mort Castle - IntroductionRay Bradbury - Second HomecomingNeil Gaiman - The Man Who Forgot Ray BradburyMargaret Atwood - HeadlifeJay Bonansinga - HeavySam Weller - The Girl In The Funeral ParlorDavid Morrell - The CompanionsThomas F. Monteleone - The ExchangeLee Martin - Cat on a Bad CouchJoe Hill - By The Silver Water Of Lake ChamplainDan Chaon - Little AmericaJohn McNally - The Phone CallJoe Meno - Young PilgrimsRobert McCammon - Children Of The Bedtime MachineRamsey Campbell - The Page Mort Castle - LightAlice Hoffman - ConjureJohn Maclay - MaxJacqueline Mitchard - Two Of A KindGary Braunbeck - Fat Man And Little BoyBonnie Jo Campbell - The TattooAudrey Niffenegger - Backwards In SevilleCharles Yu - Earth: (A Gift Shop)Julia Keller - Hayleigh's DadDave Eggers - Who Knocks?Bayo Ojikutu - Reservation 2020Kelly Link - Two HousesHarlan Ellison - Weariness

    In these stories, Brian Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.

    Great Short Short Stories: Quick Reads by Great Writers offers that opportunity. An outstanding collection of 30 brilliant short stories, each just six or fewer pages in length, it provides the chance to absorb an entire story (or two or three) in just one sitting.Well-known tales from masters of the short-story genre include: Mark Twain, "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"; Franz Kafka, "A Country Doctor"; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado"; Guy de Maupassant, "A Piece of String"; Stephen Crane, "The Veteran"; Kate Chopin, "A Pair of Silk Stockings"; plus works by Dickens, O. Henry, Chekhov, Wilde, and many others. Includes 2 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "A White Heron" and "Cask of Amontillado."The egg / Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941, American)An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge / Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?, American)The enchanted bluff / Willa Cather (1873-1947, American)A malefactor / Anton Chekhov (1860-1904, Russian)A pair of silk stockings / Kate Chopin (1851-1904, American)The veteran / Stephen Crane (1871-1900, American)The apparition of Mrs. Veal / Daniel Defoe (1660-1731, English)Nobody's story / Charles Dickens (1812-1870, English)If I were a man / Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935, American)Squire Petrick's lady / Thomas Hardy (1840-1928, English)The luck of Roaring Camp / Bret Harte (1836-1902, American)Dr. Heidegger's experiment / Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864, American)A ghost story / Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927, English)A white heron / Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909, American)A country doctor / Franz Kafka (1883-1924, Czech)Wee Willie Winkie / Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936, English)Sanctuary / Nella Larsen (1891-1964, American)Second best / D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930, English)The white silence / Jack London (1876-1916, American)Germans at meat / Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923, English)A piece of string / Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893, French)The open window / H.H. Munro, or Saki (1870-1916, English)The furnished room / O. Henry (1962-1910, American)With other eyes / Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936, Italian)The cask of Amontillado / Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849, American)The coffin-maker / Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837, Russian)The three hermits / Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910, Russian)The notorious jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain (1835-1910, American)The remarkable case of Davidson's eyes / H.G. Wells (1866-1946, English)The sphinx without a secret / Oscar Wilde (1854-1900, Irish)

    Spanning four decades and three prize-winning collections, these twenty-one vintage selected stories and thirteen scintillating new ones take us around the world, from Jerusalem to Central America, from tsarist Russia to London during the Blitz, from central Europe to Manhattan, and from the Maine coast to Godolphin, Massachusetts, a fictional suburb of Boston. These charged locales, and the lives of the endlessly varied characters within them, are evoked with a tenderness and incisiveness found in only our most observant seers.No matter the situation in which her characters find themselves--an unforeseen love affair between adolescent cousins, a lifetime of memories unearthed by an elderly couple's decision to shoplift, the deathbed secret of a young girl's forbidden forest tryst with the tsar, the danger that befalls a wealthy couple's child in a European inn of misfits--Edith Pearlman conveys their experience with wit and aplomb, with relentless but clear-eyed optimism, and with a supple prose that reminds us, sentence by sentence, page by page, of the gifts our greatest verbal innovators can bestow.Binocular Vision reveals a true American original, a master of the story, showing us, with her classic sensibility and lasting artistry, the cruelties, the longings, and the rituals that connect human beings across space and time.

    And in places what poetry! . . . I still haven't recovered."More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him "the Russian Dickens" to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know.These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories.Contains:-St. John's Eve-The Night Before Christmas-The Terrible Vengeance-Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt-Old World Landowners-Viy-The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich-Nevsky Prospect-The Diary of a Madman-The Nose-The Carriage-The Portrait-The Overcoat

    Exotic beasts and improbable travelers roam restlessly through these darkly diverting and finely honed tales.In “The Situation,” a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta-ray to be used for educational purposes (once described as Dilbert meets Gormenghast). In “Three Days in a Border Town,” a sharpshooter seeks the truth about her husband in an elusive floating city beyond a far-future horizon; “Errata” follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world. Also included are two stories original to this collection, including “The Quickening,” in which a lonely child is torn between familial obligation and loyalty to a maligned talking rabbit.Chimerical and hypnotic, VanderMeer leads readers through the postmodern into a new literature of the imagination.

    Thammavongsa is a master at homing in on moments like this -- moments of exposure, dislocation, and messy feeling that push us right up against the limits of language.The stories that make up How to Pronounce Knife focus on characters struggling to find their bearings in unfamiliar territory, or shuttling between idioms, cultures, and values. A failed boxer discovers what it truly means to be a champion when he starts painting nails at his sister's salon. A young woman tries to discern the invisible but immutable social hierarchies at a chicken processing plant. A mother coaches her daughter in the challenging art of worm harvesting.In a taut, visceral prose style that establishes her as one of the most striking and assured voices of her generation, Thammavongsa interrogates what it means to make a living, to work, and to create meaning.How to pronounce knife --Paris --Slingshot --Randy Travis --Mani pedi --Chick-a-chee! --The universe would be so cruel --Edge of the world --The school bus driver --You are so embarassing --Ewwrrkk --The gas station --A far distant thing --Picking worms

    Appearing in print for the first time, "Amnesty" is a story of a woman named Noah who works to negotiate the tense and co-dependent relationship between humans and a species of invaders. Also new to this collection is "The Book of Martha" which asks: What would you do if God granted you the ability—and responsibility—to save humanity from itself?Like all of Octavia Butler’s best writing, these works of the imagination are parables of the contemporary world. She proves constant in her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature’s strongest voices.