Featuring stories of fraud, murder, theft, and madness, the Best American Crime Reporting series has been hailed as “arresting reading” (People) and the best mix of “the political, the macabre, and the downright brilliant” (Entertainment Weekly).The color of blood / Calvin Trillin --Breaking the bank / L. Jon Wertheim --Body snatchers / Dan P. Lee --Everyone will remember me as some sort of monster / Mark Boal --The fabulous fraudulent life of Jocelyn and Ed / Sabrina Rubin Erdely --True crime / David Grann --The day Kennedy died / Michael J. Mooney --The Zankou chicken murders / Mark Arax --Mexico's red days / Charles Bowden --Hate and death / R. Scott Moxley --Dead man's float / Stephen Rodrick --Non-lehtal force / Alec Wilkinson --American murder mystery / Hanna Rosin --Stop, thief! / John Colapinto --Tribal wars / Matt McAllester

    This volume, Volume A, covers American Literature from its beginning to 1820.

    Common People will see writers who have made that leap reach back to give a helping hand to those coming up behind.We read because we want to experience lives and emotions beyond our own, to learn, to see with others’ eyes – without new working class voices, without the vital reflection of real lives, or role models for working class readers and writers, literature will be poorer.Working-class stories are not always tales of the underprivileged and dispossessed. Common People is a collection of essays, poems and memoir written in celebration, not apology: these are narratives rich in barbed humor, reflecting the depth and texture of working-class life, the joy and sorrow, the solidarity and the differences, the everyday wisdom and poetry of the woman at the bus stop, the waiter, the hairdresser. Here, Kit de Waal brings together thirty-three established and emerging writers who invite you to experience the world through their eyes, their voices loud and clear as they reclaim and redefine what it means to be working class. Original Pieces Contributed by:Damian BarrMalorie Blackman OBELisa BlowerJill DawsonLouise DoughtyStuart MaconieChris McCruddenLisa McInerneyPaul McVeighDaljit NagraDr Dave O’BrienCathy RentzenbrinkAnita SethiAdelle StripeTony WalshAlex Wheatleand more

    In “The View from Castle Rock,” the short story master Alice Munro imagines a fictional account of her Scottish ancestors’ emigration to Canada in 1818. Nathan Englander’s cast of young characters in “How We Avenged the Blums” confronts a bully dubbed “The Anti-Semite” to both comic and tragic ends. In “Refresh, Refresh,” Benjamin Percy gives a forceful, heart-wrenching look at a young man’s choices when his father -- along with most of the men in his small town -- is deployed to Iraq. Yiyun Li’s “After a Life” reveals secrets, hidden shame, and cultural change in modern China. And in “Tatooizm,” Kevin Moffett weaves a story full of humor and humanity about a young couple’s relationship that has run its course.Ann Patchett “brought unprecedented enthusiasm and judiciousness [to The Best American Short Stories 2006],” writes Katrina Kenison in her foreword, “and she is, surely, every story writer’s ideal reader, eager to love, slow to fault, exquisitely attentive to the text and all that lies beneath it.”

    At the heart of this collection is the long essay "Terror and Boredom," an unsparing analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and the West's flummoxed response to it, while other pieces address the invasion of Iraq, the realities of Iran and Tony Blair's pallid departure from Downing Street. Amis's reviews of pertinent books and films, from The Looming Tower to United 93, provide a wide-ranging survey of other responses to these calamitous issues, which are further explored in two short stories: "The Last Days of Mohammed Atta," and "In the Palace of the End," narrated by a Middle Eastern tyrant's double whose duties include epic lovemaking, grotesque torture and the duplication on his own body of the injuries sustained by his alter ego in constant assassination attempts. Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his blunt common sense, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read—informed, elegant, surprising—and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with. "From the Hardcover edition."

    This is a book about a piece of cloth, and how it is able to weave its way into the hearts of people, causing multiple and different chains of reactions.This book aims to shed light on the bigger picture, and the deeper meaning that comes with a person’s choice to either keep it or discard it, giving us a different perspective to consider our side before making assumptions and drawing conclusions.

    Combining hard-edged prose and savage Southern charm, Mary Miller showcases transcendent contemporary talent at its best. With its collection of lusty, lazy, hard-drinking characters forever in their own way, Always Happy Hour confirms Miller as an heir apparent to Mary Gaitskill.Claustrophobic and lonesome, acerbic and magnetic, the women in Always Happy Hour seek understanding in the most unlikely places—a dilapidated foster home where love is a liability, a trailer park laden with a history of bad decisions, and the empty corners of a dream home bought after a bitter divorce. Miller evokes the particular gritty comfort found in bad habits as hope turns to dust, and proves yet again her essential role in American fiction.

    From literary legends to emerging voices, the acclaimed writers featured in this collection view their hardscrabble South without romanticism or false nostalgia, not through moonlight and magnolia but moonshine and Marlboros. This is the dirty South as captured by those rooted in its land yet able to share its stories with candor and courage. Grit Lit guides readers through tales both tall and true, intoxicating stories of loss, violence, failure, feuds, family, and--above all--survival against the odds. Raw and raucous, Grit Lit gathers some of the most provocative writing to come out of the South in the last thirty years. With a preface by Edgar Award-winning author Tom Franklin and Brian Carpenter's introduction to the genre's origins and influences, this bold anthology lays bare the Rough South in all its battered glory and dares readers not to stare in awe.

    The stories range in style from the gritty noir of David Means' "Sault Ste. Marie" to the mesmerizing mythmaking of Louise Erdrich's "The Plague of Doves," while the settings include a village perched on top of an enormous whale (David Lawrence Morse's "Conceived") as well as a swank suite at the Plaza Hotel (Xu Xi's "Famine"). The three most powerful stories seem to have in common the ability to immerse readers in a character's sudden, searing moment of self-knowledge and the way that insight impacts the course of a life. In Edward P. Jones' elegiac, masterful "Old Boys, Old Girls," a hard-bitten con comes to see that redemption is within his reach. Deborah Eisenberg delicately deconstructs a young girl's attraction to an abusive man in the haunting "Windows." And, finally, the storied Alice Munro, in "Passion," conveys the complex inner world of a teenager who discovers she values risk over security.

    Inside, storytellers from around the world share times when, in the face of seemingly impossible situations, they found moments of beauty, wonder, and clarity that shed light on their lives and helped them find a path forward.From a fifteen-year-old saving a life in Chicago to a mother of triplets trekking to the North Pole to a ninety-year-old Russian man recalling his standoff with the KGB, these storytellers attest to the variety and richness of the human experience, and the shared threads that connect us all. With honesty and humor, they stare down their fear, embrace uncertainty, and encourage us all to be more authentic, vulnerable, and alive.

    Full of loneliness and hope, heartbreak and humor, Rothbart's tales blaze their way from midwestern farm fields to state prisons and border-town brothels. Much like the lost, tossed, and forgotten items Rothbart collected in his acclaimed book, Found, the stories in The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas capture the oddity, poetry, and dignity of everyday life.

    For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, "live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs."Dorothy Allison Edwidge Danticat E. L. Doctorow Louise Erdrich Adam Haslett ZZ Packer Mona Simpson Mary Yukari Waters