“Scroll Through the Weapons” is about a couple taking care of their underfed and almost feral nieces and nephews. “Signal to the Faithful” follows a boy as he takes a tense road trip with his priest. And “Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine,” the title story, is about a narcissistic rock star who moves back home during a rough patch. These stories all build on each other in strange and remarkable ways, showcasing Wilson’s crackling wit and big heart.Filled with imagination and humor, Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine is an exuberant collection of captivating and charmingly bizarre stories that promise to burrow their way into your heart and soul.

    It has the potential to be groundbreaking in its raw, honest portrayal of a just-barely-functioning family. Billy Lombardo is interested in the beauty of words. He is also a great observer of the world around him, and he is exquisite and precise in getting that world onto the page.Billy Lombardo is the author of The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, a Chicago Tribune “Best Fiction of 2005” selection. His novel Man With Two Arms is due from The Overlook Press in 2010.

    Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a – well what?

    Other plots are only slightly less outrageous in conceit. In "Lieserl," a lovesick madwoman dupes Albert Einstein into believing he has a daughter; in "The Faithful Companion at Forty," Tonto admits to second thoughts about his biggest life choice ("But for every day, for your ordinary life, a mask is only going to make you more obvious. There's an element of exhibitionism in it"). "The Travails" offers a peek at the one-sided correspondence of Mary Gulliver, who wants Lemuel to come home already and help out around the house. The homage to Swift makes sense, for, when Fowler doesn't settle for amusing her readers, she makes a lively satirist.The extraterrestrials who appear in her stories (whether the inscrutably sadistic monsters in "Duplicity" or the members of a seminar studying late-1960s college behavior in "The View from Venus: A Case Study") seem stand-ins for the author herself, who, in elegant and witty prose, cultivates the eye of a curious alien and, along the way, unfolds eccentric plots that keep the pages turning.Contents:Black Glass (1991)Contention (1986)Shimabara (1995)The Elizabeth Complex (1996)Go Back (1998)The Travails (1998)Lieserl (1990)Letters from Home (1987)Duplicity (1989)The Faithful Companion at Forty (1987)The Brew (1995)Lily Red (1988)The Black Fairy's Curse (1997)The View from Venus (1986)Game Night at the Fox and Goose (1989)

    . . . Krauss’s depictions of the nuances of sex and love, intimacy and dependence, call to mind the work of Natalia Ginzburg in their psychological profundity, their intellectual rigor. . . . Krauss’s stories capture characters at moments in their lives when they’re hungry for experience and open to possibilities, and that openness extends to the stories themselves: narratives too urgent and alive for neat plotlines, simplistic resolutions or easy answers.”  —Molly Antopol, New York Times Book Review “From a contemporary master, an astounding collection of ten globetrotting stories, each one a powerful dissection of the thorny connections between men and women. . . . Each story is masterfully crafted and deeply contemplative, barreling toward a shimmering, inevitable conclusion, proving once again that Krauss is one of our most formidable talents in fiction.” — Esquire In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all. The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies; young women’s coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss’s stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.

    In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, bitter, and wise. Black Light contains the type of storytelling that resonates somewhere deep, in the well of memory that repudiates nostalgia.

    In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on – and reinvents – her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

    These stories feature cats, bees, wolves, dogs, and even that most capricious of animals, humans, and have been reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and The Secret History of Fantasy. Kij Johnson's stories have won the Sturgeon and World Fantasy awards. She has taught writing; worked at Tor, Dark Horse, and Microsoft; worked as a radio announcer; run bookstores; and waitressed in a strip bar.Contents:The Man Who Bridged the Mist (2011)Wolf Trapping (1989)The Empress Jingu Fishes (2004)The Bitey Cat (2012)Chenting, in the Land of the Dead (1999)My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire—Exposition on the Flaws in my Spouse's Character—The Nature of the Bird—The Possible Causes—Her Final Disposition (2007)Schrödinger's Cathouse (1993)Names for Water (2010)Fox Magic (1993)Spar (2009)The Horse Raiders (2000)26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss (2008)At the Mouth of the River of Bees (2003)The Evolution of Trickster Stories among the Dogs of North Park after the Change (2007)The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles (2009)Ponies (2010)

    Caught at moments of change, Chabon's men and women, children and husbands and wives, all face small but momentous decisions. They are caught in events that will crystallize and define their lives forever, and with each, Michael Chabon brings his unique vision and uncanny understanding of our deepest mysteries and our greatest fears.

    His stories are without equal in their beautiful terrible honesty. Stylish and finely wrought, these are tales with the force of life itself.

    M. Homes as one of the most provocative and daring writers of her generation. Here you'll find the cult classic A Real Doll, the tale of a teenage boy's erotic obsession with his sister's favorite doll; Adults Alone, which first introduced Paul and Elaine, the crack-smoking yuppie couple whose marriage careens out of control in Homes's novel Music for Torching; and Looking for Johnny, in which a kidnapped boy, having failed his abductor's expectations, is returned home. Brilliantly conceived, sharply etched, and exceptionally satisfying, these stories explore the American dream in ways you're not likely soon to forget. Working in Kodacolor hues, Homes offers an uncanny picture of a surreal suburbia-outrageous and utterly believable.

    She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves. In “Desert Hearts,” a woman takes a job selling sex toys in San Francisco rather than embark on the law career she pursued only for the sake of her father. In “Pearl and the Swiss Guy Fall in Love,” a woman realizes she much prefers the company of her pit bull—and herself—to the neurotic foreign fling who won’t decamp from her apartment. In “How Am I Supposed to Talk to You?” a daughter hauls a suitcase of lingerie to Mexico for her flighty, estranged mother to resell there, wondering whether her personal mission—to come out—is worth the same effort. And in “Barbara the Slut,” a young woman with an autistic brother, a Princeton acceptance letter, and a love of sex navigates her high school’s toxic, slut-shaming culture with open eyes. With heart, sass, and pitch-perfect characters, Barbara the Slut is a head-turning debut from a writer with a limitless career before her.

    Winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, two O. Henry prizes, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Rash brilliantly illuminates the tensions between the traditional and the modern, the old and the new south, tenderness and violence, man and nature. Though his focus is regional, the themes of Rash's work are universal, striking an emotional chord that resonates deep within each of our lives.Something Rich and Strange showcases this acclaimed master's artistry and craftsmanship in thirty-two stories culled from previously published collections and two available for the first time in book form: "Outlaws" and "Shiloh." Each work of short fiction demonstrates Rash's dazzling ability to evoke the heart and soul of this land and its people—men and women inexorably tethered to the geography that defines and shapes them. Filled with suspense and myth, hope and heartbreak, and told in language that flows like "shimmering, liquid poetry" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Something Rich and Strange is an iconic work from an American literary virtuoso.

    Reprint.

    An engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits, a plague ballad, theological pamphlets, and an articulated skeleton are ingeniously fleshed out into rollicking tales. Whether she's spinning the tale of a soldier tricked into marrying a dowdy spinster, or a Victorian surgeon's attempts to "improve" women, Donoghue fills us with the sights and smells of the period as she summons the ghosts of ordinary people, bringing them to unforgettable life in fiction.