Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov and O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection includes Sredni Vastar and The Unrest Cure. 'We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples they sometimes live apart'[Description from back cover]

    The book is a last in its series started from Vanvas.

    This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive con men, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.In "Thief," an aluminum worker turns unlikely detective to solve the mystery of which of his kids is stealing from the family vacation fund. In "We Live in Water," a lawyer returns to a corrupt North Idaho town to find the father who disappeared thirty years earlier. In "Anything Helps," a homeless man has to "go to cardboard" to raise enough money to buy his son the new Harry Potter book. In "Virgo," a local newspaper editor tries to get back at his superstitious ex-girlfriend by screwing with her horoscope. Also included are the stories "Don't Eat Cat" and "Statistical Abstract of My Hometown, Spokane, Washington," both of which achieved a cult following after publication online.

    Salinger, to name just a few. Now Duncan distills his remarkable powers of observation into this unique collection of short stories and essays. At the heart of Duncan's tales are characters undergoing the complex and violent process of transformation, with results both painful and wondrous. Equally affecting are his nonfiction reminiscences, the "river teeth" of the title. He likens his memories to the remains of old-growth trees that fall into Northwestern rivers and are sculpted by time and water. These experiences—shaped by his own river of time—are related with the art and grace of a master storyteller. In River Teeth, a uniquely gifted American writer blends two forms, taking us into the rivers of truth and make-believe, and all that lies in between.

    In "Blythe," an attorney who has become a stay-at-home mother takes a night class in poetry and meets another full-time mother, one whose charismatic brilliance changes everything. In "The Wife of the Dictator," that eponymous wife ("brought back . . . from [the dictator's] last visit to America") grows more desperately, menacingly isolated every day. In "Delicate Edible Birds," a group of war correspondents--a lone, high-spirited woman among them--falls sudden prey to a brutal farmer while fleeing Nazis in the French countryside. In "Lucky Chow Fun," Groff returns us to Templeton, the setting of her first book, for revelations about the darkness within even that idyllic small town. In some of these stories, enormous changes happen in an instant. In others, transformations occur across a lifetime--or several lifetimes. Throughout the collection, Groff displays particular and vivid preoccupations. Crime is a motif--sex crimes, a possible murder, crimes of the heart. Love troubles recur--they're in every story--love in alcoholism, in adultery, in a flood, even in the great flu epidemic of 1918. Some of the love has depths, which are understood too late; some of the love is shallow, and also understood too late. And mastery is a theme--Groff's women swim and baton twirl, become poets, or try and try again to achieve the inner strength to exercise personal freedom. Overall, these stories announce a notable new literary master. Dazzlingly original and confident, Delicate Edible Birds further solidifies Groff's reputation as one of the foremost talents of her generation.

    Over the course of eight stories, we are introduced to a host of young people on the cusp of discovery and loss. As he evokes the various states of agony and pleasure--humiliation, rebellion, camaraderie, and desire--Benioff displays a profound understanding of the transformative power of a single moment and how sadness can be illuminated by a humorous flip side. When the Nines Roll Over confirms the promise of a gifted writer emerging as a storytelling force.

     • Award-winning storyteller gaining popularity: Jean Thompson’s short fiction has been honored by the National endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation; Who Do You Love: Stories was a National Book Award finalist for fiction and was promoted by David Sedaris during his own lecture tour; and Throw Like a Girl: Stories was a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. The collection is also in its sixth printing, as Thompson’s longstanding critical acclaim crosses over into a popular following. Do Not Deny Me is perfectly positioned to gain an even wider audience. • Do Not Deny Me: Here is a title that demands—and commands—attention in and of itself. Yet Thompson’s latest collection is no literary dare, delivering as it does twelve dazzling new stories that together offer, with wit, humor, and razor-sharp perception, a fictional primer on how Americans live day to day. In Thompson’s writing, The New York Times Book Review has noted, “some of the biggest satisfactions happen line by line, thanks to Thompson’s effortless ability to tip her prose into the universal.” Thompson succeeds as “one of our most astute diagnosticians of contemporary experience” (The Boston Globe).

    These pieces illustrate how our possessions act as proxies for ourselves, and how tussles over ownership articulate the power dynamics of our relationships. In Lionel Shriver’s world, we may possess people and objects and places, but in turn they possess us.In the stunning novella "The Standing Chandelier," a woman with a history of attracting other women’s antagonism creates a deeply personal wedding present for her best friend and his fiancée—only to discover that the jealous fiancée wants to cut her out of their lives. In "Domestic Terrorism," a thirty-something son refuses to leave home, resulting in a standoff that renders him a millennial cause célèbre. In "The ChapStick," a middle-aged man subjugated by service to his elderly father discovers that the last place you should finally assert yourself is airport security. In "Vermin," an artistic Brooklyn couple’s purchase of a ramshackle house destroys their once-passionate relationship. In "The Subletter," two women, both foreign conflict junkies, fight over a claim to a territory that doesn’t belong to either.Exhibiting a satisfying thematic unity unusual for a collection, this masterful work showcases the biting insight that has made Shriver one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.

    They tell of corporate betrayals and lost opportunities, and of the obsessions, hopes, fears, and vagaries of desire.

    In A Typical Irish Christmas, a grieving widower heads for a holiday in Ireland and finds an unexpected destination not just for himself, but for a father and daughter in crisis. . . . In Pulling Together, a teacher not yet out of her twenties sees her affair with a married man at a turning point as Christmas Eve approaches. . . . And in the title story, This Year It Will Be Different, a woman with a complacent husband and grown children enters a season that will forever alter her life, and theirs. . .

    He has enshrined in them every kind of experience from the pangs of hunger and sex to the rapture of mystic vision. Its range includes stark realistic pictures of the material world as well as the realm of fantasy haunted by ghosts and spirits. Basheer has written on love and hate, on politicians and pickpockets, on the fancies of childhood and on the disillusionments of adult life with an intense sense of the tragedy of life and at the same time an irrepressible sense of humour.

    Most of his friends are dead or disappeared. Corrupt CIA Director Marcus Cain is poised to ascend to the highest levels of power, and the shadowy group known as the Circle is causing chaos across the globe.

    Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? Isn't the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected? In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many different, unexpected gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, and Hemingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's Cannibalism in the Cars, a story that reveals a darker side to his humor (That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to...a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy). From Melville come the juxtaposed tales The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, of which Oates says, Only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction. From Flannery O'Connor we find A Late Encounter With the Enemy, and from John Cheever, The Death of Justina, one of Cheever's own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master. This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.

    She captures the beguiling transformation from child to adult with humor, heartache, and desperation. From grieving mothers to fathers adrift, old flames to restless teens, the isolated characters in Doll Palace are united by conflicting desires, quiet rebellions, and the private struggles of the heart.

    On her travel, she rescues a gentlewoman in distress -- Evelyn Barton-Forbes -- and the two become friends. The two companions continue to Egypt where they face mysteries, mummies and the redoubtable Radcliffe Emerson, and outspoken archaeologist, who doesn't need women to help him solve mysteries - at least that's what he thinks!The Curse of the Pharaohs (Amelia Peabody, Bk 2)One of the best-loved of mystery writers weaves another tale of intrigue featuring Amelia Peabody and Radcliffe of Crocodile on the Sandbank. This time the willful and witty duo must catch a murderer at an excavation of an ancient Egyptian tomb.The Mummy Case (Amelia Peabody, Bk 3)The third in the popular series charting the adventures of Amelia Peabody, this novel follows the Victorian lady sleuth to the "pyramids" of Mazghunah. On her arrival, it seems that the barren area can be of no interest, but a murder in Cairo soon persuades her otherwise.