By turns subtle and intense, disturbing and elusive, the stories in this collection are ultimately connected by themes of memory and loss, reality and fabrication, and by a richless of language that rests lightly on its carefully foundation.

    Where men stood tall and lived rough. But that West is no more. In its place Shann Ray finds washedup basketball players, businessmen hiding addictions, and women fighting the inexplicable violence that wells up in these men. A son struggles to accept his father’s apologies after surviving a childhood of beatings. Two men seek empty basketball hoops on a snowy night, hoping to relive past glory. A bull rider skips town and rides herd on an unruly mob of passengers as he searches for a thief on a train threading through Montana’s Rocky Mountains. In these stories, Ray grapples with the terrible hurt we inflict on those we love, and finds that reconciliation, if far off, is at least possible. The debut of a writer who is out to redefine the contours of the American West, American Masculine is a deeply felt and fiercely written ode to the country we left behind.

    These are miraculous stories of survival, perhaps even forgiveness. To some of us Georgia's life would be unthinkable. Sellers makes us believe it is well worth living. "Heather Sellers writes delicious, dangerous prose. She starts you twenty-three floors up in condo squalor, nips across for dysfunction in Disney country, threatens incest in Hotlanta, and comes to grief on the Gulf. The dead-credible life of Georgia Jackson-ineffably sweet, thoroughly in love with her own luscious body, half in love with her lush of a father-skids at the edge of the surreal. Her story had me laughing through the lump in my throat. An original. A knockout debut."-Janet Burroway

    The son of a high-ranking former Soviet diplomat, Erofeyev rebelled against Soviet values, and his works were banned until the Gorbachev era. His first translated novel, Russian Beauty, was published to great critical acclaim, and his writings in the New Yorker have won many American fans. Here, for the first time in English, is a collection of short stories written between 1978 and 1990, some of which have already acquired classic status in Russia. Written during the death-throes of the Soviet Union, though still relevant today, they have implications that are not restricted to Russia alone. In a nimble translation that preserves the dazzle and nuance of Erofeyev's rich language, Life with an Idiot will introduce Victor Erofeyev to a new generation of readers.

    

    His first affections move from a young kitchen girl in the Jewish ghetto who fills his glass tall with scarce milk to a restless married woman, an undercover spy, and a frail woman who can't escape her past suffering. It is Ivan Kl

    When the narrator moves into the area, she discovers everyone--and everything--has a story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the its founding to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the man who causes international tension when he dies straddling the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia.Each of the stories represents a brick and they interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town. What emerges is the message that the history of any place--no matter how humble--is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one's self and one's dreams but also with all of the universe.Richly imagined, weaving anecdote with recipes and gossip, Tokarczuk's novel is an epic of a small place. Since its publication in 1998 it has remained a bestseller in Poland. House of Day, House of Night is the English-language debut of one of Europe's best young writers.

    VERA & LINUS is a series of short sketches. The book's theme is the love between the two protagonists, Vera and Linus. They are mischief makers and tricksters of the most daring sort, and they are constantly up to no good, but the language holds them with a clear restraint, a restraint born perhaps out of the peculiar nature of their love, a love both for each other and the things of the world. Their mastery, and shifting natures allow them to compel the workaday world as they see it, but not to rule over each other, and so their game begins, as Vera struggles to outwit Linus, and Linus to outwit Vera.

    Powers Unlocked. An Alliance is Born.Ten thousand years ago, the Furies nearly exterminated all life in the universe before being defeated by a coalition of worlds led by the Olympians.Or so everyone thought.Now they're back, and a new reign of terror has begun.

    Now living happily in Berkeley, married and the mother of twins, Nora Jane is back in college, pregnant again, launching a new career, and facing circumstances that imperil her domestic bliss.The nine stories that follow explore the hazards of recapturing and reviving old affairs. Featuring both new and familiar Gilchrist characters, all of these stories shed brilliant new light on the oldest emotion.

    A Czech immigrant who finds a paradoxical contentment on the harsh expanse of the Nebraska prairie. A solitary young painter spying raptly and guiltily on his exquisite neighbor. These are some of the lives that Willa Cather renders, with a fine balance of compassion and detachment, in these nineteen stories. Here are the great themes that Cather staked out like tracts of land: the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; the ways in which the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment.

    

    Through the narrator we are told of what happens among those standing in line outside this store, what happens as the narrator's mind thinks and rants about the current state of Poland, and what happens as he imagines the failed Polish rebellion of 1863. The novel's form allows Konwicki (both character and author) to roam around and through Poland's past and present, and to range freely through whatever comes to his attention. By turns comic, lyrical, despairing, and liberating, The Polish Complex stands as one of the most important novels to have come out of Poland since World War II.

    The narrator, a Polish shepherd called Jacob, is deliberately a cipher, serving as a Polish everyman. After a bombing that signals the outbreak of an unnamed war, Jacob finds himself alone in the enormous palace of his master, the local lord. Everyone else has fled, and as Jacob wanders from room to room, he marvels at the wealth manifested there. He feels anger, too, and gives vent to an incongruously articulate monologue expressing his bitter resentment of the stratification of Polish society. Surveying portraits of the noble family, Jacob himself assumes the role of the lord of the manor--or perhaps several generations of lords, as this ``character'' has many voices. He personifies others as well, including a peasant girl who is treated as a sexual slave by the master of the estate. In his ramblings, Jacob portrays both classes unflatteringly-- the palace nobles as genuinely evil, the local peasants as little more than animals. Mysliwski is a master of literary pyrotechnics--Jacob's voices are grand opera, dramatic, exaggerated--and they are propelled by the author's moral outrage, which makes the destruction of the palace not only inevitable but justifiable. Yet the novel's sense of urgency seems to have been dispelled by time and intervening events.

    The exalted, memorable characters in Kirn's acclaimed debut short story col lection confront the real hard bargains in life that spring up from the business of simply living, and Kirn transforms these hard-luck stories into strapping moral lessons which evoke the bonds that unite us all.