A young woman visits her father following his nervous breakdown, and a devoted sister is profoundly unsettled by the sermon her brother insists on reciting. Whether in childhood or Vietnam, in memory or the eternal present, these people are revealed in the extenuating, sometimes extreme circumstances of everyday life, and in the complex consequences of their decisions—that, for instance, can bring together an innocent inner-city youth and a little girl attacked, months earlier, by a dog in a wintry park. Yet each story, however crucial, is marked by Mr. Wolff’s compassionate understanding and humor.In short, fiction of dazzling emotional range and absolute authority.

    Happy in her marriage, she tries to look the other way when her genial husband, Alec, takes to the bottle. When Elspeth, Margaret's sister, comes to live with them, the young woman is immediately captivated by the beauty and vitality of the farm, and by the affection she receives from those around her. But as summer turns into fall, and the friendship between Alec and Elspeth deepens, Margaret finds her spirit tested by a series of events that seem as cruel and inevitable as the endless prairie winters.Long out of print, Remembering Laughter (1937) marked Wallace Stegner's brilliant literary debut.

    His home microbiology lab—the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns—has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive and hatches a plan to transform this disastrous collision with the security state into an unforgettable work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around it.

    The famous Gibbsville stories, more than fifty of theminclude such stunners as "The Doctor's Son," "Imagine Kissing Pete," "Fatimas and Kisses," "The Cellar Domain," and "The Bucket of Blood." Again, O'Hara's Pennsylvania Protectorate, as he called itin reality, the coal region of his hometown, Pottsville, in Schuylkill Countycomes to socially and sexually complicated life. Here are the miners in the company towns, the country club set, the shopkeepers, the bartenders, the barbers, and the collegians. It is a world as varied, vibrant, and complete as Faulkner's Yoknapatawphna County or Thomas Wolfe's Altamount. Presented in this Book-of-the-Month Club Selection are four decades of the best work by the author who Bennett Cerf declared one of America's most underrated writers."

    These ten powerful stories portray men and women in their most intimate moments. A lover of poetry is asked by his wife to give up what may be his most treasured relationship. A book dealer is forced to face the truth about his life. And in the title story, a translator assists his wife’s suicide, even as he performs a last act of betrayal. James Salter’s assured style and emotional insight make him one of our most essential writers

    A couple suspects their friends think them boring; a woman resolves to see herself as nothing but then concludes she's set too high a goal; and a funeral home receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors. Lydia Davis once again proves in the words of the Los Angeles Times "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction."

    The Weary Blues announced the arrival of a rare voice in American poetry. A literary descendant of Walt Whitman ("I, too, sing America," Hughes wrote), he chanted the joys and sorrows of black America in unprecedented language. A gifted lyricist, he offered rhythms and cadences that epitomized the particularities of African American creativity, especially jazz and the blues. His second volume, steeped in the blues and controversial because of its frankness, confirmed Hughes as a poet of uncompromising integrity. Then in the 1930s came Dear Lovely Death (1931) and the radical A New Song (1938). Poems such as "Good Morning Revolution" and "Let America Be America Again" made his pen one of the most forceful in America during the Great Depression.

    Henry Award in 1961, the stories have been anthologized over a hundred times, made into three films, translated into thirteen languages, and - most important - once read, they abide in the hearts of their readers.

    ' First published this Spring in the New Yorker, The Embassy of Cambodia is a rare and brilliant story that takes us deep into the life of a young woman, Fatou, domestic servant to the Derawals and escapee from one set of hardships to another. Beginning and ending outside the Embassy of Cambodia, which happens to be located in Willesden, NW London, Zadie Smith's absorbing, moving and wryly observed story suggests how the apparently small things in an ordinary life always raise larger, more extraordinary questions.

    Poems discuss a journey across the ocean, a veterans' cemetery, money, an abandoned collection of dolls, and a man who escapes from his prison cell to commit a murder.

    An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

    Platte River is a collection of three novellas, each a singular exploration of the human heart set against the backdrop of God's creation.  Filled with arresting images—chinook winds flying through a valley, couples skating in the dark on thin ice, tools made from animal bones, a delicate shape frozen in a river—“Mahatma Joe” is about an evangelist who settles in Grass Valley, Montana, and the woman who becomes obsessed with his vision of the world. In “Field Events” a woman falls in love with a man even larger than her discus-tossing brothers. And the title novella, “Platte River,” portrays one man's lyric meditation on loneliness, the nature of peace, and the quest for love.

    Renowned for their meanness and always armed with their legendary nickel-plated colts, they patrol the streets of Harlem and attempt to keep some semblance of law and order.

    Sometimes we tell these stories to make people laugh. Sometimes we tell them to make people think. Sometimes we tell them so we can increase the chances we'll see the other person naked.Paul Shirley's stories are about an adulthood spent all over the world: living in Spain, playing in the NBA, and having his heart (and spleen) broken. But they're also stories about growing up in small-town Kansas: triumphant spelling bees, catastrophic middle school dances, and a Sex Ed. class taught by his mother.They're funny stories. They're vulnerable stories. Most of all, they're universal stories, just as the stories we tell on dates should be.

    Interwoven with their stories are those of inhabitants of the living world: a retired sea captain, a psychotic former child actor (possibly the sea captain’s illegitimate son?), and the technicians who monitor the Burrow, making sure its occupants have a constant supply of oxygen and food. Through all of their stories, and the ways in which their lives, past and present, intertwine, Krusoe creates a poignant story about what constitutes a life, what remains when we die, and what we possibly carry with us into the next world.