In Danielle McLaughlin’s stories, the world is both beautiful and alien. Men and women negotiate their surroundings as a tourist might navigate a distant country: watchfully, with a mixture of wonder and apprehension. Here are characters living lives in translation, ever at the mercy of distortions and misunderstandings, striving to make sense both of the spaces they inhabit and of the people they share them with.

    Screenwriter, director, and star of the acclaimed film Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection.

    Wry and sharp, dark and subversive, they keep watch as these characters make the choices that will change the course of their lives and run into each other in surprising, unforgettable ways.The Bowmans are declining Texas gentry, heirs to an airline fortune, surrounded by a patriarch's stuffed trophies and lost dreams. They will each be haunted by the past as they strive to escape its force. The Fosters are diplomats’ kids who might as well be orphans. Jill and Maizie grow up privileged amid poverty, powerless to change the lives of those around them and uncertain whether they have the power to change their own. The Guzmans have moved between Colombia and the United States for two generations, each seeking opportunity for the next, only to find that the American dream can be as crushing as it is elusive.Amy Parker's debut collection considers--with an unfailingly observant eye--our failures and our successes, our fractures and our connections, our impact and our evanescence. She marks herself a worthy heir to the long tradition of smart women casting cool and careful glances at the American middle class.

    Entire neighborhoods drown in mud, glass rains from the sky, birds speak gibberish, and parents of young children disappear. Millions starve while others grow coats of mold. But a few are able to survive and find a light in the aftermath, illuminating what we’ve become. In "The Disappeared", a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. A boy swells to fill his parents’ ransacked attic in "The Ruined Child". Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler’s full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William H. Gass, yet imbued with Butler's own vision of the apocalyptic and bizarre.

     Second Chances follows a single mother deserted by her adulterous ex-husband, a socialite who abandoned her family and fled to the Caribbean, a high-powered executive with a disconcerting fear of commitment and a questionable sense of judgment, and a privileged teenager plagued with a lecherous father and absentee mother while bewildered by an unforeseen opportunity with the most sought after boy in school. Although the women are each dealt cards they never expected, they find friendship, family and love in the least likely of places, and with those, they find hope.

    . . A bored London housewife discovers a secret erotic club . . . A shy, bookish girl develops an unlikely friendship with the schoolyard bully and her wild, horsey family . . . After fighting with her boyfriend, a woman goes for a night walk on a remote tropical beach with dark, unexpected consequences.Sarah Hall has been hailed as "one of the most significant and exciting of Britain's young novelists" (The Guardian). Now, in this collection of seven pieces of short fiction, published in England to phenomenal praise, she is at her best: seven pieces of uniquely talented prose telling stories as wholly absorbing as they are ambitious and accessible.

    Her jugaad and privilege puts her directly in the path of a hardworking scholarship student– Vladimir Petrov, the vodka to her hot chocolate. Their tumultuous friendship is affected by global events, the landscape around them ever changing. And slowly, the Russian winter begins to melt for the Indian summer.Funny and endearing, Three Impossible Wishes is a heart-warming book about finding love and learning to love yourself.

    Carefully crafted over 15 years, they explore unbounded sexualities, a vision of the fluidity of the person, and politics – from the deaths of black people at the hands of the police, to the deep shifts that signal the subtle changes in the nature of capitalism and much more. These stories may sometimes tickle, sometimes shock; but will always engage both the intellect and the heart.

    Here are seventeen short stories, including her Hugo Award-winning story "Cat Pictures Please," which is about what would happen if artificial intelligence was born out of our search engine history. Two stories are previously unpublished. Kritzer has a gift for telling stories both humorous and tender. Her stories are filled with wit and intelligence, and require thoughtful reading.

    A man travels to his son’s school to deal with the fallout of a violent attack and to make sure his son will not lose his college place. But what exactly has his son done? And who is to blame? A young woman trying to make it in LA, working in a clothes shop while taking acting classes, turns to a riskier way of making money but will be forced to confront the danger of the game she’s playing. And a family coming together for Christmas struggle to skate over the lingering darkness caused by the very ordinary brutality of a troubled husband and father.These outstanding stories examine masculinity, male power and broken relationships, while revealing – with astonishing insight and clarity – those moments of misunderstanding that can have life-changing consequences. And there is an unexpected violence, ever-present but unseen, in the depiction of the complicated interactions between men and women, and families. Subtle, sophisticated and displaying an extraordinary understanding of human behaviour, these stories are unforgettable.

    A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray’s curio cabinet expands in Gutshot, where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. These singular stories live and breathe on their own, pulsating with energy and humanness and a glorious sense of humor. Hers are stories that you will read and reread—raw gems that burrow into your brain, reminders of just how strange and beautiful our world is. These collected stories come to us like a vivisected body, the whole that is all the more elegant and breathtaking for exploring its most grotesque and intimate lightless viscera.

    In fact original fairy tales are still being written. Over the last century and a half many well-known authors have used the characters and settings and themes of traditional tales such as 'Cinderella', 'Hansel and Gretel', and 'Beauty and the Beast' to produce new and characteristic works of wonder and enchantment. The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales brings together forty of the best of these stories by British and American writers from John Ruskin and Nathaniel Hawthorne to I. B. Singer and Angela Carter. These tales are full of princes and princesses, witches and dragons and talking animals, magic objects, evil spells, and unexpected endings. Some of their authors, like John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, use the form to point a social or spiritual moral; others such as Jeanne Desy and Richard Kennedy, turn the traditional stories inside out to extraordinary effect. James Thurber, Bernard Malamud, and Donald Barthelme, among many others, bring the characters and plots of the traditional fairy tale into the contemporary world to make satiric comments on modern life. The literary skill, wit, and sophistication of these stories appeal to an adult audience, even though some of them were originally written for children. They include light-hearted comic fairy stories like Charles Dickens's 'The Magic Fishbone' and L. F. Baum's 'The Queen of Quok', thoughtful and often moving tales like Lord Dunsany's 'The Kith of the Elf Folk' and Philip K. Dick's 'The King of the Elves', and profoundly disturbing ones like Lucy LaneClifford's 'The New Mother', and Ursula Le Guin's 'The Wife's Story'. Together they prove that the fairy tale is not only one of the most popular and enduring forms, but a significant and continually developing part of literature.Uncle David's nonsensical story about giants and fairies / Catherine Sinclair --Feathertop / Nathaniel Hawthorne --The King of the Golden River / John Ruskin --The story of Fairyfoot / Frances Browne --The light princess / George MacDonald --The magic fishbone / Charles Dickens --A toy princess / Mary De Morgan --The new mother / Lucy Lane Clifford --Good luck is better than gold / Juliana Horatia Ewing --The apple of contentment / Howard Pyle --The griffin and the minor canon / Frank Stockton --The selfish giant / Oscar Wilde --The rooted lover / Laurence Housman --The song of the morrow / Robert Louis Stevenson --The reluctant dragon / Kenneth Grahame --The book of beasts / E. Nesbit --The Queen of Quok / L.F. Baum --The magic ship / H.G. Wells --The Kith of the elf-folk / Lord Dunsany --The story of Blixie Bimber and the power of the gold buckskin whincher / Carl Sandburg --The lovely myfanwy / Walter De la Mare --The troll / T.H. White --Gertrude's child / Richard Hughes --The unicorn in the garden / James Thurber --Bluebeard's daugher / Sylvia Townsend Warner --The chaser / John Collier --The King of the elves / Philip K. Dick --In the family / Naomi Mitchison --The jewbird / Bernard Malamud --Menaseh's dream / I.B. Singer --The glass mountain / Donald Barthelme --Prince Amilec / Tanith Lee --Petronella / Jay Williams --The man who had seen the rope trick / Joan Aiken --The courtship of Mr Lyon / Angela Carter --The princess who stood on her own two feet / Jeanne Desy --The wife's story / Ursula Le Guin --The river maid / Jane Yolen --The porcelain man / Richard Kennedy --Old man Potchikoo / Louise Erdrich

    They stay with you like a significant memory.”—Roger Rosenblatt“Van Booy is a remarkable young writer. Taste, touch, smell, sight and sound, in spite of their evanescence, are frozen for a moment in these stories and celebrated, along with their subtle interconnection, in all the aspects of love.”—Fred VolkmerThe Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion. Love, loss, frailty, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy’s themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.Born in London, Simon Van Booy grew up in Wales. A keen rugby player, he was recruited to play football for Campbellsville University in Kentucky. He eventually returned to England, where he graduated from Dartington College of Arts. Now a New Yorker, he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and in the Bard College Clemente Course. As a freelance journalist, he writes for several New York newspapers. He has won a first-place award for in-depth reporting from the New York Press Association.

    An astronaut struggles to adapt to life back on earth; a young man discovers he is going blind in a foreign city; a retired plastic surgeon uncovers old wounds; and two lovers become unexpectedly intimate. Each tale in K J Orr’s moving collection is charged with the irrepressible human urge to connect in the face of disorientating change.With exquisitely cadenced storytelling, Orr introduces us to worlds and places that are both familiar and askew. Her landscapes are instantly recognisable, yet tinged with a lingering sense of uncertainty. The result is a wonderfully diverse and captivating debut from a rising literary talent.

    Davis • Jennifer Egan • Carolyn Ferrell • Mary Gordon • Cristina Henríquez • Samantha Hunt •Binnie Kirshenbaum • Dika Lam • Caitlin Macy • Francine Prose • Holiday Reinhorn • Roxana Robinson • Curtis Sittenfeld • Lynne Tillman • Martha Witt Chick lit: A genre of fiction that often recycles the following plot: Girl in big city desperately searches for Mr. Right in between dieting and shopping for shoes. Girl gets dumped (sometimes repeatedly). Girl finds Prince Charming. This Is Not Chick Lit is a celebration of America’s most dynamic literary voices, as well as a much needed reminder that, for every stock protagonist with a designer handbag and three boyfriends, there is a woman writer pushing the envelope of literary fiction with imagination, humor, and depth. The original short stories in this collection touch on some of the same themes as chick lit–the search for love and identity–but they do so with extraordinary power, creativity, and range; they are also political, provocative, and, at turns, utterly surprising. Featuring marquee names as well as burgeoning talents, This Is Not Chick Lit will nourish your heart, and your mind. “This Is Not Chick Lit is important not only for its content, but for its title. I’ll know we’re getting somewhere when equally talented male writers feel they have to separate themselves from the endless stream of fiction glorifying war, hunting and sports by naming an anthology This Is Not a Guy Thing.”–Gloria Steinem“These voices, diverse and almost eerily resonant, offer us a refreshing breath of womanhood-untamed, ungroomed, and unglossed.”–ELLE