Written with unsparing honesty, these stories vividly illustrate love's complexities, the intricacies of family relationships, struggles with sexual identity, and the specter of AIDS. Whether chronicling a dying man's acts of vandalism, a divorcée under house arrest, a Mormon couple's potluck dinner for their few homosexual acquaintances, or a young Los Angeles boy's sexual awakening, the stories in Guess Again are full of wit, subtlety, and emotional generosity.

    With a mix of traditional, literary prose and bold – some might even say irresponsible – experimentation, Ben Greenman explores the ins and outs of modern romance. Expect tears, nudity, and recrimination.Both familiar in their humanness and wholly original, these imaginative stories take us all over the map in time, place, and circumstance. From the halfhearted summer affair between a part-time bartender and a married doctor in a Miami hotel to the cryptic pseudo-erotic love letters to a friend who is “more than a friend,” we experience the love of pop songs, the love of cohabitation in Chicago, and love that is so transporting it takes us to the moon–literally.

    These fifteen compact stories are meticulously observed glimpses of everyday life that expose the ominous lurking under the ordinary. While his wife sleeps, a husband prowls the Internet, obsessed with female serial killers; a bureaucrat tries to reinvent himself, exposing goodness as artifice when he converts to Buddhism in search of power; a woman sits on the edge of the bed where her lover lies, attempting to locate a motive for his violence within her own self-doubt. Shifting between moments of violence (real and imagined) and mundane contemporary life, these stories encompass the complexity of human emotions, our capacity for cruelty as well as compassion. Not so much minimalist as stealthy, Karate Chop delivers its blows with an understatement that shows a master at work.

    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.

    The eight-hour work day, the Ponzi scheme and the rhythm and blues have risen from its streets. But Chicago is not just a city of the past. In this dynamic issue, GRANTA brings the one-time industrial hub to life through the eyes of exciting new writers, from home grown stars like George Saunders and Dave Eggers, to immigrants who have come to the city from Bosnia, China and Ethiopia.In this issue, Aleksandar Hemon plays football with Italians and Tibetans along Lake Shore Drive. Chicago born MacArthur 'genius' grant-winning photographer Camilo José Vegara captures the demolition of the city's massive public housing estates. Richard Powers recollects the flood of 1992. Don DeLillo remembers Nelson Algren. Alex Kotlowitz explores the cost of urban violence and Dinaw Mengestu describes moving back home to run his dying father’s messenger business. Plus a sneak preview of Peter Carey's new novel.Finally, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka meditates on the meaning of the city's most visible son, Barack Obama. Out of these stories, which will be wrapped in a beautiful cover by Chris Ware, will arise a vivid portrait of a city remaking itself: a city shredded by violence but poised for a new future; a city that once again has a legitimate claim to being the home of the world's best writers.

    You’ll discover how far a prisoner will go to be with his dying wife, and what lurks between the walls of that Louisiana jailhouse to keep him there. You’ll find out how deep a man can cut himself to dig out the past. You’ll meet a college professor whose fear of flying might be the least of his worries. And you’ll learn how a sister’s love for sweet treats can reunite a broken family…whether they want it or not. Aliens and lot lizards…disembodied lips…the voice of God Himself… Thirteen stories and a brand new novella from horror author Wesley Southard. Within these pages, we all go a little mad…

    Tate seems both awed and bemused by small town life, with its legends, flights of fancy, heightened emotions, tragedies and small ruptures in the fabric of ordinary existence.

    Henry Prize Stories 2010 brings to life a dazzling array of subjects: a street orphan in Malaysia, a cowboy and his teenage bride, a Russian nanny in Manhattan, a nineteenth-century Nigerian widow, and political prisoners on a Greek island. Also included are essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.  Them Old Cowboy Songs Annie Proulx  Clothed, Female FigureKirstin Allio  The Headstrong Historian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  Stand By Me Wendell Berry  Sheep May Safely GrazeJess Row  Birch Memorial Preeta Samarasan  VisitationBrad Watson  The Woman of the House William Trevor  The Bridge Daniel Alarcón  A Spoiled ManDaniyal Mueenuddin  Oh, DeathJames Lasdun  Fresco, Byzantine Natalie Bakopoulos  The End of My Life in New YorkPeter Cameron  ObitTed Sanders  The Lover Damon Galgut  An East Egg Update George Bradley  Into the GorgeRon Rash  MicrostoriesJohn Edgar Wideman  Some Women Alice Munro  Making GoodLore Segal  For author interviews, photos, and more, go to www.ohenryprizestories.com   A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to support the PEN Readers & Writers Literary Outreach Program.

    In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being.This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass—a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.

    * 'Direct, unpretentious, humorous' SUNDAY TIMES

    His only link to the outside world is a telephone that will not dial out. During the occasional calls he receives, usually wrong numbers, the narrator remembers his former life growing up in Injury, Alaska with his Mother, an often unemployed single parent, and his older brother, Charlie, a sometime boxer, sometime actor. Throughout the course of this extraordinary novel, the unwilling captive draws his life-story in stickfigures on the walls. From the difficulty of his birth, to his sickly childhood, to adventures with his brother, the narrator depicts his crazy life, which is at once fascinating and heartbreaking. The one memory that haunts him is that of watching a movie about slaves on television and how that one slave, the one for whom Kamby Bolongo Mean River meant freedom, would never relinquish the idea of returning home.

    Asian American Studies. Is there a relationship between the population density of Tokyo and the pinkest part of a hamburger? Can one touch the inside of a noun to learn the difference between one bicycle and a field of bicycles? How close is yellow to need? How far are human fears from the fears of insects? Through a sequence of prose investigations, directions, theoretical performances, and character sketches, Sawako Nakayasu's TEXTURE NOTES presses itself against everything. Here is a book of liminal cartography, where textures are percolated by thought and propelled by feeling, where intellectual frottage meets sunlight, moonlight, the pain of seeing something beautiful and an entire town enamored by a simple rock. Once again, Nakayasu's writing explodes with genre-bending fury and fine-tuned improvisation, leaving in its wake a largess of feeling for the things of the world.

    His father has mysteriously disappeared, and Grant’s brother, Max, a lifelong rival, takes off on the day Grant returns, leaving him with a sickly flock and a pile of debt. When Max returns a year later with a young woman named Sophia, a contest of will begins between the brothers, reviving ghosts that Grant had hoped were banished from the homestead.

    With a fluency of tone and a gifted eye, he examines the dark and unfathomable moments in the most committed relationships; the small distances that stretch into miles between generations and couples when long-buried secrets tumble out into the light; or the eccentricities that may label us as odd yet mark us as unique. Capturing the bewilderment and tenderness in failed connections or missed moments, his characters stand vivid in their human frailty and we warm to them almost despite ourselves. A lonely wife determined to gather her far-flung family for a reunion invents the perfect lie to persuade them; an old woman recalls how she once trained a black crow the art of thieving; and the off-duty small-town cop on his last round of the evening who does a distressed family a great service when he summons the courage to shoot their gravely injured dog.These poignant tales reveal the subtleties in love and indifference or the strange, sad, breathtaking tricks of chance that can change a life in a second. As Lychack moves among these characters with all their virtues and failings, he observes the inevitable disparity between their realities and their dreams even while investing their stories with wit, humility, and a large measure of grace. That he succeeds so remarkably in transferring it all to the page is evidence of his prodigious talent.

    The walking wounded. These are the stories of ordinary people.