shirt makers; tying a Windsor knot to making a pot of tea; Victoria sponge to fish pie, and the rules of cricket to Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

    

    The people are caught off-guard or cast adrift by personal impulses even while wide awake to their own imperfections. Each voice will win readers over completely and break hearts with each confused and conflicted decision that is made. Every story is beautifully controlled and provocatively alive to its own truth.

    This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including Pale Horse, Pale Rider, where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiancé on his way to war, and Noon Wine, a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas. In all of the compelling stories collected here, harsh and tragic truths are expressed in prose both brilliant and precise.Selected and introduced by Sarah Churchwell, these 12 short stories by Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) include the three long tales published as Pale Horse, Pale Rider in 1937 and widely considered to be her masterpiece: Old Mortality, Noon Wine and Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

    The stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals take place at the confluence of the commonplace and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. A fossil-hunter, a comedian, a hot- air balloon pilot, parents and children, believers and nonbelievers, the people in these stories are struggling to understand the absurdity and the magnitude of what it means to exist in a family, to exist in the world. In “Shirley Temple Three,” a mother must shoulder her son’s burden—a cloned and resurrected wooly mammoth who wreaks havoc on her house, sanity, and faith. In “The Real Alan Gass,” a physicist in search of a mysterious particle called the “daisy” spends her days with her boyfriend, Walker, and her nights with the husband who only exists in the world of her dreams, Alan Gass.  Like the daisy particle itself—“forever locked in a curious state of existence and nonexistence, sliding back and forth between the two”—the stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals are exquisite, mysterious, and inextricably connected. From this enchanting primordial soup, Pierce’s voice emerges—a distinct and charming testament of the New South, melding contemporary concerns with their prehistoric roots to create a hilarious, deeply moving symphony of stories.

    Winner of the Dylan Thomas Award, this collection of short stories contains wry and defiant statements on the power and the beautiful transience of youth.

    A desolate maid. And one cold corpse. Richard Lynche, heir of an 18th century Tipperary estate, can find no peace. His bookish ways disgust his bullying letch of a father. His heartsick mother sinks ever-deeper into a drug-induced lethargy. The teen’s only solace are the loving arms of the homesick new maid, Eveleen. Meanwhile jealousy, lust, and oppression lead to gruesome visions, causing Richard to question his own sanity. Desperate to prevail over his demons, he determines there is only one way to stop the torture—a killing. Aroon is a cauldron of old-fashioned Irish stew. Spiced heavily with Downton Abbey, sprinkled with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a dash of The Godfather’s Michael Corleone, it explores the underbelly of life during the Protestant Ascendancy.

    At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I've Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be.Cities I've Never Lived In is the second book in Graywolf's collaboration with the literary magazine A Public Space.

    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.

    From small towns to major metropolitan areas, scrapbooking has become the quilting bee of the 21st centuryin fact, there's a scrapbook enthusiast in one out of every four households across America. With stories from everyday scrapbookers, scrapbook celebrities and scrapbook artists, this unique Chicken Soup volume relates how scrapbooking helps us through challenging times, celebrates our heritage and ancestral journeys and reminds us of the best moments of our lives. With special design elements interspersed throughout, this book is a delightful read for scrapbook newbies and junkies alike.

    A group of men spend a weekend hunting for mushrooms in the wilderness where they grew up and where some still find themselves trapped. An aging environmentalist takes out his frustration and anger on a singular, unsuspecting target. One woman helps another get revenge against a man whose crime extends far beyond him to an entire community. Together, the ten stories in this dazzling, surprising collection evoke a landscape that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has traveled the back roads and blue highways of America, and they completely capture the memorable characters who call it home.

    The four chapbooks collected in A PECULIAR FEELING OF RESTLESSNESS, three of them finalists and one of them the winner of the Rose Metal Press first annual short short chapbook contest, all revel in the succinctness of their form, the underlying tension anchored beneath each story of 1,000 words or less. These stories are peculiar; they resonate with restlessness. They are deft, they are gritty, and they are lyrical. Laughter, Applause. Laughter, Music, Applause by Kathy Fish, Wanting by Amy L. Clark, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix by Elizabeth Ellen, and The Sky Is a Well by Claudia Smith combine four multi-layered portrayals of beautiful uneasiness into a collection rich with wit, grace, and originality.

     Daisy McDare is busy nursing a broken heart, trying to build up her interior decorator business, and baking cookies when murder strikes Cozy Creek. At first she leaves the investigation to Chris Crumple, the local bumbling police detective. But when Crumple arrests the wrong suspect, Daisy takes the investigation into her own hands. Cracking the case won't be easy. She'll need help from her pastry-baking best friend Samantha, her wise-cracking Granny Annie, and her trusty West Highland Terrier Shamus.

    Against the relentless onslaught of Russian and Czechoslovakian divisions pouring into West Germany, Captain Kurt Mohr and his tank crews wage a desperate battle to delay the enemy advance. As a brand new company commander, he must also prove his metal to the men who serve under him. Amid the breakneck speed of mechanized warfare, Mohr battles his own self-doubt and fear in order to quickly adapt to the fast-paced battlefield environment. Fighting in Lower Bavaria also poses unique challenges to his command abilities as the close-in nature of the terrain forces him to deal with threats at point blank range. As the war's first day progresses, the brutal reality of war hits home. With the future of their nation at stake, Mohr and his men become the storm and steel that avenge the countrymen whose lives they are sworn to protect.

    Little is known of her during her 30 plus years as a slave in Tennessee, or her life shortly thereafter. Her arrival and subsequent life in Cascade, Montana would make her a legend. Enjoy this great, inspiring and very humorous story of one amazing woman!