Written in a style that has been acclaimed by our finest writers, from Edward P. Jones and Nikki Giovanni to Dave Eggers, I Got Somebody in Staunton is one of the most highly praised literary events to take on contemporary America.In the title story, a young professor befriends an enigmatic white woman in a bar along the back roads of Virginia, but has second thoughts about driving her to a neighboring town as his uncle's stories of lynchings resonate through his mind. Another tale portrays a Kansas City jazz troupe's travels to Denver, where they hope to strike it big. Meanwhile, a man in the midst of paradise must decide whether he will languish or thrive.With I Got Somebody in Staunton Lewis has lyrically and unflinchingly chronicled the lives of those most often neglected.

    Scions of entertainment greatness, they call themselves the Three Musketeers. As the incestuous clique attempts to scale the peaks claimed by their sacred yet monstrous parents during the filming of a Starwatch episode, Bertie scrupulously chronicles their futile struggles against the ravenous, narcissistic, and addicted Hollywood that claims them.

    Combining interrelated novels, stories, and novellas, Dixon's multilayered and frequently hilarious family epic—the story of Howard Tetch, his ancestors, his parents, his children, and the generations that follow—"reassures us that whatever is precious can never be completely lost" (The Baltimore Sun).

    Fayette is an enterprising schemer hoping to cash in on his brother's talents as a gunsmith. John, determined not to repeat the crime that forced both families to flee their Kentucky homes, doggedly follows his tenacious brother west, while he watches his own family disintegrate. Wondrously told through the wary eyes of John's ten-year-old daughter, Mattie, whose gift of premonition proves to be both a blessing and a curse, The Mercy Seat resounds with the rhythms of the Old Testament even as it explores the mysteries of the Native American spirit world. Sharing Faulkner's understanding of the inescapable pull of family and history, and Cormac McCarthy's appreciation of the stark beauty of the American wilderness, Rilla Askew imbues this momentous work with her tremendous energy and emotional range. It is an extraordinary novel from a prodigious new talent.Strange Business, a collection of linked stories that won the 1993 Oklahoma Book Award, is available from Penguin.

    A man takes up scuba diving in the town reservoir to fight off a killing depression. A grieving mother leads a surveyor into the woods to name once and for all the county where her son was murdered by thieves.In the Appalachia of Ron Rash's stories, the collision of the old and new south, of antique and modern, resonate with the depth and power of ancient myths.

    Now, in this eagerly anticipated follow-up -- drawn from his four years living in Moscow and traveling the breadth of the Russian landscape -- Kalfus creates unforgettable etchings of individual lives throughout a century of turbulent history, in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. Imaginative, densely detailed, and consistently rewarding, PU-239 And Other Russian Fantasies is a brilliant showcase for "one of the most interesting writers working today" (The San Diego Union-Tribune).

    A masterful collage of events is evocatively chained together by secrets and hidden truths that are almost accidentally revealed. Each episode, affectingly textured with penetrating detail, ferrets out the gristle and unconventional beauty found in the voices of the working-class inhabitants from an irretrievable, golden age Brooklyn.

    Fresh, funny, relentless, and beautifully crafted, his writing possesses that rare Chekhovian ability to perfectly capture the nuances of ordinary life and make it resonate with unexpected meaning.

    As principal of a school in the American midwest, he teaches his version of enlightenment hoping to make a difference. But all he sees around him is debilitating mediocrity until the brilliant Hester Lilt enrolls her daughter in his school.

    A self-professed genius and student of August Klimt, Scott's Schiele repeatedly challenges the boundaries of early twentieth-century Europe. Thrown in jail on charges of immorality, Schiele's Mephistophelean reputation only grows in stature until at the age of twenty-eight, the artist dies in the Great Flu Pandemic. Told from a crosscurrent of voices, viewpoints and times, this stunning novel won Scott a nomination for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award.

    The ordinary seaman is Esteban, a 19-year-old veteran of the war in Nicaragua, who has come to America with 14 other men to form the crew of the Urus. Docked on a desolate Brooklyn pier, the Urus is a wreck, and the men, without the means to return home, become its prisoners. Esteban, haunted by the loss of his first love in the war, gradually works up the courage to escape the ship and start a new life in the city. His story and those of his shipmates come to life, illuminating the conflicts and triumphs of the human heart.

    In “Vacuum,” three young brothers make trouble when they call on the seedy neighborhood doctor to cheer up their underappreciated mother. Originally published in The New Yorker, “Visitation” follows a down-and-out, divorced father as he spends a weekend with his son at a California motel. A husband shoots himself in the foot in “The Terrible Argument,” letting down not only his wife but his dog as well. In the masterful title novella, a freshly married, disastrously mismatched, and expectant young couple are visited by an unusual pair of inmates from a nearby insane asylum, who just might be—or might as well be—aliens from another planet.Brad Watson writes with such an all-seeing, six-dimensional view of human hopes and inadequacies that his talent must come from another planet. With wry humor and otherworldly grace, he reminds us how alien we humans really are—to each other and to ourselves.

    Winner of the Prix de Rome and the National Jewish Book Award, these ten stories and the title novella, "Ellis Island," exhibit tremendous range and versatility of style and technique, yet are closely unified in their beauty and in their concern with enduring and universal questions.

    Though flawed, the bad eye functions well enough to permit her an idiosyncratic view of the world, one she welcomes in the stifling postwar Brooklyn of the 1950s. During a journey to Manhattan to see a doctor about her sight, she begins to explore the sexual rites of adulthood. But can her romance last? In this beautifully observed novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz raises themes of innocence and escape while illuminating the rich inner life of a singular girl.

    Now, in her newest collection, she demonstrates once again her virtuosic abilities in precisely distilled, perfectly shaped studies of human connection and disconnection. From a group of friends whose luck in acquiring a luxurious Manhattan sublet turns to disaster as their balcony becomes a front-row seat to the catastrophe of 9/11, to the too painful love of a brother for his schizophrenic sister, Eisenberg brilliantly illustrates the lives of people rubbed raw by what the fates have sent them (Vanity Fair).