In their obsessions, Gass’s Midwestern dreamers are like the "grotesques" of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper-linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce’s Dubliners. First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

    The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South — a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg are reunited in Vietnam and petty nostalgia and the constant pain of disappointed love prevail. Airships is a striking demonstration of Barry Hannah's mature and original talent.

    Here are enchanting tales about queens and kings and princesses in magical, timeless lands; marvelously warm and funny stories that move, amuse, and enlighten us as they probe the mysterious and profound relation between art and life." This is a hardcover edition of The Art of Living and Other Stories, written by John Gardner and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1981. It is a self-stated First Printing, with stunning woodcuts by Mary Azarian.

    But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

    Burroughs comes thirteen unnerving and often breathtaking stories populated by punks and angels, skinheads and religious assassins, streetwalkers and fetishists--people who live outside the law and and the clear light of the every day. Set in landscapes as diverse as ancient Babylon, India, and the seamy underbelly of San Francisco, these daring and innovative tales are laced with Vollman's fertile imagination. The Rainbow Stories ushers us into a world that bears an awful yet hypnotic resemblance to that of our deepest nightmares, confirming Vollmann's reputation as a dark visionary of contemporary fiction.

    Rudolfo Anaya returns to the deeply spiritual themes of his hugely popular Bless Me, Ultima with this insightful tale of a prophet and his message to save humankind from itself.

    Set onboard a ship during an unnamed war, the title story is a harrowing account of guilt and responsibility, showing Conrad at his most accomplished as a master of psychological penetration. Accompanying this is another study of the brutal turns of fortune visited on the unwary by war: 'The Warrior's Soul' takes place during Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and traces the interweaving relationship between a beautiful woman and the two men who love her. 'Prince Roman', meanwhile, is one of Conrad's earliest stories, and the only piece in his entire oeuvre that touches on his homeland, Poland. The collection concludes with 'The Black Mate', a witty and light-hearted illustration of life aboard ship." "Spanning Joseph Conrad's entire literary career, these four stories touch on some of his major interests - war, imperialism, life at sea - showing him at his most intimate and ambitious."

    In this series of perfectly rendered vignettes, written just as he was starting to find his comic voice, Kurt Vonnegut paints a warm, wise, and funny portrait of life in post—World War II America–a world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. Here are tales both cautionary and hopeful, each brimming with Vonnegut's trademark humor and profound humanism. A family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. A man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. A quack psychiatrist turned "murder counselor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. While these stories reflect the anxieties of the postwar era that Vonnegut was so adept at capturing– and provide insight into the development of his early style–collectively, they have a timeless quality that makes them just as relevant today as when they were written. It's impossible to imagine any of these pieces flowing from the pen of another writer; each in its own way is unmistakably, quintessentially Vonnegut.Featuring a Foreword by author and longtime Vonnegut confidant Sidney Offit and illustrated with Vonnegut's characteristically insouciant line drawings, Look at the Birdie is an unexpected gift for readers who thought his unique voice had been stilled forever–and serves as a terrific introduction to his short fiction for anyone who has yet to experience his genius. Contents: Letter from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to Walter J. Miller, 1951. Confido F U B A R Shout About It from the Housetops Ed Luby's Key Club A Song for Selma Hall of Mirrors The Nice Little People Hello, Red Little Drops of Water The Petrified Ants The Honor of a Newsboy Look at the Birdie King and Queen of the Universe The Good Explainer

    Pearlman writes about the predicaments of being human. The title story involves an affair, an illegitimate pregnancy, anorexia, and adolescent drug use, but the real excitement comes from the intricate attention Pearlman devotes to the interior life of young Emily, who wishes she were a bug. In "Sonny," a mother prays for her daughters to be barren so they never have to experience the death of a child. "The Golden Swan" transports the reader to a cruise ship with lavish buffets-and a surprise stowaway. In prose that is as wise as it is poetic, Pearlman shines light on small, devastatingly precise moments to reflect the beauty and grace found in everyday life. She maps the psychological landscapes of her exquisitely rendered characters with unending compassion and seeming effortlessness. Both for its artistry and for the lives of the characters it presents, Honeydew is a collection that will pull readers back time and again. These stories demonstrate once more that Pearlman is a master of the form and that hers is a vision unfailingly wise and forgiving.

    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.

    Henry Prize stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. Such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (1927); William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1939); Carson McCuller’s A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud (1943); Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1949); J.D. Salinger’s For Esme with Love and Squalor (1963); John Cheever’s The Country Husband (1956) ; and Flannery O’Conner’s Everything that Rises Must Converge (1963) all were O. Henry Prize stories. An accomplished new series editor--novelist and short story writer Laura Furman--has read more than a thousand stories to identify the 20 winners, each one a pleasure to read today, each one a potential classic. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 also contains brief essays from each of the three distinguished judges on their favorite story, and comments from the prize-winning writers on what inspired their stories. There is nothing like the ever rich, surprising, and original O. Henry collection for enjoying the contemporary short story.The Thing in the Forest A. S. Byatt The Shell Collector Anthony Doerr Burn Your Maps Robyn Jay Leff Lush Bradford Morrow God’s Goodness Marjorie Kemper Bleed Blue in Indonesia Adam Desnoyers The Story Edith Pearlman Swept Away T. Coraghessan Boyle Meanwhile Ann Harleman Three Days. A Month. More. Douglas Light The High Road Joan Silber Election Eve Evan S. Connell Irish Girl Tim Johnston What Went Wrong Tim O’Brien The American Embassy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Kissing William Kittredge Sacred Statues William Trevor Two Words Molly Giles Fathers Alice Munro Train Dreams Denis Johnson

    In "Horseman," a professor confronts a young plagiarist as well as her own weaknesses as the Thanksgiving holiday looms closer and closer: "And after that, who knew?" In "Intervention," a realtor facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father's shadow while he presses forward--or not. In "Voice," a semiretired academic is conned by his increasingly estranged brother into coming along on a group tour of the Venice Biennale, fleeing a mortifying incident with a traumatized student back in Massachusetts but encountering further complications in the maze of Venice. And in "Milton and Marcus," a lapsed novelist struggles with his wife's illness and tries to rekindle his screenwriting career, only to be stymied by the pratfalls of that trade when he's called to an aging, iconic star's mountaintop retreat in Wyoming.

    Based loosely on the author's own life, the book follows a young bohemian woman, Margaret Sargent, through her experiences and lost loves in a time of coming war.

    She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

    A teacher struggles to bond with jaded students as bodies drop from the sky; a man meets his illegitimate son for an awkward pumpkin picking excursion; a professor develops a sexual obsession with the student destined to surpass him; and a female cyberotica writer looks for conventionality in the form of a suitor who may be in love with her dog. Whether writing about a small town murder, homeschooling, experiments on lab mice, or the disintegration of a long marriage over the course of a golf game, Amend's characters are more than whip-smart and laugh-out-loud funny, they are chillingly real, memorable people looking for love--or what passes for it.