Chaon mines the psychological landscape of his characters to dazzling effect. Each story radiates with sharp humor, mystery, wonder, and startling compassion. Among the Missing lingers in the mind through its subtle grace and power of language.

    In “Girl on Girl,” a high school freshman goes to disturbing lengths to help an old friend. An insatiable temptress pursues the one man she can’t have in “Meteorologist Dave Santana.” And in the title story, a long fraught friendship comes undone when three buddies get impossibly lost on a lake it is impossible to get lost on. In Diane Cook’s perilous worlds, the quotidian surface conceals an unexpected surreality that illuminates different facets of our curious, troubling, and bewildering behavior.Other stories explore situations pulled directly from the wild, imposing on human lives the danger, tension, and precariousness of the natural world: a pack of not-needed boys take refuge in a murky forest and compete against each other for their next meal; an alpha male is pursued through city streets by murderous rivals and desirous women; helpless newborns are snatched by a man who stalks them from their suburban yards. Through these characters Cook asks: What is at the root of our most heartless, selfish impulses? Why are people drawn together in such messy, complicated, needful ways? When the unexpected intrudes upon the routine, what do we discover about ourselves? As entertaining as it is dangerous, this accomplished collection explores the boundary between the wild and the civilized, where nature acts as a catalyst for human drama and lays bare our vulnerabilities, fears, and desires.

    The words haunt him as he studies the Kaiju (Japan’s giant monsters) on an island reserve, attempting to understand the beauty his wife saw.“The Return to Monsterland” opens 'Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone,' a collection of twelve fabulist and genre-bending stories inspired by Japanese folklore, historical events, and pop culture. In “Rokurokubi”, a man who has the demonic ability to stretch his neck to incredible lengths tries to save a marriage built on secrets. The recently dead find their footing in “The Inn of the Dead’s Orientation for Being a Japanese Ghost”. In “Girl Zero”, a couple navigates the complexities of reviving their deceased daughter via the help of a shapeshifter. And, in the title story, a woman instigates a months-long dancing frenzy in a Tokyo where people don’t die but are simply reborn without their memories.Every story in the collection turns to the fantastic, the mysticism of the past, and the absurdities of the future to illuminate the spaces we occupy when we, as individuals and as a society, are at our most vulnerable.

    Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields-and fields of victory-that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly- and reluctantly-in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy's singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling.

    This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive con men, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.In "Thief," an aluminum worker turns unlikely detective to solve the mystery of which of his kids is stealing from the family vacation fund. In "We Live in Water," a lawyer returns to a corrupt North Idaho town to find the father who disappeared thirty years earlier. In "Anything Helps," a homeless man has to "go to cardboard" to raise enough money to buy his son the new Harry Potter book. In "Virgo," a local newspaper editor tries to get back at his superstitious ex-girlfriend by screwing with her horoscope. Also included are the stories "Don't Eat Cat" and "Statistical Abstract of My Hometown, Spokane, Washington," both of which achieved a cult following after publication online.

    All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today.

    "Another""What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust""The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water""On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home""Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance""She Waits, Seething, Blooming""Quiet""Your Mother and I""Naveed""Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone""About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her""Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly""After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"From the Trade Paperback edition.

    In contemporary Lagos, a young boy may pose as a woman online, and a maid may be suspected of sleeping with her employer and yet still become a young wife’s confidante. Men and women can be objects of fantasy, the subject of beery soliloquies. They can be trophies or status symbols. Or they can be overwhelming in their need.In these wide-ranging stories, A. Igoni Barrett roams the streets with people from all stations of life. A man with acute halitosis navigates the chaos of the Lagos bus system. A minor policeman, full of the authority and corruption of his uniform, beats his wife. A family’s fortunes fall from love and wealth to infidelity and poverty as poor choices unfurl over three generations. With humor and tenderness, Barrett introduces us to an utterly modern Nigeria, where desire is a means to an end, and love is a power as real as money.

    'Let me buy you a cup of tea... what are you doing in England?' 'Do these children of yours speak any Luganda?' 'Did you know that man Idi Amin?' But perhaps the most difficult question of all is the one they ask themselves: 'You mean this is England?' Told with empathy, humour and compassion, these vibrant, kaleidoscopic stories re-imagine the journey of Ugandans who choose to make England their home. Weaving between Manchester and Kampala, this dazzling, polyphonic collection will captivate anyone who has ever wondered what it means to truly belong.

    In “Requiem”, a woman goes to Alaska to try and make sense of her aunt’s disappearance. An eleventh century poet wakes to find he is as an artificially intelligent companion on a starship. A woman of no account has the ability to look into the past.Singh's work dives into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within, and she unblinkingly explores the ways we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.Contents:- With Fate Conspire (2013)- A Handful of Rice (2012)- Peripeteia (2013)- Lifepod (2007)- Oblivion: A Journey (2008)- Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra (2010)- Are You Sannata3159? (2010)- Indra's Web (2011)- Ruminations in an Alien Tongue (2012)- Sailing the Antarsa (2013)- Cry of the Kharchal (2013)- Wake-Rider (2014)- Ambiguity Machines: An Examination (2015)- Requiem (2018)

    Abbott, "Cheever's true heir, our major American short story writer" (William Harrison).Here are stories about fathers and sons, stories about men and women, and stories about the relationships between men by one of our most gifted story writers. The narrator of "The Who, the What and the Why," begins breaking into his own house as a sort of therapy after his daughter dies. In "The Human Use of Inhuman Beings," the main character realizes that his closest relationship is to an angel, who appears to him only to announce the death of loved ones. All Things, All at Once reminds us why Lee K. Abbott is to be treasured: his perfect pitch for tales of hapless Southwesterners, his way with sympathetic irony, his eye that skillfully notes the awkward humiliations—common heartbreak, fractured families—and records it all in lyrical, affectionate language. In tales new and from previous collections Abbott examines lived life and the lies we necessarily tell about it.

    Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

     From Crispus' tender innocence to Ray Mortimer's near pure evil, to Rose's quiet determination, the characters in this book and their journeys showcase a world that is brimming with grace and meaning and showcases the talents of a writer at the top of his game.

    Set in a wide range of time periods and locales, including 80s UK suburbia, WWII Hong Kong and urban California, LAST OF HER NAME features an eclectic cast of outsiders: among them, an elderly housebreaker, wounded lovers, and kung-fu fighting teenage girls. "Last of Her Name is a mesmerizing and deeply felt debut that affirms all that is great about short fiction. Lok’s collection brings startling intimacy to her characters, all of them struggling with dislocation and belonging. “Woman in the Closet,” has to be considered a new classic. I can’t think of a collection that better speaks to this moment of global movement and collective rupture from homes and history, and the struggle to find meaning despite it all.” — DAVE EGGERS, author of The Parade “What a basket of jewels! Each of these stories is elegant, poignant and multi-faceted. A true pleasure.” — GISH JEN, author of The Girl at the Baggage Claim“A truly beautiful and wide ranging collection. There is love, longing, grief, displacement, endurance. And from the gut punch of the opening story to the wonderful novella that anchors the book, not a word is wasted. So many lines spoke directly in my ear: “Night after night they sleep, but rarely at the same time. Without knowing it they take turns watching each other.” A book to stay up with, a book that will make you not want to sleep..”— PETER ORNER, author of Maggie Brown & Others "Assured and keenly observed stories about the devastations—large and small—that transpire between people. Rendered in prose that's no-nonsense, darkly funny, and lovely all at once, Lok’s stories carry quiet but undeniable impact. This is a book that stays with you long after you've put it down. It makes you wonder, as good books should, what on earth is going on in each of our brains." — RACHEL KHONG, author of Goodbye, Vitamin

    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.