edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

    The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions. With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.

    

    They are stories about the woods, houses hidden in the gaps between mountains. Behind them, the skeletons of old and powerful machines rust into the slate and leaves. Water red with iron leeches from the empty mines and pools near a stone foundation. The boy there plays in the bones because he is a child and this will be his childhood. He watches while winter comes falling slowly down over the road. Sometimes he remembers a girl, her hair and the perfume she wore. These are stories about her and where she might have gone. He waits for sleep because in the next story he will leave. The boy watches an airplane blink red past his window. From here, you can't hear its violence.

    The exalted, memorable characters in Kirn's acclaimed debut short story col lection confront the real hard bargains in life that spring up from the business of simply living, and Kirn transforms these hard-luck stories into strapping moral lessons which evoke the bonds that unite us all.

    One boy's love of a soldier leads to the death of a stranger. The present takes a bittersweet journey into the past when a man revisits the summer school where he had "an accidental romance." And a forgotten mother writes a poignant letter to the teenage daughter she hasn't seen for fourteen years.Poised between the past and the future are the stories of now. In nontraditional narratives, short stories, and brief graphics, tales of anticipation and regret, eagerness and confusion present distinctively modern views of love, sexuality, and gender identification. Together, they reflect the vibrant possibilities available for young people learning to love others—and themselves—in today's multifaceted and quickly changing world.

    The writing straddles the shifting line between pure, unadorned storytelling and satire, exploring the sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking nature of survival in a decidedly cruel world.

    Frederick Barthelme creates an unforgettably wistful cast of characters, ordinary people moving carefully and curiously through a gently painful world.

    The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.

    Book annotation not available for this title.

    

    The first collection of fifteen short stories by the popular tri-media personality.

    A striking and emotionally resonant collection, SUBWAY DANCER AND OTHER STORIES is a compilation of stories originally published in some of the most respected literary magazines in the country, including The Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train and Ploughshares. In the award-winning story “Bloodlines,” two neighbors of different ethnicities are friends in spite of their differences…until an argument about expensive purebred dogs versus mutts from the pound brings the whole neighborhood’s precarious balance crashing down. “Bloodlines” was reprinted in Bark Magazine’s best-selling anthology Dog is My Co-Pilot and was cited in Best American Short Stories. In Witness to Breath, a woman living a dangerous life working on the streets takes in an elderly dog left behind when his owner is killed in a robbery. Despite never having been a dog person, their brief relationship changes her in ways she never could have expected.In Disappearances, a man not fluent in his own emotions tries unsuccessfully to broadside a train in his pickup truck, then spends the rest of the story figuring out the first clue to why he’d try to do such a thing.Among the other riveting and beautifully crafted stories included in this collection, “Five Singing Gardeners and One Dead Stranger” and “Requiem For a Flamer” were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and “The Man Who Found You in the Woods” was cited in Best American Short Stories. This collection includes an Author’s Note by Catherine Ryan Hyde.

    Parker (Seafire), and many more. Edited by Dhonielle Clayton (The Belles).In the fourth collaboration with We Need Diverse Books, fifteen award-winning and celebrated diverse authors deliver stories about a princess without need of a prince, a monster long misunderstood, memories that vanish with a spell, and voices that refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice. This powerful and inclusive collection contains a universe of wishes for a braver and more beautiful world.AUTHORS INCLUDE: Samira Ahmed, Libba Bray, Dhonielle Clayton, Zoraida Córdova, Tessa Gratton, Kwame Mbalia, Anna-Marie McLemore, Tochi Onyebuchi, Mark Oshiro, Natalie C. Parker, Rebecca Roanhorse, Victoria Schwab, Tara Sim, Nic Stone, and a to-be-announced debut author/short-story contest winner

    Eleven unique short stories that stretch from a rural Canadian Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn, featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love.These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never will it be predictable.