Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed orbits of their joint mission. Two Texas high school football players at the top of their food chain, soliciting their fathers’ attention by leveling everything before them on the field. And the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear.Brimming with irony, compassion, and withering humor, these eleven stories are at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic, and they showcase the work of a protean, prodigiously gifted writer at the height of his form. Reading Jim Shepard, according to Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.”

    

    ABOUT JULIA GLASS Julia Glass is the author of the novels Three Junes, winner of the 2002 National Book Award in Fiction; The Whole World Over; and The Widower's Tale. Her third book, I See You Everywhere , a collection of linked stories, won the 2009 SUNY John Gardner Fiction Award. Her latest novel, And the Dark Sacred Night , will be published by Pantheon Books in April 2014. Her essays have been widely anthologized, most recently in Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book , edited by Sean Manning, and in the forthcoming Labor Day , a collection of essays on childbirth edited by Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon. Also a teacher of creative writing workshops at programs ranging from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown to the M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College, Julia lives with her two sons and their father on the North Shore of Massachusetts.

    The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggling New York Jewish painter, Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic.The Magic Barrel is a book about New York and about the immigrant experience, and it is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.

    Bold and very real, these twelve stories examine a world we all know but find difficult to define.Whether a story dashes the bravado of young street toughs or pierces through the self-deception of a failed preacher, challenges the audacity of a killer or explodes the jealousy of two lovers, James Alan McPherson has created an array of haunting images and memorable characters in an unsurpassed collection of honest, masterful fiction.

    In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.

    The following stories are included in this collection: "The One Million Pound Bank Note" by Mark Twain"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" by Mark Twain"A Visit to Niagara" by Mark Twain"Mysterious Visit" by Mark Twain"The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" by Stephen Crane"The Eyes of the Panther" by Ambrose Bierce"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce"The Love of Life" by Jack London"To Build a Fire" by Jack London

    Whether writing about the love (and conflict) between parents and children or between husband and wife, or about the struggles of aging single mothers or disheartened political organizers to make sense of the world, she brings the same unerring ear for the rhythm of life as it is actually lived.The Collected Stories is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

    In THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME a professional hunter finds out what it feels like to be hunted as a wild animal- for he is the prey? In TO BUILD A FIRE a trapper fights desperately against stark fear in the cruel Arctic night... In LEININGEN VERSUS THE ANTS a settler battles for his very life against a teeming horde of millions of deadly ants...These are only a few of the thrilling stories you'll read in this fascinating book.

    I am Daniel Handler, the author of this book. Did you know that authors often write the summaries that appear on their book's dust jacket? You might want to think about that the next time you read something like, "A dazzling page-turner, this novel shows an internationally acclaimed storyteller at the height of his astonishing powers.""Adverbs" is a novel about love -- a bunch of different people, in and out of different kinds of love. At the start of the novel, Andrea is in love with David -- or maybe it's Joe -- who instead falls in love with Peter in a taxi. At the end of the novel, it's Joe who's in the taxi, falling in love with Andrea, although it might not be Andrea, or in any case it might not be the same Andrea, as Andrea is a very common name. So is Allison, who is married to Adrian in the middle of the novel, although in the middle of the ocean she considers a fling with Keith and also with Steve, whom she meets in an automobile, unless it's not the same Allison who meets the Snow Queen in a casino, or the same Steve who meets Eddie in the middle of the forest. . . .It might sound confusing, but that's love, and as the author -- me -- says, "It is not the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done." This novel is about people trying to find love in the ways it is done before the volcano erupts and the miracle ends. Yes, there's a volcano in the novel. In my opinion a volcano automatically makes a story more interesting.

    Whether in southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents’ cabinet maker, or on a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he’ll meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men; on a tennis court in Central Park, or a sidewalk in early spring New York, his attachments are ungraspable, transient and forever underwritten by raw desire—not for just one person’s body but, inevitably, for someone else’s as well. In mapping the most inscrutable corners of desire, Aciman proves to be an unsparing reader of the human psyche and a master stylist of contemporary literature. With language at once lyrical, bare-knuckled, and unabashedly candid, he casts a sensuous, shimmering light over each facet of desire to probe how we ache, want, and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of those who may want only to offer what we crave from them. Behind every step the hero takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are always ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love always casts its luminous halo. We may not always know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and others. But sooner or later we discover who we’ve always known we were.

    Attrib. and other stories celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. Correspondingly, the stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books. This is writing that centres on the weird, tender intricacies of the everyday where characters vie to 'own' their words, tell tall tales and attempt to define their worlds. With affectionate, irreverent and playful prose, the inability to communicate exactly what we mean dominates this bold debut collection from one of Britain’s most original new writers.

    They cover a period of more than 30 years, and were originally published in French periodicals and in Russia. Zola's racy tone is faithfully rendered by Parmee whose translations have been highly acclaimed.

    Dunyazade, Scheherazade's kid sister, holds the destiny of herself and the prince who holds her captive.Perseus, the demigod who slew the Gorgon Medusa, finds himself at forty battling for simple self-respect like any common mortal.Bellerophon, once a hero for taming the winged horse Pegasus, must wrestle with a contentment that only leaves him wretched.

    What they share with her other fiction is Christie's gift for sharp observations about people, the ambitions that drive them, their relationships, and the conflicts that erupt between them. This omnibus edition brings together three of Westmacott novels:Absent in the Spring: Stranded between trains, Joan Scudamore finds herself reflecting upon her life, her family, and finally coming to grips with the uncomfortable truths about her life.Giant's Bread: The story of Vernon Deyre, a composer and pianist whose obsession with art wreaks havoc with the two very different women in his life.The Rose and the Yew Tree: In one of the finest explorations of the human heart, the compelling story of a deep and abiding love, the conflicts it encompasses, and the price that must be paid.