These stories are set in a nameless community too small to be called a town, a place where wanting an education is a mark of ungodly arrogance and dowsing for water a legitimate occupation. Offutt has received a James Michener Grant and a Kentucky Arts Council Award.

    'The Orchard Keeper' tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.

    A young woman visits her father following his nervous breakdown, and a devoted sister is profoundly unsettled by the sermon her brother insists on reciting. Whether in childhood or Vietnam, in memory or the eternal present, these people are revealed in the extenuating, sometimes extreme circumstances of everyday life, and in the complex consequences of their decisions—that, for instance, can bring together an innocent inner-city youth and a little girl attacked, months earlier, by a dog in a wintry park. Yet each story, however crucial, is marked by Mr. Wolff’s compassionate understanding and humor.In short, fiction of dazzling emotional range and absolute authority.

    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.

    She portrays the MacLains, the Starks, the Moodys, and other families of the fictitious town of Morgana. “I doubt that a better book about ‘the South’-one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life and its special tone and pattern-has ever been written” (New Yorker).

    In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver’s stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or “dirty realism,” a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver’s stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work. In books such as Cathedral and the later tales included in the collected stories volume Where I’m Calling From, Carver revealed himself to be a more expansive writer than in the earlier published books, displaying Chekhovian sympathies toward his characters and relying less on elliptical effects.In gathering all of Carver’s stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America’s Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver’s career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish’s editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relationship between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement.Contents--What We Talk About When We Talk About LoveWhy Don’t You Dance?ViewfinderMr. Coffee and Mr. FixitGazeboI Could See the Smallest ThingsSacksThe BathTell the Women We’re GoingAfter the DenimSo Much Water So Close to HomeThe Third Thing That Killed My Father OffA Serious TalkThe CalmPopular MechanicsEverything Stuck to HimWhat We Talk About When We Talk About LoveOne More ThingStories from FiresThe LieThe CabinHarry’s DeathThe PheasantCathedralFeathersChef’s HousePreservationThe CompartmentA Small, Good ThingVitaminsCarefulWhere I’m Calling FromThe TrainFeverThe BridleCathedralFrom Where I’m Calling FromBoxesWhoever Was Using This BedIntimacyMenudoElephantBlackbird PieErrandOther FictionThe HairThe AficionadosPoseidon and CompanyBright Red ApplesFrom The Augustine NotebooksKindlingWhat Would You Like to See?DreamsVandalsCall If You Need MeSelected EssaysMy Father’s LifeOn WritingFiresAuthor’s Note to Where I’m Calling FromBeginners (The Manuscript Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love)Why Don’t You Dance?ViewfinderWhere Is Everyone?GazeboWant to See Something?The FlingA Small, Good ThingTell the Women We’re GoingIf It Please YouSo Much Water So Close to HomeDummyPieThe CalmMineDistanceBeginnersOne More Thing--loa.org

    Frank Bill delivers what is both a wake-up call and a gut punch. Welcome to heartland America circa right about now, when the union jobs and family farms that kept the white on the picket fences have given way to meth labs, backwoods gunrunners, and bare-knuckle brawling.Bill's people are pressed to the brink--and beyond. There is Scoot McCutchen, whose beloved wife falls terminally ill, leaving him with nothing to live for--which doesn't quite explain why he brutally murders her and her doctor and flees, or why, after years of running, he decides to turn himself in. In the title story, a man who has devolved from breeding hounds for hunting to training them for dog-fighting crosses paths with a Salvadoran gangbanger tasked with taking over the rural drug trade, but who mostly wants to grow old in peace. As Crimes in Sourthern Indiana unfolds, we witness the unspeakable, yet are compelled to find sympathy for the depraved.Bill's southern Indiana is haunted with the deep, authentic sense of place that recalls the best of Southern fiction, but the interconnected stories bristle with the urban energy of a Chuck Palahniuk or a latter-day Nelson Algren and rush with the slam-bang plotting of pulp-noir crime writing a la Jim Thompson. Bill's prose is gritty yet literary, shocking, and impossible to put down. A dark evocation of the survivalist spirit of the working class, this is a brilliant debut by an important new voice.

    "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.

    Rendered in the American vernacular with vivid imagery and a wry, dark sense of humor, these thwarted and sometimes violent lives jump off the page at the reader with inexorable force. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.With an artistic instinct honed on the works of Flannery O' Connor and Harry Crews, Pollock offers a powerful work of fiction in the classic American vein. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place.

    For Hemingway fans The Complete Short Stories is an invaluable treasury.

    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.

    Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.

    We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain. Here, time and memory circle above Phillips’ characters like vultures and angels, as they navigate the only landscape they’ve ever known. Corn reaches for rain, deer run blindly, and no matter how hungry or hurt, some forgotten hymn is always remembered. “The literary love child of Carson McCullers and John the Baptist, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ imagination is profoundly original and private," writes Rebecca Lee. Sleepovers is the winner of the 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, selected by Lauren Groff.

    These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).Mister squishy --The soul is not a smithy --Incarnations of burned children --Another pioneer --Good old neon --Philosophy and the mirror of nature --Oblivion --The suffering channel

    "No number of adjectives in the thesaurus can do full justice to the dazzlingly bizarre nature of Crews' creations".--"Washington Post Book World".