He writes with equal force about the blithe energies of youth ("Boys") and the rueful onset of middle age ("Hawaiian Night"), about Midwestern optimists ("Double Zero") and West coast strategists ("Baggage Carousel"), about visionary exhilaration ("Forecast from the Retail Desk") and delusional catharsis ("Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13.") The astounding title story, which has already been reprinted in four different anthologies, is a masterpiece of remembrance and thwarted love.Full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language, the stories in Demonology offer the deepest pleasures that fiction can afford.

    Now Grove Press is proud to reissue this contemporary classic by one of America's most important living writers, in a new edition of 'A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain' that includes two subsequently published stories -- "Salem" and "Missing" -- that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam.

    “But a real cowboy is hard to find these days, even in the West.”In Pam Houston’s “bright, edgy, and ruefully self- aware” (Boston Globe) collection of stories, we meet smart women who are looking for the love of a good man, and men who are wild and hard to pin down. Our heroines are part daredevil, part philosopher, all acute observers of the nuances of modern romance.“[Houston] takes women into grand spaces, both emotional and physical, and isolates them until there’s nothing left to do but sit down and take a hard look at one’s soul” (Los Angeles Times). Cowboys Are My Weakness is an “exhilarating” (Washington Post) and realistic look at men and women— together and apart.

    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.

    Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,” writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. “It’s the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.” The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their corners of the world.In “Miss Lora,” Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she believes is the “Magic Man.” Kirstin Valdez Quade’s “Nemecia” depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickersham’s “The Tunnel” is a tragic love story about a mother’s declining health and her daughter’s helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Wink’s “Breatharians” unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a grim chore in the wake of his parents’ estrangement.“Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of one’s writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content,” writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. “Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.”

    'The Fall of the House of Usher' describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In 'Tell-Tale Heart', a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and 'The Cask of Amontillado' explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate. These works display Poe's startling ability to build suspense with almost nightmarish intensity.David Galloway's introduction re-examines the myths surrounding Poe's life and reputation. This edition includes a new chronology and suggestions for further reading.PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED AS SELECTED WRITINGSChronologyIntroductionFurther ReadingA Note on the TextPOEMSStanzasSonnet — To ScienceA/ AaraafRomanceTO HelenIsrafelThe City in the SeaThe SleeperLenoreThe Valley of UnrestThe RavenUlalumeFor AnnieA ValentineAnnabel LeeThe BellsEldoradoTALESMS. Found in a BottleLigeiaThe Man that was Used UpThe Fall of the House of UsherWilliam WilsonThe Man of the CrowdThe Murders in the Rue MorgueA Descent into the MaelströmEleonoraThe Oval PortraitThe Masque of the Red DeathThe Pit and the PendulumThe Tell-Tale HeartThe Gold-BugThe Black CatThe Purloined LetterThe Facts in the Case of M. ValdemarThe Cask of AmontilladoHop-FrogESSÄYS AND REVIEWSLetter to B—Georgia ScenesThe Drake—Halleck Review (excerpts)Watkins TottleThe Philosophy of FurnitureWyandottéMusicTime and SpaceTwice-Told TalesThe American Drama (excerpts)HazlittThe Philosophy of CompositionSong-WritingOn ImaginationThe Veil of the SoulThe Poetic Principle (excerpts)Notes

    Link has won an ardent following for her ability to take readers deep into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe with each new story. In “The Summer People,” a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In “I Can See Right Through You,” a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In “The New Boyfriend,” a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-size animated doll. Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids...These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded in sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty--and the hidden strengths--of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.

    Sometimes sad, often humorous and always creative, these tales touch on a wide range of life experiences from romance and family to death and sex. Nana rocked in her old wooden rocking chair. “Timmy, you have always been my favorite,” she said. He looked at her. “Nana, I’m Bobby.” Read your diary, discovered your secret. I thought I loved you, but now I’m not sure. Don’t know what to do, you look so human. Clowning was Daryl’s profession, cooking was his passion. Stella thought he was perfect. She liked to laugh and never learned to cook. Alex bought Sharon a ring for Valentine’s Day, which she sold to buy the gun that stopped him from loving her. In 2009, Sean Hill combined his love of writing and technology by creating @VeryShortStory, a Twitter feed where he interacts with his readers and shares his 140-character stories.

    In this new, widely acclaimed translation that restores the controversial passages that were cut out of the original English version, "Death in Venice" tells about a ruinous quest for love and beauty amid degenerating splendor. Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but lonely author, travels to the Queen of the Adriatic in search of an elusive spiritual fulfillment that turns into his erotic doom. Spellbound by a beautiful Polish boy, he finds himself fettered to this hypnotic city of sun-drenched sensuality and eerie physical decay. Also included in this volume are eleven other stories by Mann: "Tonio Kroger," "Gladius Dei," "The Blood of the Walsungs," "The Will for Happiness," "Little Herr Friedmann," "Tobias Mindernickel," "Little Lizzy," "Tristan," "The Starvelings," "The Wunderkind," and "Harsh Hour." All of the stories collected here display Mann's inimitable use of irony, his subtle characterizations, and superb, complex plots.

     Teenage girls sneak out on a summer night to meet their boyfriends by the train tracks. A woman escapes suffocating grief through a vivid fantasy life. Members of a cult form an unsettling chorus as they extol their passion for the same man. A love story begins over cabbages in a grocery store. A laundress' life is consumed by obsession for a famous baseball player. Two high school friends kiss all night and binge-watch Winona Ryder movies after the death of a sister. Leesa Cross-Smith's sensuous stories will drench readers in nostalgia for summer nights and sultry days, the intense friendships of teenage girls, and the innate bonds felt between women. She evokes the pangs of loss and motherhood, the headiness and destructive potential of desire, and the pure exhilaration of being female. The stories in So We Can Glow--some long, some gone in a flash, some told over text and emails--take the wild hearts of girls and women and hold them up so they can catch the light.We, moons --The Great Barrier Reef is dying but so are we --Unknown legend --Low, small --A tennis court --Tim Riggins would've smoked --Surreptitious, canary, chamomile --Winona forever --Girlheart cake with glitter frosting --Fast as you --Chateau Marmont, champagne, Chanel --Bearish --All that smoke howling blue --Pink bubblegum and flowers --Knock out the heart lights so we can glow --Get rowdy --Re: little doves --Out of the strong, something sweet --The lengths --Small and high up --Small are dark, some are light, summer melts --Bright --Dark and sweaty and dirty --Home safe --Teenage dreams time machine --Rope burns --Get Faye & Birdie --The Darl Inn --You should love the right things --And down we go! --Crepuscular --Stay and stay and stay --Two cherries under a lavender moon --When it gets warm --Boy smoke --Dandelion light --California, keep us --Cloud report --Downright --You got me --Eine kleine nachmusik --A girl has her secrets --Vincent

    "Robin Hobb" and "Megan Lindholm" are both pseudonyms used by California-born Margaret Ogden, who from 1983 to 1992, published exclusively as Lindholm. This generous, 400-page hardcover original brings together short stories and novellas penned under both authorial bylines. As Hobb herself notes, "their" writing and styles differ in significant ways. (P.S. This collection includes stories previously unpublished in the United States.)

    Or so believes Larry, who returns home from Desert Storm to find his hair gone and his bones rapidly disintegrating. Then there’s Lance Corporal James Laverne of the US Marines, who grows a third ear in Kuwait. And in the audaciously comic novella “Notes from a Bunker Along Highway 8,” a Green Beret deserts his team after seeing a vision of George Washington, only to find a new calling—administering aid to wounded Iraqi civilians; he’s hindered only by the furtive nature of his mission and an unruly band of chimpanzees. Together these narratives form a bracing amalgamation of devastating humor and brilliant cultural observation, in which Gabe Hudson fearlessly explores the darker implications of American military power.

    Global in scope, each story is set in the year 2040 and imagines what the world might look like if the dire warnings issued by the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C were to come true. Using fiction—informed here and there by realism and climate science—this issue explores the tangible, day-to-day implications of these cataclysmic scientific projections. Featuring Tommy Orange, Elif Shafak, Luis Alberto Urrea, Asja Bakic, Rachel Heng, and others, with gorgeous full-color illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook.From the issue’s introduction by Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, Chief Program Officer of the NRDC: “Each story in this special issue is the product of a unique collaboration between its author and an NRDC policy expert with specialized knowledge of how climate change is already affecting the world, and how it could continue to affect the world in the decades to come. The result, we hope, is a collection where fiction’s already considerable power is fortified by science.”Featuring original stories by:Tommy OrangeClaire G. ColemanBirna Anna BjörnsdóttirLuis Alberto UrreaElif ShafakAbbey Mei OtisAsja BakićRachel HengKanishk TharoorMikael Awake

    Beattie, winner of four O. Henry prizes, has been called "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form" (The Washington Post Book World). She is a masterful observer of domestic relations and the idiosyncratic logic that governs human lives. In Follies, her most resonant collection, she looks at baby boomers in their maturity, sorting out their own lives and struggling with parents who are eccentric, unpredictable, and increasingly dependent. In "Fléchette Follies," a man rear-ends a woman at a stoplight, and the ripple effect of that encounter is vast and catastrophic. In "Apology for a Journey Not Taken," a woman's road trip is perpetually postponed by the UPS deliveryman who wants to watch TV in her house, by the girl next door who has lost her dog, and by the death of her friend in a freak accident. Impatient in his old age, the protagonist of "That Last Odd Day in L.A." can hardly manage a pleasant word to his own daughter, but he finds a chance for redemption on the last day of a vacation he spends with his niece and nephew. Ann Beattie is at the top of her form in this superb collection, writing with the vividness, compassion, and sometimes morbid wit that have made her one of the most influential writers of her generation.

    The mirror once hung in a bedroom, but now it's cracked and propped against a dumpster in an alley. The condemned man has refused the customary last cigarette but accepted as a hood the black slip that was carelessly tossed over a corner of the mirror's frame. The slip still smells faintly of a familiar fragrance.So begins "Tosca," the first in this vivid collection of Stuart Dybek's love stories. Operatically dramatic and intimately lyrical, grittily urban and impressionistically natural, the varied fictions in Paper Lantern all focus on the turmoil of love as only Dybek can portray it. An execution triggers the recollection of a theatrical romance; then a social worker falls for his own client; and lovers part as giddily, perhaps as hopelessly, as a kid trying to hang on to a boisterous kite. A flaming laboratory evokes a steamy midnight drive across terrain both familiar and strange, and an eerily ringing phone becomes the telltale signature of a dark betrayal. Each story is marked with contagious desire, spontaneous revelation, and, ultimately, resigned courage. As one woman whispers when she sets a notebook filled with her sketches drifting out to sea, "Someone will find you." Some of Dybek's characters recur in these stories, while others appear only briefly. Throughout, they—and we—are confronted with vaguely familiar scents and images, reminiscent of love but strangely disconcerting, so that we might wonder whether we are looking in a mirror or down the barrel of a gun. "After the ragged discharge," Dybek writes, "when the smoke has cleared, who will be left standing and who will be shattered into shards?" Paper Lantern brims with the intoxicating elixirs known to every love-struck, lovelorn heart, and it marks the magnificent return of one of America's most important fiction writers at the height of his powers.