A would-be Miss America auditions for a shady local talent scout over vodka and Sunny D; a NASA engineer begins to wonder if the woman he’s having an affair with is slowly poisoning her husband; a Boy Scout troop leader, recovering from a stroke, tries to protect one of his scouts from being bullied by his own sons; an ex-mobster living in witness protection feuds with the busybody head of his condo board; a grandmother, sentenced to driver’s ed after a traffic accident, surprises herself by falling for her instructor. Set against landmark moments—the first moon launch, Watergate, the Challenger explosion—these private dramas unfurl in startling ways. The Dream Life of Astronauts ratifies the emergence of an indelible new talent in fiction.

    Two stories from this collection have been adapted into the films Viscosity and A F*ckload of Scotch Tape.

    Like Faulkner's Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy's American West, Gay's Tennessee is redolent of broken souls. Mining that same fertile soil, his debut collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, brings together thirteen stories charting the pathos of interior lives. Among the colorful people readers meet are: old man Meecham, who escapes from his nursing home only to find his son has rented their homestead to "white trash"; Quincy Nell Qualls, who not only falls in love with the town lothario but, pregnant, faces an inescapable end when he abandons her; Finis and Doneita Beasley, whose forty-year marriage is broken up by a dead dog; and Bobby Pettijohn -- awakened in the night by a search party after a body is discovered in his back woods. William Gay expertly sets these conflicted characters against lush backcountry scenery and defies our moral logic as we grow to love them for the weight of their human errors.

    He is famous not only for his love of the hills, but for imbuing the countryside with life and vibrancy through moving descriptions. The simple people who inhabit his stories evoke sympathy and laughter in equal measure. This wonderful collection of seventy stories, including classics like ‘A Face in Dark’, ‘The Kitemaker’, ‘The Tunnel’, ‘The Room of Many Colours’, ‘Dust on the Mountain’ and ‘Times Stops at Shamli’, is a must-have for any bookshelf.

    She’s a writer completely unafraid." - Ali Smith"Shiny dark licorice mind candy: nothing quite like them" - Margaret Atwood. In On the Edges of Vision, unease sounds itself in the language of legend. Images call on memory, on the monstrous self. Throughout Helen McClory’s daring debut collection, the skin prickles against sweeps of light or darkness, the fantastic or the frightful; deep water, dark woods, or scattered flesh in desert sand. Whether telling of a boy cyclops or a pretty dead girl, drowned sailors or the devil himself, each story draws the reader towards not bleakness but a tale half-told, a truth half-true: that the monster is human, and only wants to reach out and take you by the hand.

    His incomparable, distinct voice--often wildly humorous, always engaging--has led the New York Times to call Means "one of our most talented younger writers."

    Jean Stafford communicates the small details of loneliness and connection, the search for freedom and the desire to belong, that not only illuminate whole lives but also convey with an elegant economy of words the sense of the place and time in which her protagonists find themselves. This volume also includes the acclaimed story "An Influx of Poets," which has never before appeared in book form.

    This fourth collection gathers material mostly written by the former space scientist in the last decade, even as a number of stories—such as the title piece, set in the universe of House of Suns—revisit earlier environments. The scope of settings is wide, ranging from the contemporaneous Earth to the near future and out to the furthest realms of the galaxy, and taking in such diverse topics as the perils of immortality, cybernetic encounters in the Wild West, uncanny skateboard parks and the flocking behaviour of birds. There is horror here, but also hope—and not a little black humour.The collection includes “Open and Shut,” “Night Passage,” and “Plague Music,” a long, previously unpublished story, all three set in the Revelation Space universe.Limited: 1500 signed numbered hardcover copiesTable of Contents:* Introduction: Winter Did Come* Belladonna Nights* Different Seas* For the Ages* Visiting Hours* Holdfast* The Lobby* A Map of Mercury* Magic Bone Woman* Providence* Wrecking Party* Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee* Death’s Door* A Murmuration* Open and Shut* Plague Music* Night Passage* Story Notes

    His lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poaching—a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella (selected for the anthologies New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best Mystery Stories of the Century), three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: "Jesus is not coming;" This terrain isn't pretty, isn't for the weak of heart, but in these desperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human.

    In this collection he explores the dark depths of the human condition, offering tales of death, disaster and - just occasionally - redemption.

    From “Broccoli†to “Borscht†to “Puffed Rice and Meatballs,†each of these new stories invites us into the uniquely captivating private worlds of Vapnyar’s Eastern European émigrés. There’s Nina, a recent arrival from Russia, for whom the colorful abundance of the vegetable markets in New York represents her own fresh hopes and dreams. . . Luda and Milena, who battle over a widower in their English class with competing recipes for cheese puffs, spinach pies, and meatballs . . . Sergey, who finds more comfort in the borscht made by a paid female companion than in her sexual ministrations. Each of the women and men who inhabit these witty, tender, and beautifully observed stories needs and longs for the taste and smell of home, wherever--and with whomever--that may turn out to be.Russian in its wit and in many of its rich details, but American in its insistence on the quest for personal happiness, however provisional and however high the cost, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love masterfully illuminates a very particular facet of desire with entirely charming results.

    A series of linked stories about a girl growing up in a small town.

    An avid hunter as well as one of America's greatest writers, Faulkner spent many days hunting in the big woods near Oxford, Mississippi.Included here is his most famous hunting story, "The Bear", as well as "The Old People", "A Bear Hunt", and "Race at Morning". Together, these four stories are considered to be the finest hunting stories ever written. Each is introduced with a prelude that weaves these tales together into a modern American classic.This book, a classic collection of sporting literature, belongs in the library of every sportsman. Big Woods was published in 1955. It has long been out of print in hard cover, and a copy of the book commands up to $175 if you can find one. We are honored to offer you a special edition of Big Woods.This edition of 1,200 copies is bound in rich cloth on 70-pound acid-free paper, with a silk ribbon and a handsome slipcase.

    Through his unique, richly textured, and brilliantly realized novels, stories, parodies, satires, fables, and essays, Barthelme redefined a generation of American letters. To John Hawkes, he was “one of our greatest of all comic writers.” Robert Coover called him “one of our great citizens of contemporary world letters.” And to Thomas Pynchon, who coined the term Barthelismo, his work conveyed something of “the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience.”This collection presents all of Barthelme's previously unpublished and uncollected short fiction, as well as work not published in his two compendium editions, Sixty Storiesand Forty Stories. Highlights of Flying to America include three unpublished stories, “Among the Beanwoods,” “Heather,” and “Pandemonium”; fourteen stories never before available in book form-from his first published story, “Pages from the Annual Report” (1959), to his last, “Tickets” (1989); and the long out-of-print Sam's Bar, with illustrations by Seymour Chwast. With Flying to America, fans and new readers alike have the huge pleasure of a new collection from one of America's great literary masters.

    These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable.