Elsewhere, an aerobics instructor—the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—makes the most shocking leap imaginable to save her soul. These are just a few of the characters you'll encounter in Sam Lipsyte's richly imagined world.Featuring a grizzled and possibly deranged male doula, a doomsday hustler who must face the multi-universal truth of "the real-ass jumbo," and a tawdry glimpse of a high school shot-putting circuit in northern New Jersey, circa 1986, Lipsyte's short stories combine the tragicomic brilliance of his beloved novels with the compressed vitality of Venus Drive. The Fun Parts is Lipsyte at his very best—a far-ranging exploration of new voices and vistas from "the most consistently funny fiction writer working today" (Time).

    This inexpensive volume comprises "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "The Ice Palace," "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," "May Day," "The Jelly-Bean," and "The Offshore Pirate." Publisher's Note.

    Valente, Dexter Palmer and others KAREN JOY FOWLER, guest editor, is the author of six novels and four short story collections, including We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. She is the winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and has won numerous Nebula and World Fantasy awards. JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS, series editor, is the best-selling editor of more than two dozen anthologies, including Brave New Worlds and Wastelands. He is the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare and is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new science fiction/fantasy novel imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Table of Contents:"Meet Me in Iram" by Sofia Samatar"The Game of Smash and Recovery" by Kelly Link"Interesting Facts" by Adam Johnson"Planet Lion" by Catherynne M. Valente"The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary" by Kij Johnson"By Degrees and Dilatory Time" by S.L. Huang"The Mushroom Queen" by Liz Ziemska"The Daydreamer by Proxy" by Dexter Palmer"Tea Time" by Rachel Swirsky"Headshot" by Julian Mortimer Smith"The Duniazát" by Salman Rushdie"No Placeholder for You, My Love" by Nick Wolven"The Thirteen Mercies" by Maria Dahvana Headley"Lightning Jack’s Last Ride" by Dale Bailey"Things You Can Buy for a Penny" by Will Kaufman"Rat Catcher’s Yellows" by Charlie Jane Anders"The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History" by Sam J. Miller"Three Bodies at Mitanni" by Seth Dickinson"Ambiguity Machines: an Examination" by Vandana Singh"The Great Silence" by Ted Chiang

    An exiled writer, working in a sandwich shop in Chicago, adjusts to the absurdities of his life. Love letters from war torn Sarajevo navigate the art of getting from point A to point B without being shot. With a surefooted sense of detail and life-saving humor, Aleksandar Hemon examines the overwhelming events of history and the effect they have on individual lives. These heartrending stories bear the unmistakable mark of an important new international writer.

    The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear.These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you.Stories from Stranger Things Happen have won the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Award. Stranger Things Happen was a Salon Book of the Year, one of the Village Voice's 25 Favorite Books of 2001, and was nominated for the Firecracker Alternative Book Award.Contents:- Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1998)- Water Off a Black Dog's Back (1995)- The Specialist's Hat (1998)- Flying Lessons (1995)- Travels with the Snow Queen (1996/1997)- Vanishing Act (1996)- Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party (1998)- Shoe and Marriage (2000)- Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water (2001)- Louise's Ghost (2001)- The Girl Detective (1999)Cover painting by Shelley Jackson

    * 'Direct, unpretentious, humorous' SUNDAY TIMES

    An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class―where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.

    Throughout the collection, women become insects, men turn to stone, a city becomes insomniac and bodies are picked apart to make up better ones. The mundane worlds of schools and sea side towns are invaded and transformed by the physical, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to the bodies of its inhabitants. Blending the mythic and the fantastic, the collection considers characters in motion – turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new.From the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018, salt slow is an extraordinary collection of short stories that are sure to dazzle and shock.

    Told with lust and affection, karate and tenderness, slapstickery, ferocity, and heart, Hot Pink is the work of a major talent in his sharpest form.*Hot Pink comes in three resplendent colors (pink, gray and blue).

    In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as "a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways." With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.

    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.

    A lonely woman reflects on her failed marriage and the single act of violence, years buried, that brought about its destruction. In these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.In "Good Girl," a depressed widower is forced to decide between the love of a good woman and the love of his own deeply flawed son. In another part of town and another time, thirteen-year-old Ellen, the central figure of "Theory of Realty," is discovering the menaces of being "at that age": too old for the dolls of her girlhood, too young to understand the weaknesses of the adults who surround her. The linked stories "Parts" and "Proof of God" offer distinct but equally correct versions of a brutal crime--one from the perspective of the victim's mother, one from the killer's.

    . . a fierce new voice of the American West.”—OutsideExploding with an unsettling exuberance, Brady Udall’s stories traverse a geography of lost love, fragmented lives, and satisfying revenge. From the night a six-foot-three Apache Indian holding a goat steps into a moonlit Arizona backyard in "Midnight Raid" to the pivotal moment when a man, delirious from a dental extraction, gets rescued by a stranger in the title story, Udall injects his stories and characters with equal parts darkness and humor. These are sad and sweet stories, moving from the familiar to surprising destinations. But even when disaster looms, Udall's fine comic sense sustains his men and women in their sometimes extravagant efforts to connect and cope. Plunged in the moment, these stories have velocity; they spray gravel as they take off.

    "They make us pay attention in new ways." In his second new and selected collection, Dunn subtly enlarges our sense of possibility. His new poems, suffused with affection and rue for our world, occasionally address the metaphysical, as in these lines—from “Talk to God”Ease into your misgivingsAsk him if in his weaknesshe was ever responsiblefor a pettiness—some weather, say,brought in to show who’s bosswhen no one seemed sufficiently movedby a sunset or the shape of an egg.Ask him if when he gave us desirehe had underestimated its power.

    Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection—part fiction, part handbook—as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations—both comic and disturbing—in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.