Henry Prize Stories 2011 contains twenty unforgettable stories selected from hundreds of literary magazines. The winning tales take place in such far-flung locales as Madagascar, Nantucket, a Midwestern meth lab, Antarctica, and a post-apocalyptic England, and feature a fascinating array of characters: aging jazzmen, avalanche researchers, a South African wild child, and a mute actor in silent films. Also included are essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.  Your Fate Hurtles Down at YouJim Shepard Diary of an Interesting YearHelen Simpson MelindaJudy Doenges NightbloomingKenneth Calhoun The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once LivedTamas Dobozy IceLily Tuck How to Leave HialeahJennine Capó Crucet The JunctionDavid Means Pole, PoleSusan Minot Alamo PlazaBrad Watson The Black Square Chris Adrian Nothing of ConsequenceJane Delury The Rules Are the RulesAdam Foulds The Vanishing AmericanLeslie Parry CrossingMark Slouka Bed DeathLori Ostlund WindeyeBrian Evenson SunshineLynn Freed Never Come BackElizabeth Tallent Something You Can’t Live WithoutMatthew Neill Null For author interviews, photos, and more,  go to www.ohenryprizestories.com   A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to support the PEN Readers & Writers Literary Outreach Program.

    Who has it. Who doesn’t. How you get it. How you don’t.In Refund, Bender creates an award-winning collection of stories that deeply explore the ways in which money and the estimation of value affect the lives of her characters. The stories in Refund reflect our contemporary world—swindlers, reality show creators, desperate artists, siblings, parents — who try to answer the question: What is the real definition of worth?In “Theft,” an eighty-year-old swindler, accustomed to tricking people for their money, boards a cruise ship to see if she can find something of true value—a human connection. In “Anything for Money,” the creator of a reality show is thrown into the real world when his estranged granddaughter reenters his life in need of a new heart; and in the title story, young artist parents in downtown Manhattan escape the attack on 9/11 only to face a battle over their subletted apartment with a stranger who might have lost more than only her deposit.Set in contemporary America, these stories herald a work of singular literary merit by an important writer at the height of her power.

    Yet his life is overturned in the winter of 1846, when his Nez Perce wife deserts him and his children die of smallpox. In the grip of a profound sorrow, MacLaren, whose home once spanned a continent, sets out to find his wife. But an act of secret vengeance changes his course, introducing him to a different wife and mother: Lucy Mitchell, journeying westward with her family.Lucy, a remarried widow, careful mother, and reluctant emigrant, is drawn at once to the self-possessed MacLaren. Convinced that he is the key to her family’s safe passage, she persuades her husband to employ him. As their hidden stories and obsessions unfold, and pasts and cultures collide, both Lucy and MacLaren must confront the people they have truly been, are, and may become.Alive with incident and insight, presenting with rare scope and intimacy the complex relations among nineteenth-century traders, immigrants, and Native Americans, A Sudden Country is, above all, a heroic and unforgettable story of love and loss, sacrifice and understanding.From the Hardcover edition.

    Herter Norton offer Rilke's work to the English-speaking world in an accurate, sensitive, modern version.

    Catherine, an American expatriate becomes unwittingly embroiled in an internecine war between rival factions of the government. Into this potentially explosive scene enters a woman once loved and lost, but who remains a powerful temptation-one that proves impossible to resist.In the opening pages of Shacochis's first novel, Mitchell Wilson, an American who works for the Ministry of Agriculture on the Caribbean island of St. Catherine, is heading downhill. His lost love, Joanna, has decided to drop into his life again, and he's on his way to the airport to meet her, riding in a dilapidated car whose brakes--dependent on coconut oil for braking fluid--have failed. Wilson's harrowing ride is a perfect metaphor for life on St. Catherine's, an island both beautiful and corrupt, and for the turn his own life is about to take. Joanna may have come to St. Catherine simply to escape trouble, but Wilson still bristles when a government official tells him to stay clear of her. He should have listened. There's a mystery to crack at the heart of this richly detailed novel, but in fact Shacochis offers a chilling evocation of the misunderstandings that arise between feckless Americans and struggling islanders for whom St. Catherine's is no paradise.At once an enchanting love story and a superbly sophisticated political novel about the fruits of imperialism in the twentieth century, Swimming in the Volcano is as brutally seductive a novel as the world it evokes.

    'A Simple Tale' tells the story of Maria Poniatowski and her life. 'The Hunters' is the tale of an American doing research one summer in London and the relationship that she develops with her neighbour.

    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.

    Playful, wry, and conversational, One More for the People chronicles three generations in the life of the Grover family. As these idiosyncratic characters reluctantly confront adulthood, one Grover is always there to take notes. But after she’s diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal disease (whose 81 symptoms include dramatic changes to her appearance, not to mention the dreaded possibility of having to move back home), One More for the People becomes something unexpected: a survival guide. In the spirit of Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Grover transforms her own misfortune into a tale as unsettling as it is entertaining.

    We are not who we think we are, nor how others see us. Long before death, we die a thousand times at the hands of a definition.” A master storyteller’s vision reawakens us to the human experience in this diverse, haunting, and unexpectedly humorous new collection of short fiction from Simon Van Booy—his first since Love Begins in Winter, winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.In his first book of short stories since Love Begins in Winter, for which he won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award), bestselling author Simon Van Booy offers a collection of stories highlighting how human genius can emerge through acts of compassion. Through characters including an eccentric film director, an aging Cockney bodyguard, the teenage child of Nigerian immigrants, a divorced amateur magician from New Jersey, and a Beijing street vendor who becomes an overnight billionaire, Tales of Accidental Genius contemplates individuals from different cultures, races—rich and poor, young and old—and reveals how faith and yearning for connection helps us all transcend darkness of fear and misfortune.

    The freedom to tell each other the stories of ourselves, to retell the stories of our culture and beliefs, is profoundly connected to the larger subject of freedom itself.”—Salman Rushdie, editorIntroduction / by Salman Rushdie --Admiral / T.C. Boyle --The year of silence / Kevin Brockmeier --Galatea / Karen Brown --Man and wife / Katie Chase --Virgins / Danielle Evans --Closely held / Allegra Goodman --May we be forgiven / A.M. Homes --From the desk of Daniel Varsky / Nicole Krauss --The king of sentences / Jonathan Lethem --The worst you ever feel / Rebecca Makkai --The wizard of West Orange / Steven Millhauser --Nawabdin Electrician / Daniyal Mueenuddin --Child's play / Alice Munro --Buying Lenin / Miroslav Penkov --Vampires in the lemon grove / Karen Russell --Puppy / George Saunders --Quality of life / Christine Sneed --Missionaries / Bradford Tice --Straightaway / Mark Wisniewski --Bible / Tobias Wolff

    Standing on those pillars, humans spent 100,000 years spreading out into the galaxy: warring, exploring, partying — the usual. Then there was the fifth science. And that killed the empire stone dead. The Fifth Science is a collection of 12 stories, beginning at the start of the Galactic Human Empire and following right through to its final days. We’ll see some untypical things along the way, meet some untypical folk: galactic lighthouses from the distant future, alien tombs from the distant past, murderers, emperors, archaeologists and drunks; mad mathematicians attempting to wake the universe itself up. And when humans have fallen back into savagery, when the secrets of space folding and perfect wisdom are forgotten, we’ll attend the empire’s deathbed, hold its hand as it goes. Unfortunately that may well only be the beginning.

    At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I've Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be.Cities I've Never Lived In is the second book in Graywolf's collaboration with the literary magazine A Public Space.

    In Cutty Sark and Landfill, the bond between adolescent son and mother reverberates with the force of an unspoken passion, bringing unexpected consequences for the son. In A Princeton Idyll, a woman is forced to realize, decades later, her childhood role in the destruction of a famous, beloved grandfather's life. In Magda Maria, a man tries to break free of the enthralling and dangerous erotic obsession of his life. In the gripping title story, Oates boldly reimagines the true-crime story of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her children in 2001. Several stories—Suicide by Fitness Center, The Glazers, and Dear Joyce Carol,—take a less tragic turn, exploring with mordant humor the shadowy interstices between self-awareness and delusion.Dramatic, intensely rendered, and always provocative, Dear Husband, provides an unsettling and fascinating look into the mysterious heart of America.

    With a mix of traditional, literary prose and bold – some might even say irresponsible – experimentation, Ben Greenman explores the ins and outs of modern romance. Expect tears, nudity, and recrimination.Both familiar in their humanness and wholly original, these imaginative stories take us all over the map in time, place, and circumstance. From the halfhearted summer affair between a part-time bartender and a married doctor in a Miami hotel to the cryptic pseudo-erotic love letters to a friend who is “more than a friend,” we experience the love of pop songs, the love of cohabitation in Chicago, and love that is so transporting it takes us to the moon–literally.

    Hempel, fiercely admired by writers and reviewers, has a sterling reputation that is based on four very short collections of stories, roughly fifteen thousand stunning sentences, written over a period of nearly three decades. These are stories about people who make choices that seem inevitable, whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. With compassion, wit, and the acutest eye, Hempel observes the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America. When "Reasons to Live, " Hempel's first collection, was published in 1985, readers encountered a pitch-perfect voice in fiction and an unsettling assessment of the culture. That collection includes "San Francisco," which Alan Cheuse in "The Chicago Tribune" called "arguably the finest short story composed by any living writer." In "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, " her second collection, frequently compared to the work of Raymond Carver, Hempel refined and developed her unique grace and style and her unerring instinct for the moment that defines a character. Also included here, in their entirety, are the collections "Tumble Home" and "The Dog of the Marriage." As Rick Moody says of the title novella in Tumble Home, "the leap in mastery, in seriousness, and sheer literary purpose was inspiring to behold.... And yet," he continues, ""The Dog of the Marriage, " the fourth collection, is even better than the other three...a triumph, in fact." "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel" is the perfect opportunity for readers of contemporary American fiction to catch up to one of its masters. Moody's passionate and illuminating introduction celebrates both the appeal and the importance of Hempel's work.