A Girl Goes into the Forest immerses readers in the complex desires, contradictions, and sorrows of daughters, wives, and husbands, artists, siblings, and mothers.In forests literal and metaphorical, the characters try, fail, and try again to see the world, to hear each other, and to speak the truth of their longings. Powerful, lyrical, and precise, Pursell’s stories call up a world at once mysterious and recognizable.A Girl Goes into the Forest invites fans of Lydia Davis and Helen Oyeyemi into a world where “no one can deter a person from her mistakes.”

    In a dazzling narrative constellation, Beach’s characters contend with the strange and terrible and beautiful in life, and no outcome is certain. Begun as a series of Facebook status updates, 420 Characters marks a new turn in an acclaimed artist and illustrator’s career, and features original collages by the author.

    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

    African American Studies. Gladman wields an idiosyncratic skill with description and characters that has drawn praise and attention from her contemporaries. JUICE describes a world where seemingly minor obsessions and details (like the narrator's almost random preference for juice) can structure and develop an entire story, down to its tone and style. As her narrator puts it: So far it has been sex and leaves that keep me alive.

    In “The Cemetery for Lost Faces,” two orphans translate their grief into taxidermy, artfully arresting the passage of time. The anchoring novella, “The Unfinished World,” unfurls a surprising love story between a free and adventurous young woman and a dashing filmmaker burdened by a mysterious family. Sparks’s stories—populated with sculptors, librarians, astronauts, and warriors—form a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Mythical, bizarre, and deeply moving, The Unfinished World and Other Stories heralds the arrival of a major writer and illuminates the search for a brief encounter with the extraordinary.

    Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection.

    Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the stories in ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises. Like the "experiments in found movement" one character conducts (in "Everybody's Autobiography"), Dutton's stories find movement wherever they turn, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writer's and reader's) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird. "Danielle Dutton's stories remind me of those alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time. Dutton's answer? That the self is a rush of the languages of storytelling and moments of helpless intimacy"--Robert Gluck.

    In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on – and reinvents – her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

    Amy Hempel's collection of 16 stories seems to ask: "What if people could be just a little more like dogs - -forever loyal, ardent and loving in our hearts?"

    In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being.This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass—a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.

    These fifteen compact stories are meticulously observed glimpses of everyday life that expose the ominous lurking under the ordinary. While his wife sleeps, a husband prowls the Internet, obsessed with female serial killers; a bureaucrat tries to reinvent himself, exposing goodness as artifice when he converts to Buddhism in search of power; a woman sits on the edge of the bed where her lover lies, attempting to locate a motive for his violence within her own self-doubt. Shifting between moments of violence (real and imagined) and mundane contemporary life, these stories encompass the complexity of human emotions, our capacity for cruelty as well as compassion. Not so much minimalist as stealthy, Karate Chop delivers its blows with an understatement that shows a master at work.

    Entire neighborhoods drown in mud, glass rains from the sky, birds speak gibberish, and parents of young children disappear. Millions starve while others grow coats of mold. But a few are able to survive and find a light in the aftermath, illuminating what we’ve become. In "The Disappeared", a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. A boy swells to fill his parents’ ransacked attic in "The Ruined Child". Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler’s full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William H. Gass, yet imbued with Butler's own vision of the apocalyptic and bizarre.

    It is rare to come across a first book that embraces the world--the way we see it, and the way it can be imagined--with such a wise and graceful mixture of humor, loss, intelligence, wit, self-deprecation and hope. AMERICAN LINDEN is such a first collection. The poems in this book are valuable, even necessary. They are, in the most important sense, love poems: to people, to ideas, to feelings, and to the mind itself, which--by means of language--move with honesty, wit, and distinction among the fleeting things of this world. Matthew Zapruder is a dangerous poet; his poems implicate us in demonstrations of lift-off and escape velocity while also proving the calamity of gravity--Dean Young.

    In fresh and irreverent prose, Romm captures the mo-ments before and after loss, mining the depths of grief with wit and grace.The stories in "The Mother Garden" are at once vividly realistic and infused with the bizarre -- a man uses a chicken egg to test whether he is ready for fatherhood; a daughter plants a garden of mothers to replace her own; a family's ghosts literally fall through the ceiling, disrupting daily life; a woman finds her father sleeping in the desert after twenty-six years of living without him. People stumble in relationships, start families, struggle with illness, learn to mourn -- and as in life, these acts are consuming, magical, and disorienting.Sharply funny and deeply moving, this extraordinary collection introduces a young writer of fierce originality and prodigious talent.

    Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Donald's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.