It all began the day he accidentally discovered he was not the father of his youngest daughter, a discovery which sent Lancelot on modern quest to reverse the degeneration of America. Percy's novel reveals a shining knight for the modern age--a knight not of romance, but of revenge.

    At the heart of the story are two people, Iris Courtney, who is white, and handsome Jinx Fairchild, the black basketball player who, in protecting Iris, kills a white man.Iris is the only witness to the crime.The two of them are growing up in the early 1950s in a New York industrial town where racial boundaries keep people apart - or bring them together in explosive scenes of fear or desire. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a murder...and a bond of passion and guilt is formed between them. How this one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies becomes Joyce Carol Oate's finest, emotion-packed novel - a work the critics are calling a masterpiece, the best work of America's best writer of contemporary realism.

    As Poppy Z. Brite writes in the foreword to this new mini-collection, "After the events of 2005, I couldn't see pairing stories I'd written before the flood with those I'd written after; for better or worse, my life, my outlook, and, necessarily, my work has changed forever ... These are literally antediluvian tales, stories written before August 29, 2005... Whatever else they may be, the stories in this little collection now seem almost impossibly innocent to me."Antediluvian Tales contains five stories of the Stubbs family, the New Orleans clan whose adventures Brite has chronicled in her popular Liquor novels and other works. Two more stories revisit the author's fictitious alter ego Dr. Brite, the coroner of New Orleans. Completing the book is "The Last Good Day of My Life," a nonfiction look at the changes the past two years have wrought on Brite, filtered through a reminiscence about a day she spent knocking around Cairns, Australia.Any reader who loves New Orleans will treasure these antediluvian tales for the city that exists in them: a city that will never again exist in its pre-Katrina form, but which cannot be killed by hurricanes, floods, or governmental neglect as long as its artists continue to chronicle and cherish it.Table of Contents:Drink Up, Dreamers, You're Running Dry: A ForewordThe Feast of St. RosalieFour Flies and a SwatterHenry Goes ShoppingThe Working Slob's Prayer (Being A Night in the History of the Peychaud Grill)Crown of ThornsWound Man and Horned Melon Go to HellThe Devil of Delery StreetThe Last Good Day of My Life (A True Story)Appendix: Alternate Order of Stories

    Arranged in their fictional chronology, the book shines forth as a single sustained work, not simply an anthology. It reveals Wendell Berry as a literary master capable of managing an imaginative integrity over decades of writing with a multitude of characters followed over several generations. Combining The Wild Birds (1985), Fidelity (1992), and Watch With Me (1994), and including four never-before-collected stories and a map of Port William, this book offers rest for the weary, hope for the beleaguered, and strength for the rest of us.

    This dazzling collection of shorter fiction describes a series of self-awakenings -- a suburban divorcee deciding among lovers, a celebrity drawn into his cousin's life of crime, a father remembering bygone Chicago, an artist, and an academic awaiting extradition for some unnamed offense.

    Frank Bill delivers what is both a wake-up call and a gut punch. Welcome to heartland America circa right about now, when the union jobs and family farms that kept the white on the picket fences have given way to meth labs, backwoods gunrunners, and bare-knuckle brawling.Bill's people are pressed to the brink--and beyond. There is Scoot McCutchen, whose beloved wife falls terminally ill, leaving him with nothing to live for--which doesn't quite explain why he brutally murders her and her doctor and flees, or why, after years of running, he decides to turn himself in. In the title story, a man who has devolved from breeding hounds for hunting to training them for dog-fighting crosses paths with a Salvadoran gangbanger tasked with taking over the rural drug trade, but who mostly wants to grow old in peace. As Crimes in Sourthern Indiana unfolds, we witness the unspeakable, yet are compelled to find sympathy for the depraved.Bill's southern Indiana is haunted with the deep, authentic sense of place that recalls the best of Southern fiction, but the interconnected stories bristle with the urban energy of a Chuck Palahniuk or a latter-day Nelson Algren and rush with the slam-bang plotting of pulp-noir crime writing a la Jim Thompson. Bill's prose is gritty yet literary, shocking, and impossible to put down. A dark evocation of the survivalist spirit of the working class, this is a brilliant debut by an important new voice.

    The play is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. Certain major and minor characters are supernatural beings (angels) or deceased persons (ghosts). The play contains multiple roles for several of the actors. Initially and primarily focusing on a gay couple in Manhattan, the play also has several other storylines, some of which occasionally intersect.

    A noose is tied around his neck. In a moment he will meet his fate: DEATH BY HANGING. There is no escape. Or is there? Find out in . . . An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

    The stories have been selected and introduced by Haruki Murakami.

    The impact is at once harrowing and thrilling.An elderly inventor, burning with manic creativity, tries to reconcile with his estranged gay son. A bereaved boy draws a thuggish classmate into a relationship of escalating guilt and violence. A genteel middle-aged woman, a long-time resident of a psychiatric hospital, becomes the confidante of a lovelorn teenaged volunteer. Told with Chekhovian restraint and compassion, and conveying both the sorrow of life and the courage with which people rise to meet it, You Are Not a Stranger Here is a triumph of storytelling.

    Always intellectually playful, but also very moving and funny, Smith explores the ways and whys of storytelling.

    Within six months his stories appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Mirabella, Story, Buzz, and in The New Yorker twice more. "The Pugilist at Rest" - the title story from this stunning collection - took first place in Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards and was selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 1992. He is a writer of astonishing talent. Jones's stories - whether set in the combat zones of Vietnam or the brittle social and intellectual milieu of an elite New England college, whether recounting the poignant last battles of an alcoholic ex-fighter or the hallucinatory visions of an American wandering lost in Bombay in the aftermath of an epileptic fugue - are fueled by an almost brutal vision of the human condition, in a world without mercy or redemption. Physically battered, soul-sick, and morally exhausted, Jones's characters are yet unable to concede defeat: his stories are infused with the improbable grace of the spirit that ought to collapse, but cannot. For in these extraordinary pieces of fiction, it is not goodness that finally redeems us, but the heart's illogical resilience, and the ennobling tenacity with which we cling to each other and to our lives. The publication of The Pugilist at Rest is a major literary event, heralding the arrival of an electrifying new voice in American fiction, and a writer of magnificent depth and range. With these eleven stories, Thom Jones takes his place among the ranks of this country's most important authors.

    A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night's wandering, he learns love's true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman than the one he left. A landowner, seeking to prove a principle, inadvertently exposes the ferocity of mother love. A wealthy young traveler melts the hauteur of a lovely woman by masquerading as her aged and loyal servant.Shimmering and haunting, Dinesen's Winter's Tales transport us, through their author's deft guidance of our desire to imagine, to the mysterious place where all stories are born.

    The triumphant collection of short stories by America's most acclaimed novelist.