A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game--and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN's newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves. An eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant venture into America looking for acquisitions and discover a down and out motel, romance, and a bit of real life. These are just some of the tales Tom Hanks tells in this first collection of his short stories. They are surprising, intelligent, heartwarming, and, for the millions and millions of Tom Hanks fans, an absolute must-have!

    “An extraordinary work...” ~ William Peter Blatty “Captures the tragedy of romantic and familial love better than any story I have ever read.” ~ Janeiro Bento Hear the twilight song of Kestrel. He has not always been this night-winged angel. He was once a star, a guitar star so righteous. He was once a lost boy in love.In The Beginning were two grassroots singers, The Brothers Brass. In The End there is no end to what one wounded girl's heart will give. And no end to what one brother will give for the other.Raised in Savannah by the sea, together, The Brothers Brass voices chime like heavenly bells. The oldest brother Kestrel falls in love with a girl named Bettilia, a wild child who hides in the treetops—hiding from her bad daddy on a ghostly mountain called Riddle Top.Soon all the Family Brass falls for Bettilia. She touches Kestrel, she touches everyone. And they touch sweet Bettilia, forever. Then comes that fateful day when Kestrel says "I do" to his dance with the devil—his devil within and without. The Kestrel Waters is an eerie, heroic, and beautiful Southern Gothic tale of human love, like none you’ve ever known. An epic fable of an epic family whose hearts are comic, profane, and profoundly true.“One of the South's wildest new voices.” ~ The Oxford American Magazine

    He can be elegant as a slow blues." The Nick Tosches Reader is the author's own selection of his best work over the past thirty years, including fiction, poetry, interviews, rock writing, investigative journalism, and criticism. First published in major magazines, obscure underground periodicals, and his own best-selling books, many of these selections deal with rock 'n' roll and cultural icons—but there are also pieces on everything from William Faulkner to organized crime to heavyweight boxing, including the Vanity Fair feature that gave rise to Tosches's major new book on Sonny Liston, published by Little, Brown. Here is "a unique and darkly impressionistic cultural history" of the last three decades as only Nick Tosches could write it.

    In 'The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above', an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her, to the bewilderment of her only child. In 'Do You Know Where I Am?' two college sweethearts rescue a lost cat - a simple act that has profound moral consequences for the rest of their lives together. In 'What You Pawn I Will Redeem', a homeless Indian man must raise $1,000 in twenty-four hours to buy back the fancy dance outfit stolen from his grandmother fifty years earlier.Even as they often make us laugh, Sherman Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candour that cut to the heart of the human experience.

    She portrays the MacLains, the Starks, the Moodys, and other families of the fictitious town of Morgana. “I doubt that a better book about ‘the South’-one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life and its special tone and pattern-has ever been written” (New Yorker).

    America's most popular pulps--Dime Detective, Black Mask, and Detective Fiction Weekly--published hundreds of his stories. Classic films like Hitchcock's Rear Window, Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid, Tournier's Black Alibi, and Siodmak's Phantom Lady, as well as dozens of other movies, were based on his work. Novels like Deadline at Dawn, Rendezvous in Black, and Night Has a Thousand Eyes have won him the epithet "father of noir." Every one of the countless many who have read and loved the work of Cornell Woolrich will welcome and applaud this publication of a new collection of tales--the first in nearly two decades--by the greatest writer of suspense fiction in the twentieth century. Woolrich lived a life of such deep despair and utter terror that he could do little except put those fears onto the printed page. In the masterfully wrought suspense of this volume's twenty stories, readers can enjoy works written at the height of Woolrich's powers, as well as many never before published in book form before now.

    Kennedy has once again brought together the best of the horror world to bring you an anthology that is packed with creepy tales. Between these pages you will find over one hundred drabbles, written by a wealth of talented authors. From the best indie horror authors to Bram Stoker award winners and Amazon top sellers. We have monsters, mayhem and madness. Come join us. Contains drabbles by, Amy Cross, William F. Nolan, Lisa Morton, Gord Rollo, Michael A. Arnzen, Mark Lukens, Richard Chizmar, Rick Gualtieri, Jeff Strand, Kevin J. Kennedy, P. Mattern, Lee Mountford, Ike Hamill, Michael Bray, Andrew Lennon, Craig Saunders, Matt Hickman, Glenn Rolfe and many more.

    A preacher bathes his ill and elderly mother, not knowing that she has mistaken him for the long-lost cousin she watched murder his brother in her father’s tobacco field. In six stories that read like novels in miniature, Kyle Minor plumbs the depths of human mystery, where they meet our kindnesses and our cruelties, our generosities and our pettiness.Kyle Minor’s work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, among them Best American Mystery Stories 2008, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Surreal South, and Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: The Best New Voices of 2006. His work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Kyle received his MFA from Ohio State University and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Toledo.

    Sublime and ridiculous, sentimental and searing, Christmas at The New Yorker is a gift of great writing and drawing by literary legends and laugh-out-loud cartoonists.Here are seasonal stories, poems, memoirs, and more, including such classics as John Cheever’s 1949 story “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor,” about an elevator operator in a Park Avenue apartment building who experiences the fickle power of charity; John Updike’s “The Carol Sing,” in which a group of small-town carolers remember an exceptionally enthusiastic fellow singer (“How he would jubilate, how he would God-rest those merry gentlemen, how he would boom out when the male voices became King Wenceslas”); and Richard Ford’s acerbic and elegiac 1998 story “Crèche,” in which an unmarried Hollywood lawyer spends an unsettling holiday with her sister’s estranged husband and kids.Here, too, are S. J. Perelman’s 1936 “Waiting for Santy,” a playlet in the style of Clifford Odets labor drama (the setting: “The sweatshop of Santa Claus, North Pole”), and Vladimir Nabokov’s heartbreaking 1975 story “Christ-mas,” in which a father grieving for his lost son in a world “ghastly with sadness” sees a tiny miracle on Christmas Eve.And it wouldn’t be Christmas—or The New Yorker—without dozens of covers and cartoons by Addams, Arno, Chast, and others, or the mischievous verse of Roger Angell, Calvin Trillin, and Ogden Nash (“Do you know Mrs. Millard Fillmore Revere?/On her calendar, Christmas comes three hundred and sixty-five times a year”).From Jazz Age to New Age, E. B. White to Garrison Keillor, these works represent eighty years of wonderful keepsakes for Christmas, from The New Yorker to you.From the Hardcover edition.

    W. Norton changed the way world literature is taught by introducing The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition. Leading the field once again, Norton is proud to publish the anthology for the new century, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Second Edition. Now published in six paperback volumes (packaged in two attractive slipcases), the new anthology boasts slimmer volumes, thicker paper, a bolder typeface, and dozens of newly included or newly translated works from around the world. The Norton Anthology of World Literature represents continuity as well as change. Like its predecessor, the anthology is a compact library of world literature, offering an astounding forty-three complete longer works, more than fifty prose works, over one hundred lyric poems, and twenty-three plays. More portable, more suitable for period courses, more pleasant to read, and more attuned to current teaching and research trends, The Norton Anthology of World Literature remains the most authoritative, comprehensive, and teachable anthology for the world literature survey.

    Redefined.Martin H. Ehrengraf, dapper and diabolical, may be Lawrence Block's darkest creation. He's the defense attorney who never sees the inside of a courtroom, because all his clients are innocent - no matter how guilty they may seem. Some even believe themselves to be guilty: They remember pulling the trigger, or wiring the dynamite to their spouse's car, or holding the bloody blade. But things have a way of working out when Martin Ehrengraf is on the case. Evidence turns up, incriminating someone else. More murders occur, with the same M.O. And the gate of the jail cell opens, and the accused walks free.But be careful - hiring Martin Ehrengraf comes with a price. A high price, one that comes due even if he appears to have done nothing on your behalf. And you'd better be prepared to pay...Here at last are the complete exploits of Martin Ehrengraf: a dozen delicious tales of vice and villainy including one - ''The Ehrengraf Fandango'' - that is appearing for the first time anywhere. It's a 12-course meal of sinister surprises, exquisitely prepared and served simmering hot by the greatest living master of mystery fiction.

    ContentsDummyDistanceThe LieSo Much Water So Close to HomeThe FlingPastoralMineFurious Seasons

    The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich­­—and intriguing—territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.Complainers --Air mail --Baster --Early music --Timeshare --Find the bad guy --The oracular vulva --Capricious gardens --Great experiment --Fresh complaint

    In the centerpiece story, an eighteenth-century Eno Indian tells of the fiery fate of his adopted father, English explorer John Lawson. In the surrounding stories, the age-old conflicts between newcomer and old-timer play out as twenty-first century retirees, carnies, runaways, heartbroken women, and farmers stumble into new lives and new insights in Ambler County, North Carolina. "Hudson's prose is pure as birdsong," says novelist Doris Betts. "These fine stories of change and discovery are a field guide to the human species in transition."

    In the years (and decades) that followed, Granta established itself as the one of the most prestigious literary publications in the English-speaking world. In that time Granta has published 26 Nobel Prize for Literature winners, defined new literary genres and paved the way for generations of young novelists. To celebrate forty years of brilliant publishing, Granta 147 brings together our best fiction and non-fiction from the last four decades, along with a selection of letters from behind the scenes. This will be a collector's issue and is not to be missed.Featuring...Angela CarterKazuo IshiguroTodd McEwenBruce ChatwinJames FentonPrimo LeviAmitav GhoshRaymond CarverPhilip RothJohn Gregory DunneRyszard KapuscinskiJoy WilliamsJohn BergerGabriel García MárquezBill BufordLindsey HilsumLorrie MooreHilary MantelIan JackEdward SaidDiana AthillEdmund WhiteVed MehtaAdrian LeftwichAlexandra FullerBinyavanga WainainaMary GaitskillLydia DavisJeanette WintersonHerta Müller