With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.

    The author relates his own life experiences to offer a view of contemporary Native American life.

    + New literature from South Korea: poetry by Hwang Byeong-seung and Moon Tae-jun, and fiction by Park Min-gyu and Kim Aeran, with an introduction by Jenny Wang Medina.+ Book Reviews: on Francesco Pacifico’s The Story of My Purity, Anne Carson’s Red Doc>, A. G. Porta’s The No World Concerto, Ray Amorisi’s Lazarus, Charles Bernstein’s Recalculating, and Nicolas Hundley’s The Revolver in the Hive.

    In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, bitter, and wise. Black Light contains the type of storytelling that resonates somewhere deep, in the well of memory that repudiates nostalgia.

    While the bricks with which Chinquee constructs her fictions - failed or failing relationships, childhood friendships, and the intricacies of family life - are not uncommon, the architecture she creates with them is rare indeed: stories now full of light, now somber, now opening the reader's eyes to an utterly new space.

    In between, Moore’s stories have been shortlisted for more than a dozen different awards including the Bridport Prize, the Fish Prize, the Lightship Flash Fiction Prize, the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Nottingham Short Story Competition. The title story won first prize in the novella category of The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes.

    Compiled by Dave Eggers and students from his San Francisco writing center, it is "both uproarious and illuminating" (Publishers Weekly).

    Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling—these stories will remind readers of the late giant David Foster Wallace, in their straightforward accounts of anything-but-straightforward events; of modern short story pioneer Raymond Carver, a bit, in their blunt, unadorned dialogue; and of Julia Whitty, a bit, in their willingness to believe what is happening, even if it absolutely shouldn’t be. Funny, piercing, unique, memorable, this is a collection of stories readers will find nearly impossible to forget:... The barber who shaves the heads of the thugs in Bin Laden’s cave tells cheerful stories of life with the preening video-obsessed leader, who has a bald spot shaped just like Iceland.... A husband gathers all of his wife’s previous boyfriends for a long day on a winery-touring bus.... A teenage boy drives off into the sunset with his troubled sister’s small daughters…and the loser husband locked in the trunk of the car.... The late Joseph Kennedy pours out his heart to a golf-course bartender moments before the stroke that silenced him forever.… A man digging in his garden finds a brand-new baby boy, still alive, and has a chat with the teenage neighbor girl whose son it is.... A man born on a Greyhound bus eventually buys the entire Greyhound Bus Company and revolutionizes Western civilization.... A mountainous bishop dies and the counting of the various keys to his house turns… tense.... A man discovers his wife having an affair, takes up running to grapple with his emotions, and discovers everyone else on the road is a cuckold too.And many others.

    An open bedroom door. An ill-timed squat. Dogs seem to have impeccable timing. Yet how quickly calamity turns to comedy in the company of a dog, and the wrong moment turns out to be just the right one. In this delightful follow-up to Dog Is My Co-Pilot, which won the Best Book of the Year award from the Dog Writers Association of America, the editors of The Bark bring together more stories, essays, and artwork that highlight the hilarity of dog behavior and the comical interactions between dog people and their four-legged friends. From playful puppies who wreak havoc in the home to dogs with a whole array of comic shticks and tricks, Howl celebrates the verve and the laughs pets offer their people. It includes laugh-out-loud reflections (and confessions), rib-tickling tales, and whimsical vignettes from well-known writers such as:• Dave Barry• Margaret Cho• Al Franken• Kinky Friedman• Pam Houston• Haven Kimmel• Neal Pollack• And many more!From the Hardcover edition.

    If the genesis for a book is to shut your wife up, I guess that’s as good as any.  On top of that, Olivia’s mother had burdened her with one of those Southern middle names kids love to make fun.  To see “deBelle” printed on the front of a book seemed vindication for all the childhood teasing.  With storytelling written in the finest Southern tradition from the soap operas of Chandler Street in the quaint town of Gainesville, Georgia, to a country store on the Alabama state line, Oliviade Belle Byrd delves with wit and amusement into the world of the Deep South with all its unique idiosyncrasies and colloquialisms.  The characters who dance across the pages range from Great-Aunt LottieMae, who is as “old-fashioned and opinionated as the day is long,” to Mrs. Brewton, who calls everyone “dahling” whether they are darling or not, to Isabella with her penchant for mint juleps and drama.  Humorous anecdotes from a Christmas coffee, where one can converse with a lady who has Christmas trees with blinking lights dangling from her ears, to Sunday church,where a mink coat is mistaken for possum, will delight Southerners and baffle many a non-Southerner. There is the proverbial Southern beauty pageant, where even a six-month-old can win a tiara, to a funeral faux pas of the iron clad Southern rule—one never wears white after Labor Day and, dear gussy, most certainly not to a funeral.  Miss Hildreth Wore Brown—Anecdotes of a Southern Belle is guaranteed to provide an afternoon of laugh-out-loud reading and hilarious enjoyment.

    Divided into four sections: love, loss, acceptance, and growth- the content serves the purpose of making you feel and finding the light at the end of the tunnel.

    Megan Mayhew Bergman's twelve stories capture the surprising moments when the pull of our biology becomes evident, when love or fear collide with good sense, or when our attachment to an animal or wild place can't be denied. In "Housewifely Arts," a single mother and her son drive hours to track down an African Gray Parrot that can mimic her deceased mother's voice. A population control activist faces the ultimate conflict between her loyalty to the environment and her maternal desire in "Yesterday's Whales." And in the title story, a lonely naturalist allows an attractive stranger to lead her and her aging father on a hunt for an elusive woodpecker. As intelligent as they are moving, the stories in Birds of a Lesser Paradise are alive with emotion, wit, and insight into the impressive power that nature has over all of us.

    This new edition of The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams contains all fifty-two stories combining the early collections The Knife of the Times (1932), Life Along the Passaic (1938) with the later collection Make Light of It (1950) and the great long story, “The Farmers’ Daughters” (1956). When these stories first appeared, their vitality and immediacy shocked many readers, as did the blunt, idiosyncratic speech of Williams’ immigrant and working-class characters. But the passage of time has silenced the detractors, and what shines in the best of these stories is the unflinching honesty and deep humanity of Williams’ portraits, burnished by the seeming artlessness which only the greatest masters command.

    Her mother may stand silently at the sink year after year, or lie in the basement weeping, but Albanese is determined to flee the deadening certainty of her parents' lives. Her story does not disappoint us.By turns haunting, hilarious, tragic, and romantic, Blue Suburbia is the chronicle of a determined young woman who overcomes family limitations, socio-economic obstacles, and personal fears to build a happy -- and blessedly ordinary -- life. Written entirely in free verse, Blue Suburbia's cadence is a steady, rhythmic heartbeat, pulsing with pain, rebellion, love, and triumph. This is the story many of us might tell, if we had the courage.

    "PINK STEAM is not kitschy, it is a culturally astute document of the real written by a master at the height of her powers"--Jennifer Moxley. The intimate secrets of Dodie Bellamy's life--sex, shoplifting, voyeurism, and writing are illuminated in Bellamy's incredibly tailored latest work where true confession bleeds into high theory into trash cinema. PINK STEAM barges beyond the cliches of gendered experience; unafraid of the personal, unabashed by politics and sex, Bellamy makes confusion her OK Corral. Dodie Bellamy is the author of CUNT-UPS and FEMININE HIJINX, both available at SPD.