Among its pages are a couple who becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex…until they can’t have sex without him; a ten-year-old whose birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for “something mean”; a woman who finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart’s desire: a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed “biter” who dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker.Spanning a range of genres and topics—from the mundane to the murderous and supernatural—these are stories about sex and punishment, guilt and anger, the pleasure and terror of inflicting and experiencing pain. These stories fascinate and repel, revolt and arouse, scare and delight in equal measure. And, as a collection, they point a finger at you, daring you to feel uncomfortable—or worse, understood—as if to say, “You want this, right? You know you want this.”Bad boy --Look at your game, girl --Sardines --The night runner --The mirror, the bucket, and the old thigh bone --Cat person --The good guy --The boy in the pool --Scarred --The matchbox sign --Death wish --Biter --Acknowledgments

    M. Homes as one of the most provocative and daring writers of her generation. Here you'll find the cult classic A Real Doll, the tale of a teenage boy's erotic obsession with his sister's favorite doll; Adults Alone, which first introduced Paul and Elaine, the crack-smoking yuppie couple whose marriage careens out of control in Homes's novel Music for Torching; and Looking for Johnny, in which a kidnapped boy, having failed his abductor's expectations, is returned home. Brilliantly conceived, sharply etched, and exceptionally satisfying, these stories explore the American dream in ways you're not likely soon to forget. Working in Kodacolor hues, Homes offers an uncanny picture of a surreal suburbia-outrageous and utterly believable.

    They find themselves in bathhouses, sports bars, grocery stores, and forests in search of exits, pink tennis balls, licorice, and independence. Yet all of her beautifully strange characters are possessed by a familiar and human longing for connection: to their homes, families, God, and themselves.Miniature catastrophes --The rope barrier --Coed picnic --Winners --Grocery story --Garden party --Arranged marriage --American interiors --A house for living --The dance --The nearby place --Invitation --Doorstop --Imaginary museums --Your shining trapdoor --Slovak sceneries --Sabbatical --Flowers for Angelika --Thursdays at Waterhouse --The seamstress --How to eat well --Owls fall in Nitra --Library of lost things --Girls I no longer know --Guest books --Field notes --Rest in pieces --Pets I no longer have --The squinter's watch --Love language

    Original Fiction, Short Story: “If anyone was going to die it was going to be us, our skulls popping in the jaws of an endangered cat.”http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

    Deeply moving and memorable, To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts examines the importance of family, the defining nature of place, the need for home, and the hope of reconciliation.

    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.

    It examines and subverts the tropes of mystery and crime storytelling in which the narrative always begins with the body of yet another murdered woman. They are mothers and daughters, teachers and students, lovers and wives, actresses and extras. They have been taken, but their stories still remain. This is how they set the plot in motion.

    With compassion and her "unfailing immediacy of language," she raises the struggles of her characters to a plane of recognition that enables them to transcend despair. Life and death, age and youth, attained hopes and unearned pleasures, provide the human settings for a brilliant exploration of life at its most pointed and significant.

    In novels such as The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan, she has captivated readers with stories of visceral power. Now, in Verge, she offers a shard-sharp mosaic portrait of human resilience on the margins.

    'Linked' doesn’t begin to describe the complex web Silber has woven…Beautiful, intricate and wise."—New York Times Book ReviewWhen is it wise to be a fool for something? What makes people want to be better than they are? From New York to India to Paris, from the Catholic Worker movement to Occupy Wall Street, the characters in Joan Silber's dazzling new story cycle tackle this question head-on.Vera, the shy, anarchist daughter of missionary parents, leaves her family for love and activism in New York. A generation later, her own doubting daughter insists on the truth of being of two minds, even in marriage. The adulterous son of a Florida hotel owner steals money from his family and departs for Paris, where he takes up with a young woman and finds himself outsmarted in turn. Fools ponders the circle of winners and losers, dupers and duped, and the price we pay for our beliefs.Fools is a luminous, intelligent, and rewarding work of fiction from the author for whom the Boston Globe said, "No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power."

    Spanning four decades and three prize-winning collections, these twenty-one vintage selected stories and thirteen scintillating new ones take us around the world, from Jerusalem to Central America, from tsarist Russia to London during the Blitz, from central Europe to Manhattan, and from the Maine coast to Godolphin, Massachusetts, a fictional suburb of Boston. These charged locales, and the lives of the endlessly varied characters within them, are evoked with a tenderness and incisiveness found in only our most observant seers.No matter the situation in which her characters find themselves--an unforeseen love affair between adolescent cousins, a lifetime of memories unearthed by an elderly couple's decision to shoplift, the deathbed secret of a young girl's forbidden forest tryst with the tsar, the danger that befalls a wealthy couple's child in a European inn of misfits--Edith Pearlman conveys their experience with wit and aplomb, with relentless but clear-eyed optimism, and with a supple prose that reminds us, sentence by sentence, page by page, of the gifts our greatest verbal innovators can bestow.Binocular Vision reveals a true American original, a master of the story, showing us, with her classic sensibility and lasting artistry, the cruelties, the longings, and the rituals that connect human beings across space and time.

    Sana Krasikov is one of those writers. Her first published story appeared in the New Yorker, her second in The Atlantic Monthly’s fiction issue. One More Year is her debut collection, made up of stories of people who hold out hope, despite the odds, that life will be kind to them.The characters who populate Krasikov’s stories are mostly women–some are new to America; some still live in the former Soviet Union, in Georgia or Russia; and some have returned to Russia to find a country they barely recognize and people they no longer understand. Mothers leave children behind; children abandon their parents. Almost all of them look to love to repair their lives, and when love isn’t really there, they attempt to make do with relationships that substitute for love.Like Jhumpa Lahiri and ZZ Packer, two writers whose fully-realized characters drive their fiction, Sana Krasikov is an exhilarating talent whose first collection puts her on the map with today's most talented young authors.

    The result: "The most creative, generous, and democratic of any of the annual volumes" (Rick Moody).Among its numerous awards, the Pushcart Prize has been chosen for the Poets Writers / Barnes Noble "Writers for Writers" Award and the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement recognition.

    In the title story, an elephant keeper courts danger from his gentle charge; in “Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus,” a headstrong young woman in Africa is lured by the freedom of the monkeys in the trees; in “Talk Turkey,” a boy has secret conversations with the turkeys on his friend’s family’s farm; in “Slim’s Last Ride,” a child plays chilling games with his pet rabbit; in “Gallus Gallus,” a pompous husband projects his anger at his wife onto her prized rooster.This fresh, inventive debut will introduce Hannah Tinti as one of the most gifted writers of her generation. Enter her world at your own risk, and you will come away bewitched.From the Hardcover edition.

    She masterfully weaves traditional and experimental topics and techniques, creating a fictional world where people behave normally in the most extreme situations, and in bizarrely with almost no provocation at all. But thanks to her vivid, sharp prose and insightful first-person voices, even the oddest behavior is utterly believable. Unpredictable and playful, these stories transcend their apocalyptic feel to offer a vision that is clear, humane, and completely engaging. The Entire Predicament secures Corin’s reputation as an original, stylistically courageous voice in contemporary avant-garde fiction.