Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields-and fields of victory-that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly- and reluctantly-in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy's singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling.

    Whether writing about the love (and conflict) between parents and children or between husband and wife, or about the struggles of aging single mothers or disheartened political organizers to make sense of the world, she brings the same unerring ear for the rhythm of life as it is actually lived.The Collected Stories is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

    This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive con men, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.In "Thief," an aluminum worker turns unlikely detective to solve the mystery of which of his kids is stealing from the family vacation fund. In "We Live in Water," a lawyer returns to a corrupt North Idaho town to find the father who disappeared thirty years earlier. In "Anything Helps," a homeless man has to "go to cardboard" to raise enough money to buy his son the new Harry Potter book. In "Virgo," a local newspaper editor tries to get back at his superstitious ex-girlfriend by screwing with her horoscope. Also included are the stories "Don't Eat Cat" and "Statistical Abstract of My Hometown, Spokane, Washington," both of which achieved a cult following after publication online.

    There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime - Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day" - sent to her publisher shortly before her death - is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.Contents:The geranium -- The barber -- Wildcat -- The crop -- The turkey -- The train -- The peeler -- The heart of the park -- A stoke of good fortune -- Enoch and the gorilla -- A good man is hard to find -- A late encounter with the enemy -- The life you save may be your own -- The river -- A circle in the fire -- The displaced person -- A temple of the Holy Ghost -- The artificial nigger -- Good country people -- You can't be any poorer than dead -- Greenleaf -- A view of the woods -- The enduring chill -- The comforts of home -- Everything that rises must converge -- The partridge festival -- The lame shall enter first -- Why do the heathen rage? -- Revelation -- Parker's back -- Judgement Day.

    Edited by the award-winning, best-selling author Richard Russo, this year’s collection boasts a satisfying “chorus of twenty stories that are by turns playful, ironic, somber, and meditative” (Wall Street Journal). With the masterful Russo picking the best of the best, America’s oldest and best-selling story anthology is sure to be of “enduring quality” (Chicago Tribune) this year.

    "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in "Blowing Up On the Spot," a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.

    Among the things I do pretty well at this point I’d have to list darts, re-closing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way. This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, a dazzling array of work in short fiction from a master of the form. The stories in Love and Hydrogen—familiar to readers from publications ranging from McSweeney’s to The New Yorker to Harper’s to Tin House—encompass in theme and compassion what an ordinary writer would seem to need several lifetimes to imagine.A frustrated wife makes use of an enterprising illegal-gun salesman to hold her husband hostage; two hapless adult-education students botch their attempts at rudimentary piano but succeed in a halting, awkward romance; a fascinated and murderous Creature welcomes the first human visitors to his Black Lagoon; and in the title story, the stupefyingly huge airship Hindenburg flies to its doom, representing in 1937 mankind's greatest yearning as well as its titanic failure. Generous in scope and astonishing in ambition, Shepard’s voice never falters; the virtuosity of Love and Hydrogen cements his reputation as, in the words of Rick Bass, “a passionate writer with a razor-sharp wit and an elephantine heart”—in short, one of the most powerful talents at work today.

    A chronicle of the final seven days of a town that is about to be razed to the ground by an invading army. The lonely voyage of an elephant from Kerala to a princess’s palace in Morocco. A fabled cook who flavours his food with precious stones. A coterie of international diplomats trapped in near-Earth orbit. These, and the other stories can be found in this collection.

    These stories feature cats, bees, wolves, dogs, and even that most capricious of animals, humans, and have been reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and The Secret History of Fantasy. Kij Johnson's stories have won the Sturgeon and World Fantasy awards. She has taught writing; worked at Tor, Dark Horse, and Microsoft; worked as a radio announcer; run bookstores; and waitressed in a strip bar.Contents:The Man Who Bridged the Mist (2011)Wolf Trapping (1989)The Empress Jingu Fishes (2004)The Bitey Cat (2012)Chenting, in the Land of the Dead (1999)My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire—Exposition on the Flaws in my Spouse's Character—The Nature of the Bird—The Possible Causes—Her Final Disposition (2007)Schrödinger's Cathouse (1993)Names for Water (2010)Fox Magic (1993)Spar (2009)The Horse Raiders (2000)26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss (2008)At the Mouth of the River of Bees (2003)The Evolution of Trickster Stories among the Dogs of North Park after the Change (2007)The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles (2009)Ponies (2010)

    For nearly a century, the work of O. Henry has delighted readers with its humor, irony and colorful, real-life settings. The writer's own life had more than a touch of color and irony. Born William Sidney Porter in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1862, he worked on a Texas ranch, then as a bank teller in Austin, then as a reporter for the Houston "Post." Adversity struck, however, when he was indicted for embezzlement of bank funds. Porter fled to New Orleans, then to Honduras before he was tried, convicted and imprisoned for the crime in 1898. In prison he began writing stories of Central America and the American Southwest that soon became popular with magazine readers. After his release Porter moved to New York City, where he continued writing stories under the pen name O. Henry. Though his work earned him an avid readership, O. Henry died in poverty and oblivion scarcely eight years after his arrival in New York. But in the treasury of stories he left behind are such classics of the genre as "The Gift of the Magi," "The Last Leaf," "The Ransom of Red Chief," "The Voice of the City" and "The Cop and the Anthem" — all included in this choice selection. A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

    Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected — and most popular — of its kind.The Best American Short Stories 2012 includesThe last speaker of the language / Carol Anshaw --Pilgrim life / Taylor Antrim --What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank / Nathan Englander --The other place / Mary Gaitskill --North Country / Roxane Gay --Paramour / Jennifer Haigh --Navigators / Mike Meginnis --Miracle polish / Steven Millhauser --Axis / Alice Munro --Volcano / Lawrence Osborne --Diem Perdidi / Julie Otsuka --Honeydew / Edith Pearlman --Occupational hazard / Angela Pneuman --Beautiful monsters / Eric Puchner --Tenth of December / George Saunders --The sex lives of African girls / Taiye Selasi --Alive / Sharon Solwitz --M&M world / Kate Walbert --Anything helps / Jess Walter --What's important is feeling / Adam Wilson

    In each of her stories, Danielle Evans explores the non-white American experience with honesty, wisdom, and humor. They are striking in their emotional immediacy, based in a world where inequality is a reality, but the insecurities of young adulthood and tensions within family are often the more complicating factors. One of the most lauded debuts of the year, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self announces a major new talent in Danielle Evans.

    In "Stone Animals," a house's haunting takes the unusual form of hordes of rabbits that camp out nightly on the front lawn. This proves just one of several benign but inexplicable phenomena that begin to pull apart the family newly moved into the house as surely as a more sinister supernatural influence might. The title story beautifully captures the unpredictable potential of teenage lives through its account of a group of adolescent schoolfriends whose experiences subtly parallel events in a surreal TV fantasy series. Zombies serve as the focus for a young man's anxieties about his future in "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" and offer suggestive counterpoint to the lives of two convenience store clerks who serve them in "The Hortlak." Not only does Link find fresh perspectives from which to explore familiar premises, she also forges ingenious connections between disparate images and narrative approaches to suggest a convincing alternate logic that shapes the worlds of her highly original fantasies.Contents:The Faery Handbag (2004)The Hortlak (2003)The Cannon (2003)Stone Animals (2004)Catskin (2003)Some Zombie Contingency Plans (2005)The Great Divorce (2005)Magic for Beginners (2005)Lull (2002)

    Across thirteen stories, this collection explores the thin border between magic and grief.

    Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In "Ship Fever," the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. And in "The Littoral Zone," two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, "science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material" (Boston Globe).