This vivid portrayal of the universal search for love brings with it a darker tale, heartbreaking in its poignancy.

    

    This genre-spanning collection of 16 short stories features familiar characters like Kate and Jim, Liam and Wy, and Bill and Moses, but also ranges farther afield than many readers will expect, leaping from modern-day Anchorage to 22nd-century Mars to the fantasy kingdom of Mnemosynea. Remarkably disparate, but indisputably Stabenow, whose fertile imagination is anything but predictable.Titles in this collection: "Nooses Give," "Conspiracy," "Under the Influence," "Wreck Rights," "Cherchez la Femme," "Siren Song," "The Eyak Interpreter," "Any Taint of Vice," "On the Evidence," "Missing, Presumed…," "The Perfect Gift," "Gold Fever," "Cheechako," "No Place Like Home," "Justice is a Two-edged Sword," and "A Woman’s Work."

    Ranging from the 19th to the 20th centuries, writers include James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, Richard Edward Connell, Henri Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Jack London, Henri Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe.

    Who guides our fate? And can we ever hope to wrest control for ourselves? In this novella, "The Loom of Thessaly" , classical mythology merges with impudent modern spirit into a science fiction legend that speculates upon the nature of reality.

    Author of the New York Times bestsellers “Let the Great World Spin” and “Transatlantic,” McCann has been called “a giant among us” (Peter Carey), “dazzlingly talented” (O: The Oprah Magazine), and “that rare species in contemporary fiction: a literary writer who is an exceptional storyteller” (The Independent). He’s received a National Book Award, an Oscar nomination, and a slew of international prizes. His talents are on full display in his new short story, “Gone,” a deeply affecting literary thriller about a mother and son, alone in a cottage on the west coast of Ireland, and the search that ensues when the boy—whom she adopted years before, deaf and with “already a whole history written in him”—goes missing. He slips away in early morning, down to the cold sea with his new Christmas wetsuit, and as the hours and days drag on, the coast guard, police, dogs, fishermen, farmers, and schoolchildren holding hands search the sea and walk the fields while the television crews and detectives come and go, the police at the cottage seeming to “ghost into one another: almost as if they could slip into one another’s faces.” The mother, Rebecca, now under suspicion, is racked with guilt over the decisions that led to her son’s disappearance, and tormented by the judgment of others: "You bought what? A wetsuit? Why in the world? What sort of mother? How much wine did you drink?" For Rebecca, “every outcome was unwhisperable.” “Gone” is a charged narrative that propels you forward, heart in your throat, and a moving, intimate look at life’s struggles toward grace and a kind of redemption.

    The first section, Folly tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, Folly also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age. By contrast, Madness is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.

    Today these stories -- "A Vintage Thunderbird;" "The Lawn Party, " " La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans," to name a few -- seem even more powerful, and are read and studied as classics of the short-story form. Spare and elegant, yet charged with feeling and with the tension of things their characters cannot say, they are masterly portraits of improvised lives.

    Sourland—sixteen previously uncollected stories that explore how the power of violence, loss, and grief shape both the psyche and the soul—shows us an author working at the height of her powers.With lapidary precision and an unflinching eye, Oates maps the surprising contours of "ordinary" life. From a desperate man who dons a jack-o'-lantern head as a prelude to a most curious sort of courtship, to a "story of a stabbing" many times recounted in the life of a lonely girl; from a beguiling young woman librarian whose amputee state attracts a married man and father, to a girl hopelessly in love with her renegade, incarcerated cousin; from a professor's wife who finds herself tragically isolated at a party in her own house, to the concluding title story of an unexpectedly redemptive love rooted in radical aloneness and isolation, each story in Sourland resonates beautifully with Oates's trademark fascination for the unpredictable amid the prosaic—the commingling of sexual love and violence, the tumult of family life—and shines with her predilection for dark humor and her gift for voice.

    In Englander's amazingly taut and ambitious "The Twenty-seventh Man," a clerical error lands earnest, unpublished Pinchas Pelovits in prison with twenty-six writers slated for execution at Stalin's command, and in the grip of torture Pinchas composes a mini-masterpiece, which he recites in one glorious moment before author and audience are simultaneously annihilated. In "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a Protestant has a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi. In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man incensed by his wife's interminable menstrual cycle gets a dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. The stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are powerfully inventive and often haunting, steeped in the weight of Jewish history and in the customs of Orthodox life. But it is in the largeness of their spirit-- a spirit that finds in doubt a doorway to faith, that sees in despair a chance for the heart to deepen--and in the wisdom that so prodigiously transcends the author's twenty-eight years, that these stories are truly remarkable. Nathan Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for Auschwitz and in a deft imaginative twist turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way; he takes an elderly wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. Again and again, Englander does what feels impossible: he finds, wherever he looks, a province beyond death's dominion.For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of stunning authority and imagination--a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad, and that heralds the arrival of a profoundly gifted new storyteller.

    In "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" a ship's crew struggles with morale as a black member of the crew lay dying. In the shorter work "The Secret Sharer" a captain on his night watch discovers an officer that has come aboard has been accused of a murder. In both works through the context of a voyage at sea Conrad masterfully explores the psychological and moral issues that are at the heart of mankind.

    C. Boyle is one of the most inventive and wickedly funny short story writers at work today. Over the course of twenty-five years, Boyle has built up a body of short fiction that is remarkable in its range, richness, and exuberance. His stories have won accolades for their irony and black humor, for their verbal pyrotechnics, for their fascination with everything bizarre and queasy, and for the razor-sharp way in which they dissect America's obsession with image and materialism. Gathered together here are all of the stories that have appeared in his four previous collections, as well as seven that have never before appeared in book form. Together they comprise a book of small treasures, a definitive gift for Boyle fans and for every reader ready to discover the "ferocious, delicious imagination" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) of a "vibrant sensibility fully engaged with American society" (The New York Times).

    H. Lawrence]- The Phantom of the Opera [Gaston Leroux]- The Call of the Wild [Jack London]- The Great God Pan [Arthur Machen]- Moby Dick [Herman Melville]- Swann's Way [Marcel Proust]- Frankenstein [Mary Shelley]- The Red and the Black [Stendhal]- The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde [Robert Louis Stevenson]- Dracula [Bram Stoker]- The Art of War [Sun Tzu]- Gulliver's Travels [Jonathan Swift]- Vanity Fair [William Makepeace Thackeray]- Anna Karenina [Leo Tolstoy]- The Death of Ivan Ilyich [Leo Tolstoy]- War and Peace [Leo Tolstoy]- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [Mark Twain]- The Picture of Dorian Gray [Oscar Wilde]Also available : 50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die Vol: 2 (Golden Deer Classics)

    There he meets the eminent professor, Gordon Stone, and his beautiful wife, Judith Silver, with whom he soon falls into a passionate affair. Into this explosive mix, a young woman appears--a single mother at the end of her emotional rope. Crystal desperately needs David. Yet caught between two women, David bears witness to a heartbreaking turn of events that seems as inevitable as the push and pull of ocean waves. . . .

    Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart - half tavern, half temple - stands Brokeland. When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life. An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we've been waiting for. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.