Have you read 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place'?... It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written..."

    Or at least that's his reputation. Some reputations are deserved, some not. Or perhaps Tymon's notoriety is a means toward quite a different end.

    Chaon mines the psychological landscape of his characters to dazzling effect. Each story radiates with sharp humor, mystery, wonder, and startling compassion. Among the Missing lingers in the mind through its subtle grace and power of language.

    Screenwriter, director, and star of the acclaimed film Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection.

    On the Massachusetts coast north of Boston, a controlling manager, Mark, discovers his wife's infidelity after twenty-five years of marriage. An overweight young woman, Marla, gains a romantic partner but loses her innocence. A philandering bartender/aspiring poet, Robert, betrays his pregnant wife. And in the stunning title novella, a teenage girl named Devon, fleeing a dirty image of her posted online, seeks respect in the eyes of her widowed great-uncle Francis and of an Iraq vet she’s met surfing the Web.Slivered by happiness and discontent, aging and death, but also persistent hope and forgiveness, these beautifully wrought narratives express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with others.

    For award-winning Portuguese author Gonçalo M. Tavares, six favorite senhores —“Misters” Calvino, Valéry, Juarroz, Kraus, Walser, and Henri—haunt the sidewalks, cafes, and back alleys of a fictive Lisbon bairro.Readers will appreciate the homages to Italian fabulist Italo Calvino, French poet and critic Paul Valéry, Argentinean poet Roberto Juarroz, Swiss modernist Robert Walser, Austrian writer and satirist Karl Kraus, and Belgian neosurrealist Henri Michaux, but Tavares’s deceptively simple style appeals on many levels. In this imaginative territory, for instance, diminutive Mister Valéry jumps up and down—satisfied to be as tall as his fellow men if “only for a shorter while.” His more egocentric neighbor, Mister Henri, philosophizes about the virtues of absinthe, acknowledging the drink can make equally for a better or worse reality.Enhancing each story are the drawings of Rachel Caiano, whose minimalist depictions mirror the essence of the personal, logical, and political absurdities that intrigue in these simple yet profound tales.When we visit Tavares’s neighborhood, its building blocks made of books, we are also visiting a version of ourselves. —Philip Graham, from the foreword

    When boats break down, wreck or call for help, Seychelle and her tug Gorda are on the scene. Accidents do happen, but in South Florida, when somebody dies at sea, all too often it is murder. The Seychelle Collection Boxed Set Books #1-4 brings readers the opportunity to buy the entire Seychelle Sullivan series at one low price.Book #1 SURFACE TENSION On a steamy Florida morning Seychelle is answering a Mayday call launched from the five-million-dollar Broward yacht called Top Ten. Seychelle has a personal stake in this rescue: her former lover, Neal Garrett, is the yacht’s hired skipper. But being the first to reach Top Ten leads to a bloody payday. A beautiful woman has been stabbed to death onboard. And Garrett is nowhere to be found. T o find out what really happened to Neal Garrett, Seychelle must retrace his last steps, through two murders and a horrific crime wave, to a final confrontation with someone who may want to kill her . . . or be her salvation.Book #2 CROSS CURRENTFor Seychelle Sullivan, life is all about making a living, making love, and keeping her eye on the beauty that still remains in her beloved Florida. Then her life takes a turn when her tug intercepts with a swamped fishing boat in the Gulf Stream. Inside the boat are a murdered woman and a little girl in a white dress.Seychelle returns to shore with a traumatized Haitian girl named Solange. Determined to protect Solange, and somehow keep her from being sent back to Haiti, Seychelle becomes obsessed with the forces that nearly killed the girl. To get the answers she needs, Seychelle must return to where it all started: in the waters of the Gulf Stream, where people died for their dreams of freedom– and a man with a machete did the work of the devil himself.Book #3 BITTER ENDThe third book in the Seychelle Collection is loosely based on the real South Florida murder of Greek immigrant tycoon Gus Boolis, once the owner of South Florida's Sun Cruz Casino Gambling boats. Seychelle didn’t see the sniper who picked Nick Pontus off at the helm of his yacht, but she knows that there are plenty of people in South Florida who wanted to see the gambling-boat tycoon dead: the Russian mobsters looking for a piece of his casino action, the Indian gamers who resent his competition, and the ecological activists fighting his plans to develop Fort Lauderdale’s waterfront. But it’s Molly, Seychelle’s former childhood best friend and Nick’s ex-wife whom the cops zero in on. And despite her bitter feelings and against her better judgment, when her back-from-the-blue friend asks for help, Seychelle can’t just weigh anchor and cruise. She’s got to dive in.Book #4 WRECKERS’ KEYIn the 1800s, Key West was built by wrecking skippers who in feats of derring-do raced to shipping disasters to save valuable cargos from the ocean depths. Today, as too many boats chase too few wrecks, salvage has turned into a cutthroat corporate enterprise. And when a friend is killed, Seychelle begins to suspect a chilling scenario: that modern-day wreckers are causing yachts to crash onto the reefs–and killing off whoever gets in the way.Nestor Frias was piloting a billionaire’s luxury power yacht on its maiden voyage when it ran aground. A few days later, Frias was dead. His eight-months-pregnant widow is distraught, and a host of questions surround both Frias’s death and the ship’s accident. When another man dies while asking questions, Seychelle navigates the dangerous shoals and channels of the case and her life, unaware that a greater danger is looming: a murderous human storm designed perfectly for her.About the AuthorChristine Kling is the author of five nautical thrillers and one anthology of short stories. She lives aboard her 33-foot sailboat Talespinner and travels wherever the wind and

    An omnibus edition of three Ruth Rendell crime novels - A Demon in My View, A Judgement in Stone and The Face of Trespass.

    *** Volume 1 plays a key role in the plot of the US movie Sex and the City. *** This Volume 2 includes love poems written by Matthew Arnold, Alfred Austin, Samuel Alfred Beadle, William Blake, Christopher Brennan, Lord Byron, Robert Burns, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Constable, William Cowper, Michael Drayton, George Eliot, Thomas Ford, Stephen Foster, Robert Frost, Thomas Frost, Norman Rowland Gale, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alfred P. Graves, Robert Herrick, Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Jonson, John Keats, Richard Lovelace, Pablo Neruda, Edgar Allen Poe, and William Shakespeare.

    January cold coming in off two rivers. Hart is broke, freezing, looking for a place to lay low from the cops. If he can't find somewhere soon he might do something rash - like steal an overcoat and accept a wallet containing $11,000 from a man dying from gunshot wounds in the street. Whoever killed him might have a bed, though, even if that means hanging out with a bunch of thieves and drifters while the heat blows over. Lucky for Hart he's handy with his fists. And if he can use his looks and smarts to get in with the gang, maybe he can ride this out and score big on his own. Originally published in 1954, Black Friday is one of David Goodis's leanest, meanest melancholy thrillers. In the character of Hart, it features one of his classic, tortured romantic heroes, a man who becomes mired in circumstances from which there is no escape. In this edition, Black Friday is combined with short stories, unpublished since they were first written for pulp magazines in America over 50 years ago.

    He is grieving for the loss of his wife when the tunnel collapses and traps the bus inside. In the darkness that follows, he manages to fumble out of the bus with the only other survivor, an astute and gentle woman who reminds him of his late wife. Without any light to guide them and with only each other to depend on, they try to escape the stifling darkness and along the way find themselves confronted by their pasts and given their last chance at intimacy, and ultimately, absolution.A realist story that plays with surreal elements, the tale poses a simple question: what is the meaning of hope?

    His is a voice combining humor and pathos with an edginess creating fresh new stories that are being published in great literary journals regularly.A boy acts out at the death of his father and abandonment by his brother through a savage playground beating; a young man confronts his own troubled history when asked to hire on his girlfriend's strung-out brother in an attempt to keep him out of prison; a teenage babysitter works through a scorching-hot summer afternoon that will prove to alter her life forever; a grieving widower finds comfort in the unlikeliest of places, a recently-built casino; an itinerant farm worker visits the same former lover in South Dakota year after year while following the Harvest north; two friends search for excuses and fail to claim responsibility for their own decisions after one loses his father, and the other's house burns to the ground; and a taxidermist falls in love with the ex-wife of his high school bully and tries to convince her to marry him despite her son who seems to share his father's bullying mentality."A brilliant, sometimes heartbreaking debut by this gifted young writer and Columbia writing teacher. Cross captures the angst and tenderness of the young men and women growing up in the rust belt with little hope and less luck. The moments of grace and redemption shine through. I loved every story." —Linda Bubon, Women & Children First Bookstore"There are countless moments like this in Fires of Our Choosing, lines that appear true from the moment they’ve been written and hang in the back of the mind for days afterwards... With Fires of Our Choosing, Cross climbs boldly into the ring with the greats, if only to deliver a decisive knockout punch." —Urban Waite, Fiction Writers Review"Cross offers no apologies for his characters: their poor choices, their lack of moral fortitude, their betrayals of each other and the poverty of their surroundings and, often, themselves; he leaves these things alone. They are who they are, and if dignity has been denied them by the rest of us, including us story-tellers, it is restored by this collection. That he has undertaken to serve as their raconteur should place Cross on the radar of all the big prizes that gift those blessed with talent, compassion and fearlessness, particularly during this present moment in our history." —Ru Freeman, Huffington PostEugene Cross was born and raised in Erie, Pennsylvania and received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. His stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine (which named him one of "20 Best New Writers" and his story "Harvester's" a "Top Five Story of 2009-2010"), American Short Fiction, Story Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and Callalloo among other publications. His work was also listed among the 2010 Best American Short Stories' 100 Distinguished Stories. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Chautauqua Writers' Festival, and the winner of the 2009 Dzanc Prize for Excellence in Literary Fiction and Community Service. He currently lives in Chicago where he teaches in the Fiction Department at Columbia College Chicago.

    It could be said that only in these short works, with their dramatic clarity and immediacy, did Lawrence fully realize his entirely original vision of the erotic and of the power of the irrational in human affairs.

    With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith joins the campaign to save our public libraries and celebrate their true place in our culture and history.

    She captures the beguiling transformation from child to adult with humor, heartache, and desperation. From grieving mothers to fathers adrift, old flames to restless teens, the isolated characters in Doll Palace are united by conflicting desires, quiet rebellions, and the private struggles of the heart.