Now Daniel sets out for one final confrontation.

    For several hundred pages of unrivaled summer reading, this is your book.

    With a passionate introduction by Enright, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story traces this great tradition through decades of social change and shows the pleasure Irish writers continue to take in the short-story form. Deft and often devastating, these short stories dodge the rolling mythologies of Irish life to produce truths that are delightful and real. Includes Roddy Doyle, Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin, Edna O’Brien, Colm Tóibín, Clarie Keegan and William Trevor.The road to the shore / Michael McLaverty --The pram / Roddy Doyle --An attack of hunger / Maeve Brennan --Summer voices / John Banville --Summer night / Elizabeth Bowen --Music at Annahullion / Eugene McCabe --Naming the names / Anne Devlin --Shame / Keith Ridgway --Memory and desire / Val Mulkerns --The mad Lomasneys / Frank O'Connor --Walking Away / Philip Ó Ceallaigh --Villa Marta / Clare Boylan --Lilacs / Mary Lavin --Meles Vulgaris / Patrick Boyle --The trout / Seán Ó Faoláin --Night in Tunisia / Neil Jordan --Sister Imelda / Edna O'Brien --The key / John McGahern --A priest in the family / Colm Tóibín --The supremacy of grief / Hugo Hamilton --The swing of things / Jennifer C Cornell --Train Tracks / Aidan Mathews --See the tree, how big it's grown / Kevin Barry --Visit / Gerard Donovan --Everything in this country must / Colum McCann --Curfew / Sean O'Reilly --Language, truth and lockjaw / Bernard MacLaverty --Midwife to the fairies / Éilís Ní Dhuibhne --Men and women / Clare Keegan --Mothers were all the same / Joseph O'Connor --The dressmaker's child / William Trevor

    What if the devil on your shoulder could actually come out and play? Voices in my Head is just that. Meet Mikey, the sweetest five-year-old you've ever met, and his psychotic dark side Michael. When his mother changes his life forever Michael comes out to play.

    Thomas presents interesting heroines: there's the girl in "Sisters" who hates her younger sibling for (among other things) her precise memory. In "Seeing Things," Maude, who "wants to be tan the whole year round," and whose "great ambition is to be whistled at on the street," is told by her younger sister, "You look ridiculous smoking with the chicken pox." And then there are the four stories about Buddy and Virginia, who have to drop out of school and get married after she gets pregnant. From sibling rivalry to marital strife, Thomas uncovers the pain, the poignancy, and the belief in love that lie in the hearts of her heroines.

    His stories are without equal in their beautiful terrible honesty. Stylish and finely wrought, these are tales with the force of life itself.

    Every game played with your child has the potential to become a lifelong memory.The Rookie is a flash fiction piece (just over 500 words) based on a childhood memory.

    Join the O'Reilly family once again as they meet around the Jack O'Lantern on Halloween night and share ghost stories that will make you shiver and have you looking over your shoulder to see if there is "a little something extra" wandering through your home tonight.

    But when the president of the synagogue absconds with a small fortune, far deeper—and more troubling—rifts emerge...In "The Closet," Evelyn's sister flees her family to take up residence in the attic—while the shunned Evelyn finds herself slipping into the waters of her sister's soul....In "Wish List," an expert on terrorism, vacationing at an academic retreat in England,receives a late-night phone call from National Public Radio. Asked for commentary on a hostage situation of which he is ignorant, Ed can whisper only: "It's unspeakable."Total ImmersionIn these and other exquisite stories, Allegra Goodman fills rooms with laughter and voices, captures dinner parties, seaside picnics, academic grudges, shul politics, and the kind of hurts that only families and lovers can know. Featuring two new stories previously published in The New Yorker, Total Immersion is Allegra Goodman's first collection of short fiction—a masterful work from one of the most powerful and eloquent voices on the American literary landscape.

    Jimmy Rabbitte hates jazz, always has. But his wife Aiofe loves it, and Jimmy loves Aiofe. So when, in attempt to convert him, she buys him two tickets for a Keith Jarrett concert he decides to take Outspan, former member of Jimmy's band The Commitments, who has come back into his life after a chance meeting in the cancer clinic. Jarrett is famous for being intolerant of any noise at all - a cough, a sneeze, a wheeze - from the audience, stopping playing and shaming the perpetrator. And Outspan's diagnosis is lung cancer, it's pretty bad, and he needs an oxygen cylinder to breathe properly.Will Outspan create havoc? Will Jimmy learn to love jazz at last?

    Falkenberg. But instead of impressing the teacher, Jessie's name ends up on the Naughty Board! Will Jessie go from teacher's pest to teacher's pet? Or will the Naughty Board prevail? This hilarious junior novel includes eight-page of full-color photos from the show.

    Henry-prize winner Swamy's debut collection of stories, dreams collide with reality, modernity collides with antiquity, myth with true identity, and women grapple with desire, with ego, with motherhood and mortality. In "Earthly Pleasures," Radika, a young painter living alone in San Francisco, begins a secret romance with one of India's biggest celebrities. In "A Simple Composition," a husband's moment of crisis leads to his wife's discovery of a dark, ecstatic joy and the sense of a new beginning. In the title story, an exhausted mother watches, distracted and paralyzed, as a California wildfire approaches her home. With a knife blade's edge and precision, the stories of A House Is a Body travel from India to America and back again to reveal the small moments of beauty, pain, and power that contain the world.

    editions of "Youth in Revolt." Each passage is keyed to the page from which it was deleted for ease in reading. Now you can discover what happening to Lefty in Book II. Did Millie Filbert try to seduce Nick? Who ratted on Nick to the police to collect the reward? And more--a must read for Nick Twisp fans! Also collected here are a dozen short humor pieces by C.D. Payne.

    Carolyn was just a teenager when she had her son, Benjamin, and she still feels solely responsible to secure his future. As Joshua watches Carolyn struggle to accept his support, he knows he has to find some way to convince her that she--and Ben--will always be taken care of.

    Let the carriage to a royal ball wait. There is a story to be told: of a starless night, a mother and her sick son, and a mortal who falls in love with the snow god, and will do anything to have her...