The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums” wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form.   Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.

    A South American president revisits the scenes of his ruthless rise to power-shortly after his own funeral. A transformed and sparkling city of London sets the scene for a company chairman's nemesis at the hands of his wife. In Andalucia, the spirit of the "duende" inspires an elderly widow to dance a death-defying flamenco. We meet splendacious Mrs. da Silva, sixty-five year old matriarch of Rebel War Band, as she boogies at a carnival. The ghost of Dante's Virgil, leading his pilgrim along perilous paths, is brought to mind as one friend guides another on her final journey.

    Here, a man acts rashly and life-threateningly to ensure he wins a prize . . .Dip in the Pool is taken from the short story collection Someone Like You, which includes seventeen other devious and shocking stories, featuring the wife who serves a dish that baffles the police; a curious machine that reveals the horrifying truth about plants; the man waiting to be bitten by the venomous snake asleep on his stomach; and others.'The absolute master of the twist in the tale.' (Observer )This story is also available as a Penguin digital audio download read by Adrian Scarborough.Roald Dahl, the brilliant and worldwide acclaimed author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and many more classics for children, also wrote scores of short stories for adults. These delightfully disturbing tales have often been filmed and were most recently the inspiration for the West End play, Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales by Jeremy Dyson. Roald Dahl's stories continue to make readers shiver today.

    Whether his characters are struggling to save trees in their yards, their marriages, or themselves, Cannin renders their moments of revelation with rich observation, energy, humor, and grace.

    

    Two roughneck hockey players are kicked off the team and forced to join the drama club. A young bartender at a party of coastal aristocrats has to deal with the surreal request to put a rich old coot out of his misery. Can a father defend his family if the diver helping to free the tangled propeller of their boat turns out to be a real threat?With humor, a piercing eye, and a sense that danger often lies just around the corner, Robinson gives us a variety of vivid characters, wealthy and poor, delinquent and romantic, while illuminating the mythic, universal implications of so-called ordinary life. These stories are at once classic and modern; taken together, they bring the good news that an important, compassionate new voice in American fiction has arrived.

    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.

    Four young Piedmontese women—Ada, Frida, Silvia and Bianca—living secretly in the mountains surrounding Turin, risked their lives to overthrow Italy’s authoritarian government. They were among the thousands of Italians who joined the Partisan effort to help the Allies liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators. What made this partisan war all the more extraordinary was the number of women—like this brave quartet—who swelled its ranks.The bloody civil war that ensued pitted neighbor against neighbor, and revealed the best and worst in Italian society. The courage shown by the partisans was exemplary, and eventually bound them together into a coherent fighting force. But the death rattle of Mussolini’s two decades of Fascist rule—with its corruption, greed, and anti-Semitism—was unrelentingly violent and brutal.Drawing on a rich cache of previously untranslated sources, prize-winning historian Caroline Moorehead illuminates the experiences of Ada, Frida, Silvia, and Bianca to tell the little-known story of the women of the Italian partisan movement fighting for freedom against fascism in all its forms, while Europe collapsed in smoldering ruins around them.

    Seeking warmth and true connection, they shield themselves and loved ones while creating a rarely-glimpsed world of valor, minor grandeur, side-street heroics. Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted grand-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and 18th-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truths–sometimes bruising, ofttimes warming–from human hearts as immense as they are local.

    It is an alluring, irresistible book. And it was written by xTx. That should be all you need to know. She is a master and we are her grateful subjects." -Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls

    

    C. Boyle writes, “The Model T gave way to the Model A and to the Ferrari and the Prius . . . modernism to postmodernism and post-postmodernism. We advance. We progress. We move on. But we are part of a tradition.” Boyle’s choices of stories reflect a vibrant range of characters, from a numb wife who feels alive only in the presence of violence to a new widower coming to terms with his sudden freedom, from a missing child to a champion speedboat racer. These stories will grab hold and surprise, which according to Boyle is “what the best fiction offers, and there was no shortage of such in this year’s selections.” Mulling over the question of character likability, series editor Heidi Pitlor asks, “Did I like these characters? I very much liked reading their stories, as did T. C. Boyle.” Here are characters who “are living, breathing people who screw up terribly and want and need and think uneasy thoughts.”   T. C. BOYLE, guest editor, has published fifteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his novel World’s End and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, as well as the 2014 Henry David Thoreau Prize for excellence in nature writing. His most recent book is the novel The Harder They Come. HEIDI PITLOR, series editor, is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.

    JonesCold snap by Thom JonesDoe season by David Michael KaplanPatriotic by Janet KauffmanGirl by Jamaica KincaidTerritory by David LeavittThe kind of light that shines on Texas by Reginald McKnightYou're ugly, too by Lorrie MooreThe management of grief by Bharati MukherjeeMeneseteung by Alice MunroGhost girls by Joyce Carol OatesThe things they carried by Tim O'BrienThe shawl by Cynthia OzickBrokeback Mountain by Annie ProulxStrays by Mark RichardIntensive care by Lee SmithThe way we live now by Susan SontagTwo kinds by Amy TanFirst, body by Melanie Rae ThonAble, Baker, Charlie, Dog by Stephanie VaughnNineteen fifty-five by Alice WalkerFever by John Edgar WidemanTaking care by Joy Williams

    The exploration of starvation and consumption is at the core of each character; what does our hunger reveal about the state of our soft hearts? Ellen jumps rope on rooftops in the searing Korean sun. She has sworn off carbohydrates until she can find pants that fit. Damon resents his two dollar chow mein bought on a Montreal curb. There are half-eaten poutines on living room floors and greasy corn kernels stuck to chins. There are weak cocktails, cheap coffees, white plastic forks, and cigarettes. Everywhere.These interwoven stories are propulsive. They pull back the blast shield to reveal blinding interior voices; unrepentant and raw. Coles' irreverent characters scorch, and strangely comfort us, as they struggle to process the permeable nature of their thoughts. Such are the sardonically complex and humourous Eating Habits Of The Chronically Lonesome.

    It has become a feature of the designer's job to define the problems that exist in his network, choose and analyse several optimization parameters during the analysis process, and then prioritize and evaluate these parameters in the architecture and design of the system.