Book picks similar to
RUIN by Cara Hoffman


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More Stories We Tell: The Best Contemporary Short Stories by North American Women


Wendy Martin - 2004
    The second collection drawn together by editor Wendy Martin, these twenty-four exquisite examples of contemporary writing feature stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Mary Gaitskill, Alice Munro, Sandra Cisneros, and Lorrie Moore (to name a few).We Are the Stories We Tell is also available from Pantheon.

Airships


Barry Hannah - 1978
    The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South — a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg are reunited in Vietnam and petty nostalgia and the constant pain of disappointed love prevail. Airships is a striking demonstration of Barry Hannah's mature and original talent.

The Gift of a Child


Donna K. Weaver - 2018
    She and her two young children must now face a holiday season filled with so many reminders of what they've lost. But when a coworker who’s raising his young nephew moves next door, Rae discovers that the support of a good friend, and the gift of a child, can bring back some of the joy of the season.

Suspicion on Sugar Creek


Susannah B. Lewis - 2016
    She hoped to work on her novel, play Rook with the old lady next door and spend some lazy time with her husband and daughters. But when a new neighbor winds up dead, Tessa and her Rook partner find themselves jumping to suspicious conclusions. Add a young hippie named Rusty to the mix, and these three seem like an unlikely trio to solve an alleged crime. When you’re not laughing at the humorous rhetoric in Suspicion on Sugar Creek, you’ll be on the edge of your seat wondering how it will all play out.

The 2020 Short Story Advent Calendar


Michael Hingston - 2020
    For the special edition slipcase please go here.You know the drill by now. The 2020 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories from some of the best writers in North America. This year's slipcase is a thing of beauty, too, with electric-yellow lining and spot-glossed lettering. It also comes wrapped in two rubber bands to keep those booklets snug in their beds.

Short Cuts: Selected Stories


Raymond Carver - 1993
    Collected altogether in this volume, these stories form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss. From the collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Where I’m Calling From, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and A New Path to the Waterfall; including an introduction by Robert Altman. With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, this is the work of “one of the true contemporary masters” (The New York Review of Books).  From the eBook edition.

The Stories of Alice Adams


Alice Adams - 2002
    Now, with this posthumous compilation, readers can become reacquainted with Þfty-three of Adams's best-loved stories, culled from her Þve award-winning collections. A Þtting tribute -- and an extraordinary primer for those new to Adams's work -- The Stories of Alice Adams celebrates the voice, vision, and spirit of one of America's most beloved writers.

The Icicle


Carolyn Marie Castagna - 2022
    Illustrator and writer's Carolyn Marie Castagna's first shared short story.A small icicle hanging from a roof peers inside a window at a small reading room, and learns about magical human qualities, and the importance of the one most special human feeling.

Exhibitionism


Toby Litt - 2002
    Written by the author of Adventures In Capitalism, this title features twists 'n' turns, sex 'n' violence, and glitz 'n' glamour.

Divorcer


Gary Lutz - 2011
    DIVORCER is a collection of seven harrowing and hyperprecise short stories about ruinous relationships and their aftershocks.

Varieties of Disturbance


Lydia Davis - 2007
    Her admirers include Grace Paley, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith; as Time magazine observed, her stories are "moving . . . and somehow inevitable, as if she has written what we were all on the verge of thinking."In Varieties of Disturbance, her fourth collection, Davis extends her reach as never before in stories that take every form from sociological studies to concise poems. Her subjects include the five senses, fourth-graders, good taste, and tropical storms. She offers a reinterpretation of insomnia and re-creates the ordeals of Kafka in the kitchen. She questions the lengths to which one should go to save the life of a caterpillar, proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, probes the limits of marital fidelity, and unlocks the secret to a long and happy life.No two of these fictions are alike. And yet in each, Davis rearranges our view of the world by looking beyond our preconceptions to a bizarre truth, a source of delight and surprise.Varieties of Disturbance is a 2007 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

Right Where We Belong


Deborah Raney - 2017
    But she’s not ready for the sparks that fly when she meets local nonprofit owner Eric Hampton . . . or for the sudden reappearance of an unwelcome face from her past. In Courtney Walsh's A Sweethaven Romance: Eleanor Waverly is practically Sweethaven royalty, but her comfortable, cushy world is turned upside-down when she discovers an old map hidden in the bottom of a 125-year-old time capsule. Her only hope of uncovering the truth lies with local firefighter (and Waverly rival) Jason Holloway, and with his piercing eyes and troubled past, it's clear from the start it's not only her way of life that's on the line, it's her heart.

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake


Breece D'J Pancake - 1983
    In 1983 Little, Brown and Company's posthumous publication of this book electrified the literary world with a force that still resounds across two decades. A collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia with astonishing power and grace, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake has remained continuously in print and is a perennial favorite among aspiring writers, participants in creative writing programs, and students of contemporary American fiction. "Trilobites", the first of Pancake's stories to be published in The Atlantic, elicited an extraordinary immediate response from readers and continues to be widely anthologized.

All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories


Edward P. Jones - 2006
    Jones, a prodigy of the short story, returns to the form that first won him praise in this new collection of stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children. Here he turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them in the city, people who in Jones's masterful hands emerge as fully human and morally complex. With the legacy of slavery just a stone's throw behind them and the future uncertain, Jones's cornucopia of characters will haunt readers for years to come.

Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure


Craig Lancaster - 2011
    A traveling salesman consigned to a late-night bus ride. A prison inmate stripped of everything but his pride. A teenage runaway. Mismatched lovers. In his debut collection of short fiction, award-winning novelist Craig Lancaster returns to the terrain of his Montana home and takes on the notion of separation in its many forms - from comfort zones, from ideas, from people, from security, from fears. These ten stories delve into small towns and big cities, into love and despair, into what drives us and what scares us, peeling back the layers of our humanity with every pag