But for Meg—locked in a dead-end relationship and with a deadline looming for a book that she can't write—this thought fills her with dread. Stuck in a labyrinth of her own devising, Meg knows that there must be a way out.

    In between, Moore’s stories have been shortlisted for more than a dozen different awards including the Bridport Prize, the Fish Prize, the Lightship Flash Fiction Prize, the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Nottingham Short Story Competition. The title story won first prize in the novella category of The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes.

    The daughter of East German emigrants encounters her doppelgänger, who has crossed another cultural divide. Twin brothers fall for the same girl. When a stripper receives an enigmatic proposal from a client, she accepts, ignorant of its terms.Shadows, doubles, and the ghosts of past and future lovers haunt these elegantly structured and often hallucinatory stories. The language is hypnotic, deadpan, intense; the sentences jewel-hard and sublime. This marks the début of a stylish, exuberant new voice in modern fiction.

    "I read Luis Jaramillo’s beautiful collection in one sitting. This is a ravishing book. I loved every word. It should be required reading for everyone." —Abigail Thomas "The Doctor’s Wife is like the runaway child of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust—Luis Jaramillo’s acerbic wit and satire are rare finds in America. Pick this up at once." —Alexander CheeWinner of the Dzanc Short Story Contest, Luis Jaramillo's The Doctor's Wife pushes the limits of what a short story collection can be. In stylish, intimate, and devastating short flashes, Jaramillo chronicles the small domestic moments, tragic losses, and cultural upheavals faced by three generations of a family in the Pacific Northwest, creating a moving portrait of an American family and the remarkable woman at its center.

    A young fisherman washes up nearly dead on the shores of Newfoundland. It is Manuel Rebelo who has tried to escape the suffocating smallness of his Portuguese village and the crushing weight of his mother’s expectations to build a future for himself in a terra nova. Manuel struggles to shed the traditions of a village frozen in time and to silence the brutal voice of Maria Theresa da Conceicao Rebelo, but embracing the promise of his adopted land is not as simple as he had hoped.Manuel’s son, Antonio, is born into Toronto’s little Portugal, a world of colourful houses and labyrinthine back alleys. In the Rebelo home the Church looms large, men and women inhabit sharply divided space, pigs are slaughtered in the garage, and a family lives in the shadow cast by a father’s failures. Most days Antonio and his friends take to their bikes, pushing the boundaries of their neighbourhood street by street, but when they finally break through to the city beyond they confront dangers of a new sort.With fantastic detail, larger-than-life characters and passionate empathy, Anthony De Sa invites readers into the lives of the Rebelos and finds there both the promise and the disappointment inherent in the choices made by the father and the expectations placed on the son.

    A boy must learn to care for his younger brother when their mother leaves the family. A young woman who has never lacked lovers despairs of ever finding love itself, and then makes an accidental discovery that brings her real joy. Culled from Dubus’s treasured collections Selected Stories and Dancing After Hours, these beautiful stories of people at pivotal moments in their lives are some of the most bewitching and profound in American fiction.

    In restaurants and hotel rooms, the couple begin telling folk tales to each other, perhaps as a way to fill the undefined space between them. Theirs is a comic and enigmatic relationship in which emotions are often muted and sometimes masked by verbal play and philosophical questions, and further complicated by the woman’s frequent unexplained disappearances.You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. is an intimate novel of memory and longing that challenges Western tropes and Orientalism. Embracing the playful surrealism of Haruki Murakami and the atmospheric narratives of filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, Sheung-King’s debut is at once lyrical and punctuated, and wholly unique, and marks the arrival of a bold new voice in Asian-Canadian literature.Praise for You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked.:Longlisted for CBC's Canada Reads 2021“One of the best book debuts of 2020” — The Globe and Mail“Sheung-King has written a wonderfully unexpected and maverick love story but also a novel of ideas that hopscotches between Toronto, Macau, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Prague. It is enchanting, funny, and a joy to read.”—Kyo Maclear, author of Birds Art Life“A tale of two rich and rootless people that oozes the horror and confusion of love, while staying somehow still desperately romantic, and so gloriously sad. This novel is also about something else: it gives the cold shoulder to the dominant gaze and its demands to control the Asian body, carving out a thrilling space beyond whiteness. I didn’t want it to end.” —Thea Lim, author of An Ocean of Minutes, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize“In a cruel paradox for writers who are just trying to recount their lives, the tropes of diasporic lit have made it nearly impossible to write about belonging without also placing whiteness at the center of attention—the tropes exist because stories that do this are regularly rewarded with publication. But You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. sidesteps this trap all together: It is bored by Western approval.” — Thea Lim, The Nation.“He practically sets the page on fire." —Brett Josef Grubisic, Toronto Star

    Barry Hannah's reputation as a master of the short story, first established in 1978 with the publication of Airships, is magnified in this volatile, long-awaited collection of new stories. Astonishing in range and in the portrayal of the human heart, these fierce and radar-perfect stories give us individuals with whom hilarity and pain combine with true and startling clarity.

    What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness?  Finding themselves in disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls and women in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition. Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, GIRLS OF A CERTAIN AGE captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work.

    Dick Award finalist* Locus Recommended Reading Here are 33 weird, wonderful stories concerning men, women, teleportation, wind-up cats, and brown paper bags. By turns whimsical and unsettling—frequently managing to be both—these short fictions describe family relationships, bad breakups, and travel to outer space.    Vukcevich's loopy, fun-house mirror take on everyday life belongs to the same absurdist school of work as that of George Saunders, David Sedaris, Ken Kalfus, and Victor Pelevin, although there is no one quite like him. Try one of these stories, it won't take you long, but it will turn your head inside out.Contents:By the Time We Get to Uranus (1998)The Barber's Theme (1995)Beatnicks with Banjoes (2001)Finally Fruit (1997)Pretending (2001)Mom's Little Friends (1992)No Comet (1994)There Is Danger (1993)Pink Smoke (2001)Season Finale (1995)The Sweater (2001)Home Remedy (1996)A Breath-Holding Contest (1991)Fancy Pants (2000)In the Refrigerator (2001)The Perfect Gift (1994)Message in a Fish (2001)Catch (1996)The Finger (1995)Rejoice (1999)My Mustache (1993)We Kill a Bicycle (1995)A Holiday Junket (1998)Giant Step (1994)Quite Contrary (1994)Doing Time (1992)The Next Best Thing (1998)Beastly Heat (1999)Ceremony (1991)Poop (2000)White Guys in Space (1996)Whisper (2001)Meet Me in the Moon Room (1998)

    Italo Calvino once said about her, “I don’t know another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don’t show us.” Thus Were Their Faces collects a wide range of Ocampo’s best short fiction and novella-length stories from her whole writing life. Stories about creepy doubles, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks to a girl, a house of sugar that is the site of an eerie possession, children who lock their perverse mothers in a room and burn it, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman.Jorge Luis Borges wrote that the cruelty of Ocampo’s stories was the result of her nobility of soul, a judgment as paradoxical as much of her own writing. For her whole life Ocampo avoided the public eye, though since her death in 1993 her reputation has only continued to grow, like a magical forest. Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world’s finest.

    An online forum for cancer support turns into a love triangle for an English professor, a Canadian fisherman, and an elementary school teacher living in Japan. A deer and a polar bear flirt via Skype. In The Hypothetical Girl a menagerie of characters graze and jockey, play and hook up in the online dating world with mixed and sometimes dark results. Flirting and communicating in chat rooms, through texts, e-mails, and IMs, they grope their way through a virtual maze of potential mates, falling in and out of what they think and hope may be true love.   With levity and high style, Cohen takes her readers into a world where screen and keyboard meet the heart, with consequences that range from wonderful to weird. The Hypothetical Girl captures all the mystery, misery, and magic of the eternal search for human connection.

    Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College and returned permanently in 1908. her first book of stories, 'In a German Pension', appeared in 1911, and she went on to write and publish an extraordinary body of work. This edition of The Collected Stories brings together all of the stories that Mansfield had written up until her death in January of 1923. With an introduction and head-notes, this volume allows the reader to become familiar with the complete range of Mansfield's work from the early, satirical stories set in Bavaria, through the luminous recollections of her childhood in New Zealand, and through the mature, deeply felt stories of her last years. Admired by Virginia Woolf in her lifetime and by many writers since her death, Katherine Mansfield is one of the great literary artists of the twentieth century.

    Her latest work, A Dream of a Woman, is her first book of short stories since her seminal 2014 collection A Safe Girl to Love. Centering transgender women seeking stable, adult lives, A Dream of a Woman finds quiet truths in prairie high-rises and New York warehouses, and in freezing Canadian winters and drizzly Oregon days.In "Hazel and Christopher," two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. In "Perfect Places," a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In "Couldn't Hear You Talk Anymore," the narrator reflects on past trauma and what might have been as she recalls tender moments with another trans woman.An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.

    Full of loneliness and hope, heartbreak and humor, Rothbart's tales blaze their way from midwestern farm fields to state prisons and border-town brothels. Much like the lost, tossed, and forgotten items Rothbart collected in his acclaimed book, Found, the stories in The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas capture the oddity, poetry, and dignity of everyday life.