The Grass Dancer


Susan Power - 1994
    Set on a North Dakota reservation, this book weaves the stories of the old and the young, broken families, romantic rivals, and men and women in love and at war.

No One Belongs Here More Than You


Miranda July - 2007
    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.

Nine Stories


J.D. Salinger - 1953
    D. Salinger published in April 1953. It includes two of his most famous short stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor". (Nine Stories is the U.S. title; the book is published in many other countries as For Esmé - with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories.)The stories are:"A Perfect Day for Bananafish""Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut""Just Before the War with the Eskimos""The Laughing Man""Down at the Dinghy""For Esmé – with Love and Squalor""Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes""De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period""Teddy"

How We Are Hungry


Dave Eggers - 2005
    "Another""What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust""The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water""On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home""Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance""She Waits, Seething, Blooming""Quiet""Your Mother and I""Naveed""Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone""About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her""Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly""After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"From the Trade Paperback edition.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love


Raymond Carver - 1981
    Alternate-cover edition can be found here In his second collection, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated and beloved short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.

House Made of Dawn


N. Scott Momaday - 1968
    One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote. The other was the world of the twentieth century, goading him into a compulsive cycle of sexual exploits, dissipation, and disgust. Home from a foreign war, he was a man being torn apart, a man descending into hell.

A Model World and Other Stories


Michael Chabon - 1991
    edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Where the Dead Sit Talking


Brandon Hobson - 2018
    With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, a troubled artist who also lives with the family.Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents


Julia Alvarez - 1991
    What they have lost - and what they find - is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that make up this exquisite novel from one of the premier novelists of our time.

Lot: Stories


Bryan Washington - 2019
    He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston's myriad neighborhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman's affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra.Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.Lockwood --Alief --610 North, 610 West --Shepherd --Wayside --Bayou --Lot --South Congress --Navigation --Peggy Park --Fannin --Waugh --Elgin

The Night in Question


Tobias Wolff - 1995
    A young woman visits her father following his nervous breakdown, and a devoted sister is profoundly unsettled by the sermon her brother insists on reciting. Whether in childhood or Vietnam, in memory or the eternal present, these people are revealed in the extenuating, sometimes extreme circumstances of everyday life, and in the complex consequences of their decisions—that, for instance, can bring together an innocent inner-city youth and a little girl attacked, months earlier, by a dog in a wintry park. Yet each story, however crucial, is marked by Mr. Wolff’s compassionate understanding and humor.In short, fiction of dazzling emotional range and absolute authority.

I Am No One You Know


Joyce Carol Oates - 2004
    In "Fire," a troubled young wife discovers a rare, radiant happiness in an adulterous relationship. In "Curly Red," a girl makes a decision to reveal a family secret, and changes her life irrevocably. In "The Girl with the Blackened Eye," selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001, a girl pushed to an even greater extreme of courage and desperation manages to survive her abduction by a serial killer. And in "Three Girls," two adventuresome NYU undergraduates seal their secret love by following, and protecting, Marilyn Monroe in disguise at Strand Used Books on a snowy evening in 1956.These vividly rendered portraits of women, men, and children testify to Oates's compassion for the mysterious and luminous resources of the human spirit.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories


Flannery O'Connor - 1955
    Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in the title story, confronting the murderous Misfit; a neglected four-year-old boy looking for the Kingdom of Christ in the fast-flowing waters of the river; General Sash, about to meet the final enemy. Stories include:"A Good Man Is Hard to Find""The River""The Life You Save May Be Your Own""A Stroke of Good Fortune""A Temple of the Holy Ghost""The Artificial Nigger""A Circle in the Fire""A Late Encounter with the Enemy""Good Country People""The Displaced Person"©1955 Flannery O'Connor; 1954, 1953, 1948 by Flannery O'Connor; renewed 1983, 1981 by Regina O'Connor; renewed 1976 by Mrs. Edward F. O'Connor; (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Nine Inches


Tom Perrotta - 2013
    Whether he's dropping into the lives of two teachers―and their love lost and found―in "Nine Inches", documenting the unraveling of a dad at a Little League game in "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face", or gently marking the points of connection between an old woman and a benched high school football player in "Senior Season", Perrotta writes with a sure sense of his characters and their secret longings.Nine Inches contains an elegant collection of short fiction: stories that are as assured in their depictions of characters young and old, established and unsure, as any written today.

The Refugees


Viet Thanh Nguyen - 2017
    From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration.