When the nameless narrator botches an assignment for the clandestine organization that employs him, everyone in his life—including his new girlfriend—is revealed to be either true-blue, double operative, or both.With the literary coyness of Paul Auster and the dark absurdity of Kafka, Hunt's debut is a daring, memory-driven narrative that is as fittingly spare as a bare ceiling light—and just as pendulous. On the surface, the narrator is a simple man, fixing his washer and dryer, strolling through city parks, falling in love at an office supply store. But in The Impossibly, the mundane gives way to outrageous misconduct, and with each unexpected visitor or cryptic note, the tension reaches tantalizing heights. As the narrator frugally doles out clues about his dangerous work in an unnamed European city, the reader inevitably becomes confidante and fellow gumshoe. The narrator's final assignment—to identify his own assassin—dismantles the reader's own analysis of the evidence.

    Beloved for the lens of the strange he places on small town life, Steven Millhauser further reveals in Voices in the Night the darkest parts of our inner selves to brilliant and dazzling effect. Here are stories of wondrously imaginative hyperrealism, stories that pose unforgettably unsettling what-ifs, or that find barely perceivable evils within the safe boundaries of our towns, homes, and even within our bodies. Here, too, are stories culled from religion and fables: Samuel, who hears the voice of God calling him in the night; a young, pre-enlightenment Buddha, who searches for his purpose in life; Rapunzel and her Prince, who struggle to fit the real world to their dream. Heightened by magic, the divine, and the uncanny, shot through with sly and winning humor, Voices in the Night seamlessly combines the whimsy and surprise of the familiar with intoxicating fantasies that take us beyond our daily lives, all done with the hallmark sleight of hand and astonishing virtuosity of one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.

    Away in Medical School, Molly believed her life was on track. That was until she returned home for Christmas and learned her life was nothing she had always believed. As this surprising journey unfolds, Molly not only learns how to put aside the pain of her past but she finally learns how to say goodbye.

    C. Boyle is one of the most renowned storytellers of the modern era. This collection of fourteen stories drifts effortlessly between myth and reality, encompassing a panorama of human emotions. In “The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award,” Boyle reveals a writer’s dismay when a simple trip is turned upside down by a stranger. “Los Gigantes” tells the story of a group of giants being used to create a new breed of soldier for the military. In “The Way You Look Tonight” Boyle examines the way our perceptions of our loved ones can change on a dime with just a simple revelation. And in “Sic Transit” he shows how quickly we can become consumed with curiosity.Boyle travels the world in these and the rest of the stories, from California to Russia, Latin America to upstate New York, but his adept touch at depicting the lives of his characters never wavers.

    The stories include tales of strippers, of their husbands and lovers and the helpless, ill-placed desire that is shot out of their customers, of a rape by a man of another man at a peep show in Times Square, the victim wordlessly accepting what happens to him while watching a woman dance behind glass, of fucking a woman wearing a fur coat and feeling unexplainable rage at her disregard of animal life. The story ends with the character running away into the night with the coat, "as if an animal rescued." In "Invisible Fish," a night clerk in a mall pet store tortures the animals at night until the whole place stinks of fear and rage. Dumbfounded, the store owners blugeon to death a chimpanzee, the only animal in the store that can imagine capable of such atrocities.

    . . Hilarious and poignant."--Entertainment Weekly Bream Gives Me Hiccups: And Other Stories is the whip-smart fiction debut of Academy Award-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg. Known for his iconic film roles but also for his regular pieces in the New Yorker and his two critically acclaimed plays, Eisenberg is an emerging literary voice.Taking its title from a group of stories that begin the book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups moves from contemporary L.A. to the dorm rooms of an American college to ancient Pompeii, throwing the reader into a universe of social misfits, reimagined scenes from history, and ridiculous overreactions. In one piece, a tense email exchange between a young man and his girlfriend is taken over by his sister, who is obsessed with the Bosnian genocide (The situation reminds me of a little historical blip called the Karadordevo agreement); in another, a college freshman forced to live with a roommate is stunned when one of her ramen packets goes missing (she didn't have "one" of my ramens. She had a chicken ramen); in another piece, Alexander Graham Bell has teething problems with his invention (I've been calling Mabel all day, she doesn't pick up! Yes, of course I dialed the right number - 2!).United by Eisenberg's gift for humor and character, and grouped into chapters that open with illustrations by award-winning cartoonist Jean Jullien, the witty pieces collected in Bream Gives Me Hiccups explore the various insanities of the modern world, and mark the arrival of a fantastically funny, self-ironic, and original voice.

    Acclaimed author David Schickler’s collection of linked stories follows a troupe of love-hungry urbanites through a charmed metropolis and into the Preemption--a mythic Manhattan apartment building. The Preemption sets the stage for a romantic fantasy as exuberant, dark, and dazzling as the city it occupies. Behind closed doors, the paths of an improbable cast of tenants--a seductive perfume heiress; a crabby, misunderstood actor; a preternaturally sharp-sighted priest--tangle and cross, while a perilous love triangle builds around three characters: James Branch, a shy young accountant with an unusual love for the Preemption’s antique elevator, and a strange destiny... Patrick Rigg, a Wall Street lothario who soothes his pain by seducing beautiful women, carrying a gun, and attending the nightly sermons of a foreboding priest... Rally McWilliams, a fetching, hopeful young writer who roams the city at night, searching for the soulmate she believes in but can’t find...Charged with joy and a deadly sense of humor, Kissing in Manhattan is a daring new writer’s vision of a world where men and women, good and evil, love and sex, meet, battle, and embrace on every street corner.

    Here the characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A critic once called Rakoff "magnificent," a word which perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse.

    Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point and beyond in this frazzled trip through Scottish clubland. He experiences the vertiginous uppers and downers of the Second Summer of Love, dabbles in a spot of disc jockeying and closes in, gradually, on some kind of redemption…Selected from Irvine Welsh's novel Ecstasy.VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series:Home by Salman RushdieDreams by Sigmund FreudEating by Nigella LawsonWork by Joseph Heller

    In Fortune Smiles - his first book since Orphan Master - he continues to give voice to characters rarely heard from, while offering something we all seek from fiction: a new way of looking at our world.In six masterly stories, Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal. "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. "Nirvana," which won the prestigious Sunday Times short story prize, portrays a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finding solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In "Hurricanes Anonymous" - first included in the Best American Short Stories anthology - a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind. Unnerving, riveting, and written with a timeless quality, these stories confirm Johnson as one of America's greatest writers and an indispensable guide to our new century.

    A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray’s curio cabinet expands in Gutshot, where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. These singular stories live and breathe on their own, pulsating with energy and humanness and a glorious sense of humor. Hers are stories that you will read and reread—raw gems that burrow into your brain, reminders of just how strange and beautiful our world is. These collected stories come to us like a vivisected body, the whole that is all the more elegant and breathtaking for exploring its most grotesque and intimate lightless viscera.

    The seven stories in this excellent collection demonstrate the author's ability to create memorable tales on themes of love and marriage, divorce, the experience of the artist, high society and its workings and other topics."Souls Belated," a tragedy of mores, focuses on characters overcome by the demands of convention, while "The Pelican" and "The Muse's Tragedy" both present women whose realities differ from their public personae. "Expiation" is a satiric, revealing story about the publishing industry, featuring a writer determined to increase the sales of her first novel. In "The Dilettante," a young man who prides himself on his ability to manipulate women must face ironic consequences when he introduces his fiancée to his supposed lover. "Xingu" is a witty satire on the intellectual pretensions of a group of rich women, while "The Other Two" presents a darkly humorous look at the consequences of divorce.Gathered in this inexpensive volume, these stories provide an excellent sampling of Wharton's masterly efforts in the short story genre, a form of fiction she felt especially suited to her talents and one that enabled her to achieve a focused and intimate realism.

    Who has it. Who doesn’t. How you get it. How you don’t.In Refund, Bender creates an award-winning collection of stories that deeply explore the ways in which money and the estimation of value affect the lives of her characters. The stories in Refund reflect our contemporary world—swindlers, reality show creators, desperate artists, siblings, parents — who try to answer the question: What is the real definition of worth?In “Theft,” an eighty-year-old swindler, accustomed to tricking people for their money, boards a cruise ship to see if she can find something of true value—a human connection. In “Anything for Money,” the creator of a reality show is thrown into the real world when his estranged granddaughter reenters his life in need of a new heart; and in the title story, young artist parents in downtown Manhattan escape the attack on 9/11 only to face a battle over their subletted apartment with a stranger who might have lost more than only her deposit.Set in contemporary America, these stories herald a work of singular literary merit by an important writer at the height of her power.

    Using these brief messages of real people from another age, Butler creates fully imagined stories that speak to the universal human condition. In Up by Heart, a Tennessee miner is called upon to become a preacher, and then asked to complete an altogether more sinister task. In The Ironworkers' Hayride, a young man named Milton embarks on a romantic adventure with a girl with a wooden leg. From the deeply moving Carl and I, where a young wife writes a postcard in reply to a card from her husband who is dying of tuberculosis, to the eerily familiar The One in White, where a newspaper reporter covers an incident of American military adventurism in a foreign land, these are intimate and fascinating glimpses into the lives of ordinary people in an extraordinary age.

      A Christmas Hope   “Very much recommended . . . a wonderful story.”—Historical Novel Review   Claudine Burroughs dreads the holiday season. She feels she has nothing in common with her circle of wealthy, status-minded friends, and the only time she’s remotely happy is when she is volunteering at a women’s clinic, a job her husband strongly disapproves of. When Claudine meets a charming poet at a Yuletide gala, her spirits are finally lifted—until he is accused of killing a fellow guest. Believing in his innocence, Claudine vows to do her utmost to help. But it seems that hypocritical London society would rather send an innocent man to the gallows than expose the shocking truth about one of their own.   A New York Christmas   “A perfect present for [Anne Perry’s] readers.”—RT Book Reviews   Jemima Pitt, the daughter of Thomas Pitt, head of Britain’s Special Branch, is crossing the Atlantic for the first time. Her companion, Delphinia Cardew, is to marry in a grand Manhattan affair that will join together two fabulously wealthy families. But a shadow darkens the occasion: Missing from the festivities is Delphinia’s disgraced mother—and the groom’s charismatic brother has asked Jemima to help him find her and forestall the scandal that will surely follow if the prodigal parent turns up at the wedding. From Hell’s Kitchen to Fifth Avenue, from the Lower East Side to Central Park, Jemima trudges through snowy streets, asking questions but getting few answers—and never suspecting that she is walking into mortal danger.From the Trade Paperback edition.