Her stories are revered by some of the best American writers of our day, but until now there has been no stand-alone collection of her short fiction.Wait Till You See Me Dance consists of several extraordinary longer stories as well as a selection of intoxicating very short stories. In the chilling “The First Full Thought of Her Life,” a shooter gets in position while a young girl climbs a sand dune. In “Voltaire Night,” students compete to tell a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. In “Stay Where You Are,” two oblivious travelers in Central America are kidnapped by a gunman they assume to be an insurgent—but the gunman has his own problems.An Unferth story lures you in with a voice that seems amiable and lighthearted, but it swerves in sudden and surprising ways that reveal, in terrifying clarity, the rage, despair, and profound mournfulness that have taken up residence at the heart of the American dream. These stories often take place in an exaggerated or heightened reality, a quality that is reminiscent of the work of Donald Barthelme, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders, but in Unferth’s unforgettable collection she carves out territory that is entirely her own.

    In eight tragi-comic stories, Einstein's Beach House: Stories features ordinary men and women rising to life's extraordinary challenges.

    His sense of isolation lies at the heart of these later works. "Billy Budd, Sailor," a classic confrontation between good and evil, is the story of an innocent young man unable to defend himself against a wrongful accusation. The other selections here--"Bartleby," "The Encantadas," "Benito Cereno," and "The Piazza"--also illuminate, in varying guises, the way fictions are created and shared with a wider society.In his introduction Frederick Busch discusses Melville's preoccupation with his "correspondence with the world," his quarrel with silence, and why fiction was, for Melville,"a matter of life and death."Bartleby --The piazza --The Encantadas --The bell-tower --Benito Cereno --The paradise of bachelors and the tartarus of maids --Billy Budd, sailor.

    A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game--and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN's newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves. An eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant venture into America looking for acquisitions and discover a down and out motel, romance, and a bit of real life. These are just some of the tales Tom Hanks tells in this first collection of his short stories. They are surprising, intelligent, heartwarming, and, for the millions and millions of Tom Hanks fans, an absolute must-have!

    The limitless scope of human emotion and experience are depicted in stories that give aching and eloquent voice to the terrible wounds we inflict on those closest to us. These are tales of loss and redemption; of shame and forgiveness; of love and abuse and the healing power of storytelling. A book that resonates with uncompromising candor and incandescence, Trash is sure to captivate Allison's legion of readers and win her a devoted new following.

      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.

    Elsewhere, an aerobics instructor—the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—makes the most shocking leap imaginable to save her soul. These are just a few of the characters you'll encounter in Sam Lipsyte's richly imagined world.Featuring a grizzled and possibly deranged male doula, a doomsday hustler who must face the multi-universal truth of "the real-ass jumbo," and a tawdry glimpse of a high school shot-putting circuit in northern New Jersey, circa 1986, Lipsyte's short stories combine the tragicomic brilliance of his beloved novels with the compressed vitality of Venus Drive. The Fun Parts is Lipsyte at his very best—a far-ranging exploration of new voices and vistas from "the most consistently funny fiction writer working today" (Time).

    Taut, brooding, and densely atmospheric, these stories show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness. These tales are as horrifying as anything written by Clive Barker or Stephen King, but they are crafted with a lyricism and intensity that compel us to confront our secret kinship with the horrifying.

    In this ebullient collection, virgins escape from being sacrificed, witches refuse to be burned, whores aren't ashamed, and every woman gets a chance to be a radioactive cockroach warrior who snaps back at catcallers. Gwen E. Kirby experiments with found structures--a Yelp review, a WikiHow article--which her fierce, irreverent narrators push against, showing how creativity within an enclosed space undermines and deconstructs the constraints themselves. When these women tell the stories of their triumphs as well as their pain, they emerge as funny, angry, loud, horny, lonely, strong protagonists who refuse be secondary characters a moment longer. From "The Best and Only Whore of Cym Hyfryd, 1886" to the "Midwestern Girl [who] is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories," Kirby is playing and laughing with the women who have come before her and they are telling her, we have always been this way. You just had to know where to look.

    Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life."

    At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I've Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be.Cities I've Never Lived In is the second book in Graywolf's collaboration with the literary magazine A Public Space.

    The deadbeat father of a pregnant teenager tries to transform his life by playing the role of Jesus in a bloody penitential Passion. A young man discovers that his estranged father and a boa constrictor have been squatting in his grandmother’s empty house. A lonely retiree new to Santa Fe becomes obsessed with her housekeeper. One girl attempts to uncover the mystery of her cousin's violent past, while another young woman finds herself at an impasse when she is asked to hear her priest's confession.Always hopeful, these stories chart the passions and obligations of family life, exploring themes of race, class, and coming-of-age, as Quade's characters protect, betray, wound, undermine, bolster, define, and, ultimately, save each other.

    Since then her work has been translated throughout the world. Edna O'Brien has called Tolstaya "an enchantress." Anita Desai has spoken of her work's "richness and ardent life." Mixing heartbreak and humor, dizzying flights of fantasy and plunging descents to earth, Tolstaya is the natural successor in a great Russian literary lineage that includes Gogol, Yuri Olesha, Bulgakov, and Nabokov.White Walls is the most comprehensive collection of Tolstaya's short fiction to be published in English so far. It presents the contents of her two previous collections, On the Golden Porch and Sleepwalker in a Fog, along with several previously uncollected stories. Tolstaya writes of lonely children and lost love, of philosophers of the absurd and poets working as janitors, of angels and halfwits. She shows how the extraordinary will suddenly erupt in the midst of ordinary life, as she explores the human condition with a matchless combination of unbound imagination and unapologetic sympathy. A New York Review Books Original "Tolstaya carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down." --Time

    Stories were to be about 250 words long; first prize was a check and a crate of oranges.Two to three thousand stories began to show up annually in Tallahassee, and National Public Radio regularly broadcast the winner. But, more important, the Micro form turned out to be contagious; stories of this "lack of length" now dot the literary magazines. The time seemed right, then, for this anthology, presenting a decade of contest winners and selected finalists. In addition, Stern commissioned Micros, persuading a roster of writers to accept the challenge of completing a story in one page.Jesse Lee Kercheval has a new spin on the sinking of the Titanic; Virgil Suarez sets his sights on the notorious Singapore caning; George Garrett conjures up a wondrous screen treatment pitch; and Antonya Nelson invites us into an eerie landscape. Verve and nerve and astonishing variety are here, with some wild denouements.How short can a Micro be, you wonder. Look up Amy Hempel's contribution, and you'll see.Includes:Poet's husband by M. GilesCough by Harry HumesDaydream by R. AllenWrong channel by R. FernandezHarmony by J. Williams20by20 by L. BrewerYour fears are justified by R. DeMarinisAt the point by B. McCaddonHalo by M. McFeeMockingbird by L. BerryChanging the channel by E.E. MillerWanting to fly by S. DunningEclipsed by R. ShusterNew Year by P. PainterSurvivors by K. AddonizioAnti-Cain by V. SuarezPainted devils by F. ChappellHoneycomb by N.R. SingerBaby, baby, baby by F. CamoinAn old story by J. KelmanConception by T. FlemingAll this by J. AvallonStone belly girl by J. Granger Worry by R. WallaceYou can't see dogs on the radio by L. WendlingTrue story of Mr. and Mrs. Wong by M. ChinFlu by S. DybekThe bridge by R. EdsonKennedy in the barrio by J.O. CoferGrief by R. CarlsonMount Olive by M.A. LoveHurray for Hollywood by G. GarrettThis is how I remember it by Betsy KemperNovember by U. HegiCarpathia by J.L. KerchevalChickens by E. MagarrellMayor of the sister city speaks to the chamber of commerce in Klamath Falls, Oregon, on a night in December in 1976 by M. MartoneConfirmation names by M. LippoHostess ; Housewife by A. HempelLand's end by A. NelsonLast supper in the Cabinet Mountains by D. BottomsStrongman by W. White-RingDiverging paths and all that by M. O'HaraA gentleman's C by P. PowellOf exposure by J. HolmanTea leaves by J. BurrowayWe eat our peas for the souls in Purgatory by A. McPetersWaiting by P. McNallyBut what was her name? by D. RaffelGuadalupe in the Promised Land by Sam ShepardMorning news by J. SternMolibi by L. HancockWallet by A. Woodman

    In the penal colony / Franz Kafka --Girl / Jamaica Kincaid --The smallest woman in the world / Clarice Lispector --The daughters of the late colonel / Katherine Mansfield --Labor day dinner / Alice Munro --Spring in Fialta / Vladimir Nabokov --The things they carried / Tim O'Brien --A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor --I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen --Wants / Grace Paley --In dreams begin responsibilities / Delmore Schwartz --The man to send rain clouds / Leslie Marmon Silko --Helping / Robert Stone --Master and man / Leo Tolstoy. Packed dirt, churchgoing, a dying cat, a traded car / John Updike --The flowers / Alice Walker --No place for you, my love / Eudora Welty --Paper garden / Jerome Wilson