Some money from each copy of Speaking with the Angel sold will benefit autism education charities around the world, including The Treehouse School in London, where Nick’s son Danny is a student, and the New York Child Learning Institute here in the States. This project is truly a labor of love for Hornby and the other writers involved, many of whom are Nick’s friends.These original first-person narratives come from the most exciting voices in fiction. Melissa Bank gives readers a glimpse into the mind of a modern New Yorker whose still-new relationship is a constant source of surprise in “The Wonder Spot.” In Zadie Smith’s “I’m the Only One,” a young man recalls his strained relationship with his diva-esque sister. Dave Egger’s “After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned,” is told from the viewpoint of an unfortunate pit bull. Helen Fielding offers up a new twist on I’ve fallen and I can’t get up in “Luckybitch.” And in Nick Hornby’s “NippleJesus,” a bruiser finds out that guarding modern art is far more hazardous than controlling the velvet ropes at a nightclub. Speaking with the Angel also includes stories from Roddy Doyle, Irvine Welsh, Colin Firth, John O’Farrell, Robert Harris, Patrick Marber, and Giles Smith.Twelve completely new stories, written by twelve undeniably imaginative voices. Speaking with the Angel is at turns clever, outrageous, witty, edgy, tender, and wicked. This is what they meant by original.

    Some readers noticed his nimble blending of humor with painful truths reminded them of George Saunders. His creativity and fresh voice reminded others of Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. But with his new collection, Jodzio creates a class of his own.Knockout is the unified collection of stories that create flawless portraits of deeply flawed figures on the edge of the American Dream. A recovering drug addict gets tricked into stealing a tiger. A man buys a used sex chair from his neighbor. A woman suffering from agoraphobia raises her son completely indoors. An alcoholic runs a bed and breakfast with the son from his deceased wife's first marriage. These people will admit that their chances have passed them by. These people know they were born on the wrong side of the tracks, and their dreams will remain unreachable, but that doesn't stop them from dreaming. Yet readers won’t be fooled by the funny premises —Jodzio steers these stories into deeper places, creating a brilliant examination of those on the fringes of modern life.With its quirky humor, compelling characters, and unexpected sincerity, Knockout by John Jodzio is poised to become his breakout book, drawing a wide readership to this provocative and talented young writer.

    With no grown-ups around to take care of them, the other kids simply spend their days drinking Silly Juice while playing meaningless games without a care in the world. But unlike them, she has never felt like she has truly belonged. It is not until Harmonia discovers a secret like none other that her life changes forever. For on the far side of the sun sits a planet like none other, a place called Eidos. Joined by runaways from Sky, along with the infamous Captain Jessi and her makeshift crew, they set off across the endless seas of space.Yet before they can reach Eidos, a long journey awaits young Harmonia and her friends. Between a broken planet, a maniacal woman bent on bringing them back, and the sheer boredom, they have a long journey ahead of them. But in the end, Harmonia just might find a place she can finally call home.

    The Hobbs family farm, White House purveyor since 1897, is patrolled by fifteen and seven eights inch beagle, the seventh generation of its line. The beagle, born with a cannon ball thick scull, and teeth he honed on deer bones, is a canine assassin, who makes friends with his sworn enemy, a Flemish hare, a scholarly rabbit, tailored by nature in the worse fitting fur imaginable.

    Henry Prize Stories 2011 contains twenty unforgettable stories selected from hundreds of literary magazines. The winning tales take place in such far-flung locales as Madagascar, Nantucket, a Midwestern meth lab, Antarctica, and a post-apocalyptic England, and feature a fascinating array of characters: aging jazzmen, avalanche researchers, a South African wild child, and a mute actor in silent films. Also included are essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.  Your Fate Hurtles Down at YouJim Shepard Diary of an Interesting YearHelen Simpson MelindaJudy Doenges NightbloomingKenneth Calhoun The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once LivedTamas Dobozy IceLily Tuck How to Leave HialeahJennine Capó Crucet The JunctionDavid Means Pole, PoleSusan Minot Alamo PlazaBrad Watson The Black Square Chris Adrian Nothing of ConsequenceJane Delury The Rules Are the RulesAdam Foulds The Vanishing AmericanLeslie Parry CrossingMark Slouka Bed DeathLori Ostlund WindeyeBrian Evenson SunshineLynn Freed Never Come BackElizabeth Tallent Something You Can’t Live WithoutMatthew Neill Null For author interviews, photos, and more,  go to www.ohenryprizestories.com   A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to support the PEN Readers & Writers Literary Outreach Program.

    The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster's cottage, miles from Moscow. A young woman who is about to marry a rich aristocrat instead begins a torrid relationship with a construction worker. A father, finally free of his daughter's demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. A middle-aged woman cares for her injured mother at Christmas. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor, Daphne du Maurier. Rose Tremain awakens the senses in this magnificent and diverse collection of short stories. In her precise yet sensuous style, she lays bare the soul of her characters - the admirable, the embarrassing, the unfulfilled, the sexy, and the adorable - to uncover a dazzling range of human emotions and desires.

    Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized. These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small-town life. The country is blue-collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

    When they met at the Philadelphia high school where they’d come to teach, each had suffered a profound loss that had not healed. How likely was it that they could learn to trust, much less love, again?Justin Cronin’s poignant debut traces the lives of Mary Olson and O’Neil Burke, two vulnerable young teachers who rediscover in each other a world alive with promise and hope. From the formative experiences of their early adulthood to marriage, parenthood, and beyond, this novel in stories illuminates the moments of grace that enable Mary and O’Neil to make peace with the deep emotional legacies that haunt them: the sudden, mysterious death of O’Neil’s parents, Mary’s long-ago decision to end a pregnancy, O’Neil’s sister’s battle with illness and a troubled marriage. Alive with magical nuance and unexpected encounters, Mary and O’Neil celebrates the uncommon in common lives, and the redemptive power of love.

    Each story is a dramatisation of the instant in a life that exposes it all: love and the lack of love, hope and the lack of hope.

    In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician. With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.Dimensions --Fiction --Wenlock edge --Deep-holes --Free radicals --Face --Some women --Child's play --Wood --Too much happiness

    In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being.This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass—a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.

    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

    These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).Mister squishy --The soul is not a smithy --Incarnations of burned children --Another pioneer --Good old neon --Philosophy and the mirror of nature --Oblivion --The suffering channel

    He enjoys standing quietly with a house before his clients arrive, and today, although he feels pinned beneath an invisible weight, he resolves to savor this solitary moment. It’s one of those overhauled ranches so common to Old Cranbury these days, swollen and dressed to resemble a colonial. White, of course, with ornamental shutters and latches pretending to hold them open. A close echo of its renovated sisters on Whistle Hill Road, garnished with hostas and glitzed with azaleas. He has seen too many of these to count… A man strikes an under-the-table deal with a surgeon to spend a few quiet seconds closer to his wife than he's ever been; a young soon-to-be mother looks on in paralyzing astonishment as her husband walks away from a twenty-year career in advertising at the urging of his spirit animal; an elderly artist risks more than he knows when he's commissioned by his newly-arrived neighbors to produce the work of a lifetime.In her stunning debut collection, The Wonder Garden, Lauren Acampora brings to the page with enchanting realism the myriad lives of a suburban town and lays them bare. These linked stories take a trenchant look at the flawed people of Old Cranbury, incisive tales that reveal at each turn the unseen battles we play out behind drawn blinds, the creeping truths from which we distract ourselves, and the massive dreams we haul quietly with us and hold close.Deliciously creepy and masterfully complex The Wonder Garden heralds the arrival of a phenomenal new talent in American fiction.

    A passionate exploration of the forces that shape us, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write explores themes of survival and the powerlessness of the self in a chaotic and unfair world, finding hope in the emotions and vitality of poetry. With characteristic meditative lyricism, the poet reflects on grief and the power of language in extended odes (“Ode to Nothing,” “Ode to Words”) and slips effortlessly from personal trauma (“Song of What Happens”) to public catastrophe (“Charlottesville Elegy”).The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write confirms Orr’s place among the preeminent lyric poets of his generation, engaging the deepest existential issues with wisdom and humor and transforming them into celebratory song.