A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.
John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel: “Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full...

"[A] remarkable collection . . . Bold and addictive, Going Away Shoes is a find." -People The foibles of the people in Jill McCorkle's world are so familiar that we want nothing so much as to watch them walk into-and then get out of-life's inevitable traps. Here, in her first collection in eight years, McCorkle collects eleven brand-new stories bristling with her characteristic combination of wit and weight. In honeymoon shoes, mud-covered...

Combines fifteen of the author's classic short stories with fifteen new stories in an anthology that features tales involving donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, and marriage. In these comfort-zone-destroying tales, including the masterpiece, War Dances, characters grapple with racism, damaging stereotypes, poverty, alcoholism, diabetes, and the tragic loss of languages and customs. Questions of authenticity and identity abound.

“Borges's composed, carefully wrought, gnarled style is at once the means of his art and its object—his way of ordering and giving meaning to the bizarre and terrifying world he creates: it is a brilliant, burnished instrument, and it is quite adequate to the extreme demands his baroque imagination makes of it . . . . Absolutely and most vividly original."—Saturday Review
The seventeen pieces in Ficciones

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Langston Hughes's stories about Jesse B. Semple--first composed for a weekly column in the Chicago Defender and then collected in Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple Stakes a Claim--have been read and loved by hundreds of thousands of readers. In The Best of Simple, the author picked his favorites from these earlier volumes, stories that not only have proved popular but are now part of a great and growing literary tradition. Simple...

Considered one of the greatest short story writers of her generation, Katherine Mansfield was a modernist writer from New Zealand. This collection includes thirty-five of her most popular stories. In this volume you will find the following stories: "The Tiredness of Rosabel", "At Lehmann's", "Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding", "The Swing of the Pendulum", "The Woman at the Store", "How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped", "Ole Underwood", "Millie", "Bains...

A volume of six stories and novellas by the National Book Award-winning author of We Were the Mulvaneys includes the title story, in which the disappearance of a sweet blonde-haired child is linked to her mother's indiscretions, a too-obvious schoolteacher and an older student with a fascination for a Native American legend.

In this collection of richly imagined stories, Elizabeth Tallent, the master of short fiction, delivers a diverse suite of stories about men and women confronting their vulnerabilities in times of transition and challenge.

Beginning in the 1980s, Elizabeth Tallent’s work appeared in some of our most prestigious literary publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s. Marked

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"A new collection of stories by the visionary "master of the form" (The Observer), David Means"--

"First published in Japan in 2003 and never before published in the United States, Dead-End Memories collects the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, quietly discover their ways back to recovery. Among the women we meet in Dead-End Memories is one betrayed by her fiancae who finds a perfect refuge in an apartment above her uncle's bar while seeking the real meaning of happiness. In "House of Ghosts," the daughter of a yoshoku...