"In this collection of stories, dreams collide with reality, modernity collides with antiquity, myth with true identity; women grapple with desire, with ego, with motherhood and mortality. The stories travel from India to America and back again to reveal the small moments of beauty, pain, and power that contain the world"--

Groff follows up The Monsters of Templeton with this innovative and beautifully written collection that covers a wide swath of humanity, from east coast resort towns, to the early 20th century flu epidemic, to WWII Europe.

In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore, in a perfect blend of craft and bewitched spirit, explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal her own exquisite, singular wisdom. In "Debarking," a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the United States prepares to invade Iraq, and against this ominous moment, we see--in all its irresistible hilarity and darkness--the perils of...

"Spanning Gaiman's career to date, The Neil Gaiman Reader: Selected Fiction is a ... collection from one of the world's most beloved writers, chosen by those who know his work best: his devoted readers. A ... representation of Gaiman's ... imaginative fiction, this ... volume includes excerpts from each of his five novels for adults--Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane--and nearly fifty of his short...

"Stories that capture our times by "a young author who has already established himself as a unique American voice" (Elle). Saïd Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain." His new collection of stories-some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories-are set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised...

"Inspired by recent true events, the all-original stories in Witnesses for the Dead are set in motion by the act of witnessing; the characters who populate these pages are not themselves the original perpetrators of crimes, but find their lives indelibly changed by what they see, as they grapple with coming forward, taking action, or retreating into the shadows. In "Envy" by Christopher Chambers, a sweet, shy wallflower watches as something horrific...

A newborn's absent face appears on the back of someone else's head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he's after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses--whether...

Clever and haunting by turns, Ayiti explores the Haitian diaspora experience. A married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood. Wise,...

From internationally acclaimed author Margarita García Robayo comes Fish Soup, a unique collection comprising two novellas and the book of short stories Worse Things (winner of the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize). Set on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, Waiting for a Hurricane follows a girl obsessed with escaping both her life and her country. Emotionally detached from her family, and disillusioned with what the future holds if she remains,...

"Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley's most accomplished short stories to display the full range of his remarkable talent. Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories - heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved,...