Ten stories from author Alice Munro tackle a variety of themes, such as love, loss, and redemption. 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...

"In the thirteen stories in her second collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov. The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future."--BOOK...

"In her stunning debut, Souvankham Thammavongsa captures the day-to-day lives of immigrants and refugees in a nameless city, illuminating hopes, disappointments, love affairs, and above all, the pursuit of a place to belong. An ex-boxer turned nail salon worker falls for a pair of immaculate hands; a mother and daughter harvest earthworms in the middle of the night; a country music-obsessed housewife abandons her family for fantasy; and a young girl's...

A collection of four short works includes the title novella and "The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American composer John Morton."

Like a little Freud in your fiction? C.P. Boyko's new collection is a dream come true. Perversely funny new work.

This collection of stories illuminates moments that shape a life, from a dream or a sexual act to simple twists of fate that turn a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Set in the countryside and towns of Lake Huron, these stories about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virtual and real, paint a portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be.

Presents short stories from 1972 through 2002 by twenty-four North American women authors including Toni Cade Bambara, Sandra Cisneros, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alice McDermott.

From a Nigerian boy's friendship with his family's former houseboy to a sweatship girl's experience as a sister wife, from love and murder on the frontier to a meltdown in academe, these stories, for Díaz, have the economy and power to "break hearts bones vanities and cages."

"'To read their stories felt to me the way I suspect other people feel hearing jazz for the first time,' recalls Curtis Sittenfeld of her initial encounter with the Best American Short Stories series. 'They were windows into emotions I had and hadn't had, into other settings and circumstances and observations and relationships.' Sittenfeld was met by the same feeling selecting the stories for this year's edition. The result is a striking and nuanced...