The book spans the 20th century, bringing characters into tableaus of deceit and desire. Beneath his coifed prose Towles is a master of the shiv, the bait and switch; we see the flash of light before the shock wave strikes, often in the final sentence. . . . Table for Two delivers the kick of a martini served in the Polo Lounge. - The New York Times Book Review

Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood.

The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages. Told from seven points of view, Eve in Hollywood describes how one of Towles's most beloved characters, the indomitable Evelyn Ross from Rules of Civility, crafts a new future for herself--and others--in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of 1930s Los Angeles.

Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles's canon of stylish and transporting fiction.

Each of these witty, intelligent stories is a slice of modern life.--People

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she's as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

In The Patron Saints of Middle Age, a woman visits two friends she hasn't seen since her divorce. In A for Alone, a married artist embarks on a creative project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can't spend time alone together without lusting after each other. And in Lost but Not Forgotten, Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an alumni reunion at her boarding school.

Hilarious, thought-provoking, and full of tenderness for her characters, Sittenfeld's stories peel back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

Taught everywhere--from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing--it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Peters describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place--from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water

In this intimate collection, Amanda Peters melds traditional storytelling with beautiful, spare prose to describe the dignity of the traditional way of life, the humiliations of systemic racism and the resilient power to endure. A young man returns from residential school only to realize he can no longer communicate with his own parents. A grieving mother finds purpose and healing on the front lines as a water protector. And a nervous child dances in her first Mawi'omi. The collection also includes the Indigenous Voices Award-winning and title story Waiting for the Long Night Moon.

At times sad, sometimes disturbing but always redemptive, the stories in Waiting for the Long Night Moon will remind you that where there is grief there is also joy, where there is trauma there is resilience and, most importantly, there is power.

A new edition of the now iconic fiction writer Claire Keegan's debut story collection featuring a fresh cover to tie in with her current bestselling trio: the Booker Prize shortlisted Small Things Like These, Foster, and So Late in the Day

These stories are diamonds. --Esquire

First published in 1999 and proclaimed an impressive debut by William Trevor, Antarctica introduced the world to Claire Keegan, whose short fiction has since captured readers worldwide and established her as among the form's most masterful practitioners (New York Times). Now with a revised titular story, this iridescent first collection of stories draws readers into a world of obsession and betrayal in Keegan's singular, commanding and award-winning prose.

In Antarctica, a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with a man other than her husband. In Love in the Tall Grass, Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date, with her lover, that has been nine years in the waiting. In Passport Soup, Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his young daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief. Keegan's writing contains a clear vision of unaffected truths and boldly explores a world where dreams, memory, and chance have crippling consequences for those involved. Often dark and enveloped in a palpable atmosphere, the reader feels that something momentous is lurking within each of these carefully sculpted tales.

The winner of the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Antarctica remains a dazzling and haunting debut by one of the world's best short story writers.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction

These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.--Roxane Gay

In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women's memories and hunger and desire. I couldn't put it down.--Karen Russell

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we na vely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelg ngers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

Tackling some of humanity's oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. They are Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic, revelatory.

Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity's oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.

In The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In Exhalation, an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom, the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

In this beguiling collection of twelve imaginative stories set in Lagos, Nigeria, 'Pemi Aguda dramatizes the tension between our yearning to be individuals and the ways we are haunted by what came before.

In Manifest, a woman sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter's face. Shortly after, the daughter is overtaken by wicked and destructive impulses. In Breastmilk, a wife forgives her husband for his infidelity. Months later, when she is unable to produce milk for her newborn, she blames herself for failing to uphold her mother's feminist values and doubts her fitness for motherhood. In Things Boys Do, a trio of fathers finds something unnatural and unnerving about their infant sons. As their lives rapidly fall to pieces, they begin to fear that their sons are the cause of their troubles. And in 24, Alhaji Williams Street, a teenage boy lives in the shadow of a mysterious disease that's killing the boys on his street.

These and other stories in Ghostroots map emotional and physical worlds that lay bare the forces of family, myth, tradition, gender, and modernity in Nigerian society. Powered by a deep empathy and glinting with humor, they announce a major new literary talent.

2018 Reprint of 1892 Edition. This short story is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental. Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency, a diagnosis common to women in that period. Gilman used her writing to explore the role of women in America at the time. She explored issues such as the lack of a life outside the home and the oppressive forces of the patriarchal society. Through her work Gilman paved the way for writers such as Alice Walker and Sylvia Plath.

A Penguin Classics Hardcover

Regarded as one of world literature's foremost novelists, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's short stories are also some of the best ever written. White Nights tells of love and loss on the streets of St. Petersburg, A Nasty Business presents the hilarious tale of a general dropping in on the wedding of a subordinate, while The Meek One is an existentialist tale of marriage and tragedy.

Winner of the National Book Award

The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction.

There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

O'Connor published her first story, The Geranium, in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, Judgement Day--sent to her publisher shortly before her death--is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of The Geranium. Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.

Includes Story of Your Life--the basis for the major motion picture Arrival

Elegantly redesigned, A River Runs through It includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award-winning 1992 film adaptation of River. Based on Maclean's own experiences as a young man, the book's two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean's own words, a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.

The word atavism, coined by a botanist and popularized by a criminologist, refers to the resurfacing of a primitive evolutionary trait or urge in a modern being. This inventive collection from Lydia Millet offers overlapping tales of urges ranging from rage to jealousy to yearning--a fluent triumph of storytelling, rich in ideas and emotions both petty and grand.

The titular atavists include an underachieving, bewildered young bartender; a middle-aged mother convinced her gentle son-in-law is fixated on geriatric porn; a bodybuilder with an incel's fantasy life; an arrogant academic accused of plagiarism; and an empty-nester dad determined to host refugees in a tiny house in his backyard.

As they pick away at the splitting seams in American culture, Millet's characters shimmer with the sense of powerlessness we share in an era of mass overwhelm. A beautician in a waxing salon faces a sudden resurgence of grief in the midst of a bikini Brazilian; a couple sets up a camera to find out who's been slipping homophobic letters into their mailbox; a jilted urban planner stalks a man she met on a dating app.

In its rich warp and weft of humiliations and human error, Atavists returns to the trenchant, playful social commentary that made A Children's Bible a runaway hit. In these stories sharp observations of middle-class mores and sanctimony give way to moments of raw exposure and longing: Atavists performs an uncanny fictional magic, full of revelation but also hilarious, unpretentious, and warm.

Now celebrating its 75th anniversary, a trove of iconic horror stories from the legendary Shirley Jackson, the master of the haunted tale (The New York Times Book Review). Featuring an introduction by A. M. Homes.

One of the darkest, most nightmarish stories of the twentieth century, Shirley Jackson's The Lottery created a sensation when it was first published in 1948. This lucid tale of a sleepy town's annual lottery--and the monstrous desires it awakens--endures as an essential classic of American fiction.
The Lottery and Other Stories unites The Lottery with twenty-four wonderfully strange and equally terrifying short stories from the legendary Shirley Jackson. Together they demonstrate Jackson's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the horrible, the unsettling to the ominous--and showcase a true master at the height of her haunting powers.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE - PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD WINNER.

With a new foreword by Domenico Starnone, this stunning debut collection flawlessly charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.

With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide.

A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakastani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.

Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, these stories speak with passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and a baffling new world.

Transcendent tragicomedy.... Prepare to be devastated and made whole again. --The A.V. Club

Featuring:

- A young engaged couple forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices for their wedding.

- A pair of lonely commuters who ride the subway in silence, forever, eternally failing to make that longed-for contact.

- A struggling employee at a theme park of U.S. presidents who discovers that love can't be genetically modified.

And fifteen more tales of humor, romance, whimsy, cultural commentary, and crushing emotional vulnerability.

A new reissue of Babitz's collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s--decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Black Swans further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.

With an introduction by Stephanie Danler, bestselling author of Sweetbitter.

On the page, Babitz is pure pleasure--a perpetual-motion machine of no-stakes elation and champagne fizz. --The New Yorker