Distortions

Author	Anna Kavan
ISBN	0393302849

‘Whatever I am, I’m among the lost things—I do know that.’

To enter the works of Anna Kavan is to enter a swirling, menacing reality where inexorable doom weighs heavy through each word. Each story in Julia and the Bazooka is comprised of a thinly-fictionalized version of Kavan’s...

Author	Richard Ford
ISBN	0099448971

Richard Ford with Raymond Carver

This collection of ten short stories published as part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series is Richard Ford at his best. Certainly, Ford would go on to write a string of first-rate novels, but these short stories are some of the finest American...

Author	Kevin Canty
ISBN	0375708006

The characters in Kevin Canty’s new collection are people we all know. People who are perhaps ourselves, searching, often in the wrong places, for something meaningful, or real, or at least, for a moment, right. Here are couples like Vincent and Laurie, who after beginning an ill-timed relationship,...

Author	Bobbie Ann Mason
ISBN	0375758437

"These stories will last," said Raymond Carver of Shiloh and Other Stories when it was first published, and almost two decades later this stunning fiction debut and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award has become a modern American classic. In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky...

Author	Joy Williams
ISBN	0394729129

Joy Williams beloved dog turned on her. She had to put him down. I used to have a doberman named Sanchez a la Mancha. My brother rescued him from a dire situation. Sanchez was understandably crazy. A lot of other people's pets have passed into my company over the years and that's what happened there. I had...

Author	Richard Yates
ISBN	0312420811

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic...

Author	Thom Jones
ISBN	0571179452

Thom Jones's second collection of stories takes its readers into an edgy, overadrenalized world of desire, mania and rage. Following his extraordinary debut in The Pugilist at Rest, Thom Jones returned with a collection of unparalleled fire and vision. Jones takes us from down-and-out in America...

Author	Deborah Eisenberg
ISBN	0671024620

Deborah Eisenberg's deeply etched and mysterious stories focus on individuals grappling with the dislocations, ironies, and compromises levied by ordinary reality and the vivid, troubling worlds her characters inhabit. In 'The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor, ' a messenger arrives to conduct...

Author	Anton Chekhov
ISBN	0140150358

Anton Chekhov remarked toward the close of his life that people would stop reading him a year after his death. But his literary stature and popularity have grown steadily with the years, and he is accounted the single most important influence on the development of the modern short story.

Edited...

Author	Bonnie Jo Campbell
ISBN	0743203070

The stories in this prizewinning debut collection encompass train wrecks, circus acts, river journeys, transspecies transmogrification, and growing up and growing old around the small towns of Michigan. Without glamorizing poverty, Bonnie Jo Campbell details a vision in which shabbiness, beauty,...

Author	Charles D'Ambrosio
ISBN	0316171255

I purchased this book after reading one of the short stories ("Her Real Name") in a fiction anthology. The story was so incredible that I wanted to read everything that I could find by the same author. (I ordered his other book, The Dead Fish Museum, at the same time. I have already read it and reviewed it.)

This...

Author	Mary Gordon
ISBN	0375423168

The masterly stories of Mary Gordon return us to the pleasure of this writer's craft and to her monumental talent as an observer of character and of the ever-fading American Dream. These pieces encompass the pre- and postwar Irish American family life she circles in the early Temporary Shelter series,...

Author	Susan Cahill
ISBN	0451614453

Kate Chopin (1851-1904): The Story of an Hour
Edith Wharton (1862-1937): The Other Two
Willa Cather (1873-1947): A Wagner Matinée
Colette (1873-1947): The Secret Woman
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946): Miss Furr and Miss Skeene
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): The New Dress
Contents
Katherine...

Author	Charles Baxter
ISBN	0679776494

Baxter dives into the undercurrents of middle-class American life in these eleven arresting, often mesmerizing stories. Whether they know it or not, Baxter's characters are floating above an abyss of unruly desire, inexplicable dread, unforeseen tragedy, and sudden moments of grace.

A...

Author	Brady Udall
ISBN	0393335542

“Funny, unpredictable, and abounding with strange beauty . . . a fierce new voice of the American West.”—Outside

Exploding with an unsettling exuberance, Brady Udall’s stories traverse a geography of lost love, fragmented lives, and satisfying revenge. From the night a six-foot-three...

Author	Amy L. Clark
ISBN	0978984838

Fiction. The four chapbooks collected in A PECULIAR FEELING OF RESTLESSNESS, three of them finalists and one of them the winner of the Rose Metal Press first annual short short chapbook contest, all revel in the succinctness of their form, the underlying tension anchored beneath each story of 1,000...

Author	Frederick Barthelme
ISBN	0802134378

Frederick Barthelme's wry and wonderful stories have given us a stunning, cautionary, funny, sometimes bleak, and often transcendent portrait of contemporary life in the sprawl of suburban America. Barthelme made his remarkable debut with these tender and affectionate stories, most of which...

Author	Terrence Holt
ISBN	0393071219

In the Valley of the Kings marks the extraordinary debut of Terrence Holt, who fifteen years ago abandoned a promising writing career to practice medicine. Moved by his patients’ valor in the face of death, seeking to comprehend the mysteries revealed at their bedside, Holt has taken up fiction again....

Author	Jason Brown
ISBN	1890447471

“Everything Natalie said seemed, to herself, to have been said better by him. He was less fond of speaking, however, than he was of hitting people in the face, which seemed a more likely source of her love to those of us who knew him,” begins Jason Brown’s linked collection of beautifully haunted,...

Author	Allan Gurganus
ISBN	0375704272

In these eleven stories, Allan Gurganus--author of the highly acclaimed Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All--gives heartbreaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires and triumphs of a grand cast of Americans.

Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family...

Author	Ryan Harty
ISBN	0877458693

The vast, unsettling landscape of the American Southwest is as much a character in Ryan Harty's debut collection, Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona, as the men and women who inhabit its award-winning stories. In eight vivid tales of real life in the west, Harty reminds us that life's greatest challenge...

Author	Laurie Colwin
ISBN	0060958944

This is the third Colwin book I've read. I embarked on reading her books because I loved Happy All the Time. However, I am disappointed so far in her other books. I found this one to be very mediocre. There were a few problems with this book, I think. The main one is that there was something uneven about the...

Author	Thomas McGuane
ISBN	1400041562

A superb collection of stories--his first in twenty years--from one of our most acclaimed literary figures, whom "The New York Times Book Review" has called "a writer of the first magnitude."
Place exerts the power of destiny in these ten stories of lives uncannily recognizable and unforgettably...

Author

Mary Robison

Chosen from Robison's three long-unavailable collections, along with four new stories, Tell Me reflects the early brilliance as well as the fulfilled promise of Mary Robison's literary career. In these stories (most of which have appeared in The New Yorker), we enter her sly world of plotters, absconders,...