In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

Author	Raymond Carver
ISBN	0679723692

Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another.  These twelve stories mark a turning point in Carver’s career and “overflow with the danger,...

Author	George Saunders
ISBN	0099595818

Have you ever heard a politically incorrect joke and laughed, and then felt guilty, but then laughed again?

Have you ever driven by a car wreck and slowed down to see the emergency response vehicles, and the vehicle made to look like a damaged accordion?

Have you ever watched a reality...

Author	Claire Vaye Watkins
ISBN	1594488258

Winner of the 2012 Story Prize
Recipient of the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Foundation Award
A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" fiction writer of 2012

Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents...

Author

Joy Williams

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams has a one-of-a-kind gift for capturing both the absurdity and the darkness of everyday life. In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being.

This series of short,...

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	Stanley Elkin
ISBN	1564783421

A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Ellerbee is a good husband, a good employer, a good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings--until he is killed during a senseless liquor-store hold-up. Suddenly smote by a deity as indifferent as history, Ellerbee is off on a whirlwind tour of a distressingly...

Author	Grace Paley
ISBN	0140075577

Wry and chatty, Grace Paley’s debut collection The Little Disturbances of Man thoughtfully explores the interiority of Jewish women living in New York. In lucid prose Paley fully renders an eclectic mix of immigrant and second-generation voices across these ten lively stories, which portray...

Author	Stanley Elkin
ISBN	1564783324

Vendibility

In that mysterious place between the conscious and unconscious, that murky reality after sleep but before waking, that long lonely road... well, from the Lower East Side of Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge to Williamsburg, there writes Stanley Elkin. A Bad Man is Elkin at...

Author	Mary Miller
ISBN	1631492160

Mary Miller seizes the mantle of southern literature with this wry tale of middle age and the unexpected turns a life can take.

Like her predecessors Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver, Mary Miller brings an essential voice to her generation. Building on her critically acclaimed novel, The Last...