The Coast of Good Intentions
10 best books like The Coast of Good Intentions (Michael Byers): Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories, Death Is Not an Option, Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories, Among the Missing, Women and Other Animals: Stories, The Collected Stories, The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird, It's Beginning to Hurt, Who I Was Supposed to Be, Harmony of the World: Stories
| Author | Kevin Wilson |
| ISBN | 0061579025 |
Kevin Wilson's characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just...
| Author | Suzanne Rivecca |
| ISBN | 0393072568 |
Death Is Not an Option is a bold, dazzling debut collection about girls and women in a world where sexuality and self-delusion collide. In these stories, a teacher obsesses over a student who comes to class with scratch marks on his face; a Catholic girl graduating high school finds a warped kind of redemption...
Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories
| Author | Sandra McDonald |
| ISBN | 1590210948 |
A writer of whimsy and passion, Sandra McDonald has collected her most evocative short fiction to offer readers in Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories. A beautiful adventuress from the ancient city of New Dalli sets off to reclaim her missing lover. What secrets does she hide beneath her silk skirts?...
| Author | Dan Chaon |
| ISBN | 0345441613 |
In this haunting, bracing new collection, Dan Chaon shares stories of men, women, and children who live far outside the American Dream, while wondering which decision, which path, or which accident brought them to this place. Chaon mines the psychological landscape of his characters to dazzling...
| 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 | Reynolds Price |
| ISBN | 0743244990 |
For more than four decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, with a career remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms embraced. Though perhaps best known as a novelist and poet, Price here likewise demonstrates his mastery of the short...
The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird
| Author | Douglas Thin |
| ISBN | 1590170261 |
"The true weird tale has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains. An atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; a hint of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension...
| Author | James Lasdun |
| ISBN | 0374299021 |
The stories in this remarkable collection--including "An Anxious Man," winner of the National Short Story Prize (UK)--are vibrant and gripping. James Lasdun's great gift is his unfailing psychological instinct for the vertiginous moments when the essence of a life discloses itself. With forensic...
| Author | Susan Perabo |
| ISBN | 0743290372 |
Behind every face in Who I Was Supposed to Be is a singular quirk to explore, a peculiarity to celebrate. In Susan Perabo's world, nothing can be taken for granted: here, a retired grocer takes up jewel theft in his twilight years; a data processor squanders her inheritance on one of Princess Diana's gowns;...
Harmony of the World: Stories
| Author | Charles Baxter |
| ISBN | 0679776516 |
In these ten stories, Charles Baxter shows his genius in making his characters' everyday sufferings--and occasional fragile joys--seem utterly unprecedented, even as he reminds us, gently and with a sly comic twist, that everything they feel is only the collateral damage of being human. Whether...
| Author | William Lychack |
| ISBN | 0618302433 |
Acclaimed for The Wasp Eater, his first collection of stories, Lychack focuses now on a fascinating range of human behavior. With a fluency of tone and a gifted eye, he examines the dark and unfathomable moments in the most committed relationships; the small distances that stretch into miles between...
| Author | Jean Thompson |
| ISBN | 0743203011 |
In this acclaimed collection, Jean Thompson limns the lives of ordinary people -- a lonely social worker, a down-and-out junkie, a divorced cop on the night shift -- to extraordinary effect. With wisdom and sympathy and spare eloquence, she writes of their inarticulate longings for communion and...
| Author | Lara Vapnyar |
| ISBN | 1400033896 |
There Are Jews in My House is one of the most striking debuts of recent years. Tracing the lives and aspirations of Russians living in Moscow and Brooklyn, these poignant, sad and funny stories create a luminous new literary world.
In the title story, set during the Second World War, Galina,...
| Author | Quim Monzó |
| ISBN | 1934824194 |
wow.
i suspect this book will do really well when it comes out in july, because just by putting it up here on goodreads.com, i have had three requests to borrow/have my copy, and i didn't even have to write an encouraging review for it or put up animal pictures to attract attention. but i will take...
| Author | Ardashir Vakil |
| ISBN | 0140264892 |
'I have been bunking off school to go to the movies. I have stolen money, I have sold things, I have double-crossed my friends and - I cannot bear to think of the thought - have been into the bathroom with my brother's friend, Darab.'
Eight-year old Cyrus Readmoney, son of wealthy parents, voluntarily...
| Author | Matthew Klam |
| ISBN | 0375726616 |
The New Yorker magazine named Matt Klam one of the twenty best young writers in America, and the seven stories that comprise Sam the Cat are all the proof we need.
Knowing, perceptive, and wickedly funny, Matt Klam loves his characters but spares them nothing: the swaggering womanizer Sam falls...
| Author | Leonardo Sciascia |
| ISBN | 0940322536 |
Leonardo Sciascia was an outstanding and controversial presence in twentieth-century Italian literary and intellectual life. Writing about his native Sicily and its culture of secrecy and suspicion, Sciascia matched sympathy with skepticism, unflinching intellect with a street fighter's...
| Author | Andrew Sean Greer |
| ISBN | 0312241267 |
In the title story of this collection, neighborhood boys crouch in a backyard toolshed, and conspire to prove their piano teachers to be witches. In "Cannibal Kings," a disillusioned young man accompanies a troubled boy on a tour of prep schools through the Pacific Northwest, only to realize that he...
| Author | Brian Evenson |
| ISBN | 1566892252 |
Illustrated by graphic novelist Zak Sally, Brian Evenson’s hallucinatory and darkly comic stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche and peer into the gaping moral chasm that opens when we become estranged from ourselves. From...
| Author | Lee Smith |
| ISBN | 0449002268 |
A teenage girl tells the painful and hilarious tale of her philandering father's fall from grace and curious effort to save his marriage. A professional "fiancee" chronicles her Caribbean cruise with three Atlanta developers. A young woman concocts an imaginary brother to impress her friends --...
| Author | Scott Anderson |
| ISBN | 0330368540 |
My good friend Stan gave me this book on Mancation (a place where men go to drink themselves into submission and read) and it is nothing short of amazing. I didn't add it to Goodreads until I was a little more than half way through and was surprised to find a couple of bad reviews, I don't get that at all. Just...
| Author | Carol Shields |
| ISBN | 0679313273 |
Carol Shields, the Pulitzer Prize-winner author of the novels Unless, The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party was also a renowned short story writer. Now readers can enjoy all three of Carol Shields’s short story collections – Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival –...
| Author | Margaret Lazarus Dean |
| ISBN | 0743297229 |
It is the early 1980s, and America is in love with space. Growing up in the shadow of Cape Canaveral, young Dolores Gray has it particularly bad: she dreams of becoming an astronaut.At school, Dolores finds herself caught between her desire for popularity and her secret friendship with the smartest...
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards
| Author | Robert Boswell |
| ISBN | 1555975240 |
An enthralling and wise new collection from the author of Century's Son and one of America's most respected writers
I was twenty-nine years old and wanted to change before I hit thirty. Clete and I developed a plan for me . . . a plan that would work all that summer and beyond. Even after I left the...
