The Collected Stories

Author	Saul Bellow
ISBN	0142437298

This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around him - he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friend - Herzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters...

Author

Iris Murdoch

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor both professionally and personally, and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung...

Author	Nadine Gordimer
ISBN	0140165347

In these sixteen stories ranging from the dynamics of family life to the worldwide confusion of human values, Nadine Gordimer gives us access to many lives in places as far apart as suburban London, Mozambique, a mythical island, and South Africa. In "Some Are Born to Sweet Delight, " a girl's innocent...

Author	Barbara Kingsolver
ISBN	0571171788

Mother and adopted daughter, Taylor and Turtle Greer, are back in this spellbinding sequel about family, heartbreak and love.

Six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam during a tour of the Grand Canyon with her guardian, Taylor. Her insistence on what she has...

Author

William Maxwell

My heart was sliced to ribbons by this story. The narrator, an elderly man whose boyhood was scarred by a horrendous event, attempts to make sense of it all – and to make amends, as he tells it – 50 years down the road during the course of writing his memoirs.

In his memoirs, he talks about his...

Author	Anthony Powell
ISBN	0006540414

Memories of childhood and perturbations of the present…
The Greeks, because they so greatly feared the Furies, had named them the Eumenides – the Kindly Ones – flattery intended to appease their terrible wrath.
But despite the flattery the Kindly Ones stick to their unkindly doings…
The...

Author	John McGahern
ISBN	0679744010

This is the first set of short stories I've read by McGahern. Most were excellent. One dragged ("Peaches"), one was extremely disturbing ("Lavin") but many others left you wanting more, like a good short story should.
While McGahern was a great writer in general, I love the way the guy wrote about...