The Spot

Author	Robert Stone
ISBN	0618386254

In Fun with Problems, Robert Stone demonstrates once again that he is “one of our greatest living writers” (Los Angeles Times). The stories in this new collection share the signature blend of longing, violence, and black humor with which Stone illuminates the dark corners of the human soul....

Author	William Trevor
ISBN	0670022063

A marvelous collection from "the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language" ("The New Yorker").
Four-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, three-time winner of the Whitbread Prize, and five-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, William Trevor is one of the most acclaimed...

Author	Ann Beattie
ISBN	1439168741

When Ann Beattie began publishing short stories in The New Yorker in the mid-seventies, she emerged with a voice so original, and so uncannily precise and prescient in its assessment of her characters’ drift and narcissism, that she was instantly celebrated as a voice of her generation. Her name...

Author	T. Coraghessan Boyle
ISBN	0670021423

A superb new collection from "a writer who can take you anywhere" ("The New York Times")
In the title story of this rich new collection, T.C. Boyle has created so vivid and original a retelling of the story of Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France,...

Author	Patricia Engel
ISBN	0802170781

Fresh, accomplished, and fearless, Vida marks the debut of Patricia Engel, a young author of immense talent and promise. Vida follows a single narrator, Sabina, as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of...

Author	Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN	0061996521

Joyce Carol Oates is not only one of our most important novelists and literary critics, she is also an unparalleled master of the short story. "Sourland"--sixteen previously uncollected stories that explore the power of violence, loss, and grief to shape the psyche as well as the soul--shows us an...

Author	Jennifer Gilmore
ISBN	1416571701

When Jennifer Gilmore’s first novel, Golden Country, was published, The New York Times Book Review called it "an ingeniously plotted family yarn" and praised her as an author who "enlivens the myth of the American Dream." Gilmore’s particular gift for distilling history into a hugely satisfying,...

Author	David Goodwillie
ISBN	1439157057

American Subversive is a book about belief turned inside-out. It's an intelligent and literary thriller, a thought-provoking peek into America's dark soul, and a veritable page turner. It's also the debut book for David Goodwillie, an author who is up to the task of unearthing the country's seductive...

Author	Ted Mooney
ISBN	0307272737

When Odile Mével, a French clothing designer, agrees to smuggle ceremonial May Day banners out of the former Soviet Union, she thinks she’s trading a few days’ inconvenience for a quick thirty thousand francs. Yet when she returns home to Paris to deliver the contraband to Turner, the American...

Author	David Rabe
ISBN	1439163332

A most curious and interesting tale in that it centers on the most granular details of moments that American soldiers experienced in the Vietnam War. Raw and crude at times, but I bet this is as close as a reader will get to a accurate depiction of how it felt to be a soldier in a conflict with so many more questions...

Author	A.L. Kennedy
ISBN	0224077872

..... of the broken hearted? Who had love that's now departed. And that is the theme of A.L. Kennedy's latest collection of short stories. Bleak, perhaps. But then you don't read A.L. Kennedy unless you can take her unflinching, precise, unsettling, razor sharp dissection of the pain that makes us human....

Author	Lisa Robertson
ISBN	1552452158

A New York Times Notable Book of 2010

Verses, essays, confessions, reports, translations, drafts, treatises, laments and utopias, 1995–2007. Collected by Elisa Sampedrin.

Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past — its ideas, its personages, its syntax — to construct...

Author

Edward Hirsch

A rich and significant collection of more than one hundred poems, drawn from a lifetime of “wild gratitude” in poetry.

In poems chronicling insomnia (“the blue-rimmed edge / of outer dark, those crossroads / where we meet the dead”), art and culture (poems on Edward Hopper and Paul...

Author	Harvey Swados
ISBN	1590170849

There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca, when I could no more have wanted to live any place else than I could have conceived of myself as a daddy, disciplining my boy and dandling my daughter.

So begins "Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn", which gives...

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	Barry Hannah
ISBN	0802119689

Once again, foiled by the inaccuracy and wholesale brutality of a five-tiered rating system. Barry Hannah, based on this collection, got slightly worse - or at least less concerned about the vagaries of plot and the finely tuned sentence - but the first two collections are simply astounding. If I weren't...

Author	Delmore Schwartz
ISBN	0811206807

Bi-Partisan Preview

I was introduced to Delmore Schwartz's writing from two different perspectives in the mid-70's.

It might come as little surprise that these introductions had to do with passions that persist to this day: music, literature and politics.

Firstly, I...

Author	Lucia Perillo
ISBN	0393083535

Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo’s story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them and are surprised when the world comes roaring back.


An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and...

Author	Richard Bausch
ISBN	0307266273

From the prizewinning novelist and world-renowned short-story writer, the author of 2008’s universally acclaimed novel Peace (“A brilliant one-act drama depicting the futility and moral complexity of combat” —The New York Times), eleven indelible new tales that showcase the electrifying...

Author	Saul Bellow
ISBN	0670842168

A trio of short works by the Nobel laureate and "greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century" (James Wood, The New Republic)

While Saul Bellow is known best for his longer fiction in award-winning novels such as The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, Something to Remember...

Author	Donald Barthelme
ISBN	0671807714

"Fragments are the only forms I trust" is one fat clue the reader might net as to the run of the current in these strange, witty, surreal short stories.

At first bewildered glance, each piece seems a montage of floating, congruent, non-congruent, time-dandling events, words, things; a montage...

Author	Bernard Malamud
ISBN	0374270376

Un cuore inclinato

I racconti di Malamud splendono di umiltà e grazia, sono delicatamente spirituali, hanno corpo di sogno e di illusione. Contengono in un'interiorità poetica consistente e preziosa la sorpresa della rivelazione, il tesoro lirico, il rinnovamento musicale. Speranza...

Author	Thomas Lynch
ISBN	0393042073

Heart-rending stories of life and death: a debut fiction collection by the award-winning author of The Undertaking.

A Methodist minister gone astray, a grieving trout bum gone fishing with his father’s remains, an artist overwhelmed by incarnate beauty—these are just a few of the iconic...

Author	Padgett Powell
ISBN	1936787318

Really??!? I'm not a great literary critic, but I am really wondering how much the publisher paid or the favors they had to call in to gain blurbs in support of this mess. I mean, really, the book's title should have been, PLEASE PASS THE CRACK PIPE AND LET ME HAVE ANOTHER HIT OF ACID. It was like reading a piece...