James Salter is one of the finest writers of our time. From his first published story in the Paris Review in 1968, Salter's work in the form has been universally acclaimed: five have appeared in O. Henry collections, Dusk and Other Stories won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, and more recently he was the recipient of PEN USA's 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2010 REA Prize for the short story, and the 2012 PEN/Malamud Award. Each indelible narrative in the Collected Stories is marked by Salter's great literary grace, his ability to show the subtleties of a character or situation with precision, and his equally assured ability to command reversals of fortune or shocking revelations. The stories concern men and women in their most intimate moments, struggling with loss, desire, or the burden of memory. A fallen rider lies in a field, alone but for the knowledge that these may be her last twenty minutes. A man assisting in his wife's suicide is devastated by the aftermath. Two New York attorneys on a trip to Italy discover that their recent wealth affords them the possibility of a higher life, the reality of which is somewhat sordid. A young woman is unable to share a life-changing piece of news with her closest friends. Including his two published collections, Dusk and Other Stories (1988) and Last Night (2005), and the previously uncollected 'Charisma', this volume confirms indisputably that 'James Salter is a master of the great American short story'(The Times).

Masterly collection of short stories by an American novelist at the height of her powers. It is the stories upon which Cynthia Ozick's literary reputation rests. She writes about bitterness, cruelty and compulsion with brutal acuity and tenderness. She has created a timeless collection in which Greek mythology, superstition and the religious and cultural experience of the Jewish diaspora in America collide. The Pagan Rabbi is seduced by a tree sprite after seeing his daughter rescued from drowning by a water sprite. Such ecstasy is not permitted to mortals and so the scholar must die. He hangs himself with his prayer shawl as he watches the strangely beautiful nymph decay. In Envy, a Yiddish poet who watches the success of a contemporary, becomes very like a character in an I.B. Singer story entrapped by his anguish and haunted by the memory of a child. In the Doctor's Wife, the most gentle of the stories, a poor doctor not unlike Chekhov endures family life in which he is adored by his three sisters and oppressed by his family obligations. In these stories, we see Ozick defining herself and her literary territory. The stories may be read purely as evocations of Jewish experience, where time seems to have by-passed these characters. In the Butterfly and the Traffic Light, Jerusalem is seen upon a hill as only it can be in legend, and America is said not to have cities scarred by battles. This is a dazzling collection of short stories by an internationally celebrated novelist.

Martha was the youngest of sixteen, handpicked reporters who filed accurate, confidential reports on the human stories behind the statistics of the Depression directly to Roosevelt's White House. From these pages, we understand the real cost of sudden destitution on a vast scale. We taste the dust in the mouth, smell the disease and feel the hopelessness and the despair. And here, too, we can hear the earliest cadences of a writer who went on to become, arguably, the greatest female war reporter of the 20th century.

Thirteen interrelated stories, several of which appeared in The New Yorker magazine, are about the longing for friendship, how we achieve new intimacies for ourselves, and how slowly, inexplicably, we can lose them.

From a writer whose every book is a literary event, a superbly accomplished work of fiction. "Last Night is a spellbinding collection of stories about passion-by turns fiery and subdued, destructive and redemptive, alluring and devastating. In ten powerful stories, Salter portrays men and women in their most intimate moments. A book dealer faces the truth about his life-as it is and never will be again-when he is visited unexpectedly by his brash former girlfriend. A lonely married woman, after a disturbing encounter with a drunken poet at a dinner party, finds herself irresistibly drawn to his animal surrogate, a huge tawny-eyed dog. A lover of poetry must come to terms with his wife's request to give up what may be his most treasured relationship. And in the title story, already hailed by Frank Conroy as "a masterpiece, clearly and without question," a translator, tormented by an agonizing sense of inevitability, assists in his wife's suicide even as he performs a last betrayal. A haunting symphony of desire, memory, and loss-from a writer whose assured style and emotional insight make him one of our most compelling voices at work today.

Readers coming to Michaels's work for the first time will find the early, pointed stories as well as some of his later works that have never been collected. Michaels's early stories are written with a frantic sexuality that displays his distinctive dark humor. In "Fingers and Toes," recurring characters Henry and Phillip weigh the value of their friendship against their encounters with the same woman through a set of urban hallucinations characteristic of the early stories.

Jewish-American Stories (Mentor Series)

Ann VanderMeer is the Hugo Award-winning editor of Weird Tales and the founder of Buzzcity Press. She currently serves as an acquiring fiction editor for Tor.com, Cheeky Frawg Books, and Weirdfictionreview.com. She has also won a World Fantasy Award and a British Fantasy Award for coediting The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. She is the coeditor of numerous titles, including The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, Steampunk, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, and The Steampunk Bible. Jeff VanderMeer is a columnist, a publisher, and the author of several books, including Booklife

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for "Two Hearts" Winner of the Washington Science Fiction Small Press Award for "El Regalo" Nominee for the Mythopoeic Award The beloved author of The Last Unicorn returns with the signature elegance and originality that has earned him comparisons to J. R. R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, and Kurt Vonnegut. Readers seeking magic, wonder, and mystery need look no further. In these resonant new stories, some appearing for the first time, you will find bold adventure, sly humor, and resounding depth. In the thrilling and beautiful "Two Hearts," return to the extraordinary world of The Last Unicorn . Observe the World's Most Annoying Eight-Year-Old bend time, fate, and household chores to his sorcerous will. Learn how Soukyan met the Fox, and why a stolen dream might be more dangerous than an unstoppable assassin. Discover the price of a merman's treasure, match wits with the man who saw right through Sherlock Holmes, and redefine feline style with Gordon, the self-made cat. The Line Between is a captivating blend of traditional and contemporary fantasy, crafted by the field's most remarkable imagination. It is a collection you will return to again and again and treasure forever.

Through his distinctive fusion of modernist daring and traditional storytelling, Bernard Malamud became one of postwar America's most important writers, his work an inspiration for and lasting influence on novelists who have come after him, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth most notably among them. The second volume of the Library of America's Malamud edition brings together three novels of the 1960s: A New Life (1961), a satiric campus novel set in the Pacific Northwest (based on the author's experiences at Oregon State), in which native New Yorker Seymour Levin finds himself confronted not only with a new landscape but with erotic intrigue, university politics, and an appointment that isn't quite what he had expected it to be. The Fixer (1966) is the gripping saga of a Jew imprisoned in pre-Revolutionary Russia after being falsely accused of the ritual murder of a twelve-year-old boy. The novel-in-stories Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969) follows the comic misadventures, sexual and otherwise, of a failed American painter in Italy. In the ten unforgettable stories concluding the collection, Malamud shows himself to be an heir to the tradition of Hawthorne, Chekhov, and Kafka, and at his best--"Idiots First," "The Jewbird," "The German Refugee"--their equal--

Raised in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants, and coming of age in Depression-era New York, Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) began his career writing stories of unsparing precision and power, plumbing the depths of an impoverished urban world. His early, naturalistic style evolved into an inventive, often surreal idiom that blurs reality and fantasy. His first novel, The Natural (1952), is a dazzling reimagining of the possibilities of sports fiction, and it remains one of the greatest and most beloved novels about baseball ever written. In The Assistant (1957), Malamud created a searing drama of guilt and redemption about a struggling grocer's family and the mysterious drifter who comes to rob, and then to work at, his store, transforming all of their lives in unforeseen ways. Joining these novels are twenty-six short stories, ranging from the early tale "Armistice," set in Brooklyn during the troubling weeks of the German invasion of France in 1940, to one of his deepest and most celebrated stories, "The Magic Barrel," a deep fable about a rabbinical student and the matchmaker who leads him to an utterly unexpected bride--

Twenty-two captivating stories where queer culture and fey folklore meet. The legends of Fairyland tell that one should never taste the food or sip the drink, or else risk being caught there forever. But the tempting morsels in So Fey are irresistible! Lambda Award-nominated editor Steve Berman brings together acclaimed fantasy writers with some of the brightest names in speculative and LGBT fiction to create tales that are moving and magical. These stories of romance and grief, adolescence and identity, struggle and hope will enchant readers who long for a fantastic escape--and a wonderful twist! One sample of this bewitching treat is sure to trap you in its pages! From the pains of loss in Holly Black's "The Coat of Stars" to dealing with issues of identity in Richard Bowes's "The Wand's Boy" to Melissa Scott's look at the dangers of love in "Mister Seeley" So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction takes you into worlds that are at once amazing and familiar. With tales that tear and tug at the heart but never cease to enchant, this exciting and unique collection will long last in the minds of readers.

From the author of the acclaimed novel Living Dead Girl , a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, come twelve haunting stories about people caught somewhere between love and madness. Simplify mines the often surreal terrain of people on the margins of life: from the man with a photo of Elvis bleeding on his wall in "Comeback Special," to the profoundly troubled boy genius of the title story "Simplify," to the family that must traverse "The Distance Between Us" to finally get to the truth about their son the murderer, each story hums with sharp drama, mystery, wonder, and startling humor. Simplify, the first collection of short fiction by Tod Goldberg, portrays a world where redemption, hope, and violence are never too far apart. "A keen voice, profound insight...Tod Goldberg's fine ear for dialogue and for the spoken nuances of social microstrata enable him to dispense with reams of descriptive background and cut straight to the heart of the matter. If sometimes his overwhelmed characters fail to fully engage emotionally, their deadpan delivery of jolting ironies reaches to laugh-out-loud heights of insight. Even the collection's title has a sardonic ring. While hardly simple, "Simplify" is devilishly entertaining." --Los Angeles Times "Tod Goldberg's collection, "Simplify," contradicts its title: Goldberg complicates things, in brilliant and moving ways, in stories that live along the border between the mundane and the surreal." --Chicago Tribune "Simplify by Tod Goldberg is lovely and odd." --New York Journal-News Everybody dies at the end of a Tod Goldberg story. Well, almost. The ones who don’t die — violently, through hangings, shots to the heart, slit wrists, drownings, murders — are left to deal with the emotional and psychological fallout. They are the mothers, fathers, younger brothers and sisters in Goldberg’s creepy, strangely sardonic, definitely disturbing version of Middle America...And that, of course, is where the fun begins." --LA Weekly "Goldberg's work is an eclectic collection of realist and surrealist storytelling...startling and shuddersome." --TimeOut Chicago "It’s rare to find a book that can evoke such strong emotions within a single collection, however, Tod Goldberg’s Simplify is a force to be reckoned with." --Bookslut.com "The stories on the whole are powerful, provocative and a pleasure to read. The title entry, in particular, is a minor masterpiece." --Crime Fiction Dossier "The stories in this collection hum with speed and ferocity and a raw energy that exposes your nerve endings, wakes up places inside of you that you had happily lulled to sleep. The sharp-edged, hard-luck boys that populate these pages know exactly how you feel at two in the morning and are telling the truth about it. Simplify is ruthless and tender, truthful, full of heart and scary in all the right ways." --Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness; Sight Hound "Energized, engaging, highly readable-- each one of Tod Goldberg's stories is a nugget of originality. I started each new story with fresh interest, wondering where he would take me next-- to bleeding Elvis, or the Salton Sea, or through the strange way childhood cruelty rearranges adulthood. A terrific collection." --Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt; Willful Creatures "With Simplify Tod Goldberg places himself in the company of such modern masters of short fiction as Dan Chaon, Rick De Marinis and Thom Jones, demonstrating a broad range of styles and moods that he manages to coalesce into a single and frankly, pretty disturbing whole." --Scott Phillips, author of The Walkaway; The Ice Harvest "Tod Goldberg is an amazing true original who plunges deep into the scary heart of our American life. Hilarious and unnerving, charming and creepy, dusted with a strange, ineffable melancholy, these stories made the hair on my head stand up and my eyes fall out. I recommend Simplify to everyone, everywhere. Read it right now!" --Dan Chaon, aut

In the field of mad science, women have for too long been ignored, their triumphs misattributed to mere men. Society has seen the laboratory as the province of men. Jacob's Ladder electric arcs, death rays, even test tubes have phallic connotations, subliminally reinforcing the patriarchy. The mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, advocated that women appear more masculine to earn respect. If Marie Curie had been allowed to develop her Atomic Gendarmerie for the Institut du radium, surely she would have been awarded her third Nobel Prize, for Peace. Thankfully, the women working to dangerous and/or questionable ends in the pages of Daughters of Frankenstein are unafraid of the patriarchy--indeed, as lesbian mad scientists, they prefer the company and comforts of their own gender. Androids? Pfeh, the gynoid is superior. Etheric dynamos have a more pleasing design, one that is vulvar, than Tesla coils. Eighteen imaginative, if not insane, women; eighteen stories told by some of the finest writers working in queer speculative fiction: Traci Castleberry, Sean Eads, Gemma Files, Amy Griswold, and Melissa Scott.

Three women. Three holidays. Three stories to make that time of year a lot more fun. This collection of three stories about three beloved winter celebrations is Red Dress Ink's first holiday title.

"Jacob Appel's acrobatic imagination is always a thrill to watch in action. These stories fly through the air and grip your heart. Appel's naturalness as a storyteller makes The Liars' Asylum a total pleasure, a collection in a league of its own. Each story-- there are no duds here-- engages and entertains. Each is beautifully measured and composed, populated by characters I worried for, crushed on, and hoped with."-- Kelly Luce "In this excellent collection of stories, Jacob Appel mines everything for what it is and what it might be: the ordinary, the bizarre, the poignant. The voice, regardless of the narrator, is always crisp and exuberant, in ways subtle and fresh. I could say he is a writer to watch, but actually he is publishing well and frequently. He's a writer to read."-- Fred Leebron "While the plants and ponds might be aggressively artificial in Jacob Appel's newest collection of stories, there's not a single false note when it comes to Appel's characters and their intertwined lives. Romance blooms despite vast differences in ages and circumstance, and near connections plunge into a unique melancholy optimism that will propel readers from one story to the next."-- Suzanne Greenberg "Jacob M. Appel's brilliant new story collection manages to pull off the rarest of literary feats-- delivering eight fantastic stories, each as entertaining as it is philosophically rich. A book of laugh-out-loud wit braided with intellectual fearlessness, The Liars' Asylum offers delights for the mind on every page. Best of all, these irreverent, lovingly subversive stories upend dusty assumptions about what it means to be alive and allow the reader to experience her own existence with a fresh eye. A stunning book that will remain with you long after the last page is turned."-- Alethea Black "Across eight compelling stories, Jacob Appel offers us glimpses into the lives of people keeping secrets, broaching taboos, and testing the limits of their relationships. From a former teacher's suicide to an epidemic of storms that forces those caught in them to tell the truth, The Liars' Asylum beautifully and artfully exposes the mysteries and longings of the human heart."-- Anne Valente "Jacob M. Appel new collection, The Liars' Asylum , confirms his status as one of our most skillful, and appealing, practitioners of short fiction. Indeed, Appel is one of those blessed and nimble writers who, like Chekhov, can find a story anywhere. On ample display are his trademark first-person narrators (often young women), his deliciously light touch, his mastery of the 'reversal of fortune' moment. His new cast of characters includes a girl tasked with ensuring her aunt a 'beau, ' an immigrant Finn who teaches us the meaning of endurance, and a ER psychiatrist dealing with a mass hysteria of truth-telling. Appel's fiction is a brilliant and reassuring example of Horace's maxim: The role of the artist is to inform and delight."-- Catherine Browder

"This groundbreaking collection brings together 28 stunning stories by literary talents never before assembled in a single volume. With contributions from both established and bright new voices in lesbian fiction, 'Women on Women' ranges from the subtlety and restraint of Willa Cather's 'Tommy, the Unsentimental' to Sapphire's daring and highly erotic 'Eat' and Valerie Miner's suspenseful 'Trespassing.' Some of the stories are universal in theme - the joy and excitement of new romance, the ageless problems of family life, and the pain of lost love and of death. And many are written by or about members of racial, ethnic, and other minorities within the gay community. These are stories that offer stirring, eloquent, often passionate insights into the lesbian experience in a long-overdue collection that represents the best of lesbian short fiction from past to present"--Amazon.com.