The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to find the answer to the question, “And then what happened?” Edited by Neil Gaiman, a literary magician whose acclaimed work defies easy categorization and transcends all boundaries, and “master anthologist” (Booklist) Al Sarrantonio, Stories is a groundbreaking collection that reinvigorates and expands the boundaries of imaginative fiction, affording some of the best writers in the world—from Peter Straub and Chuck Palahniuk to Roddy Doyle and Diana Wynne Jones, Stewart O’Nan and Joyce Carol Oates to Walter Mosley, Jodi Picoult, the volume’s editors, and others—the opportunity to work together, defend their craft, and realign misconceptions. A brilliant and visionary compendium of diverse tales, Stories will transform your view of the world and ignite a new appreciation for the limitless realm of exceptional fiction.

Over the last few decades, Edith Pearlman has staked her claim as one of the great practitioners of the short story. Her understanding and skill have earned her comparisons to Anton Chekhov, John Updike and Alice Munro. Her latest work, gathered in this stunning collection of twenty new stories, is an occasion for celebration. The stories in Honeydew are unmistakably by Pearlman; whole lives in ten pages. They are minutely observant of people, of their foibles and failings, but also of their moments of kindness and truth. Whether the characters are Somalian women who've suffered circumcision, a special child with pentachromatic vision or a staid professor of Latin unsettled by a random invitation to lecture on the mystery of life and death, Pearlman knows each of them intimately and reveals them with generosity.

"In 1973 celebrated writer and editor Harlan Ellison announced the third and final volume of his unprecedented anthology series, which began with Dangerous Visions and continued with Again, Dangerous Visions. But for reasons undisclosed, The Last Dangerous Visions was never completed. Provocative and controversial, socially conscious and politically charged, wildly imaginative yet deeply grounded, the thirty-two never-before-published stories, essays, and poems in The Last Dangerous Visions stand as a testament to Ellison's lifelong pursuit of art, uniting a diverse range of science fiction writers both famous and newly minted, including Max Brooks, Edward Bryant, Cecil Castellucci, James S. A. Corey, Howard Fast, P. C. Hodgell, Dan Simmons, Robert Sheckley, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Mildred Downey Broxon, and Cory Doctorow, among others. The historic publication of The Last Dangerous Visions completes the long-awaited final chapter in an incredible literary legacy."--Amazon.

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.

Now in paperback, a "tantalizingly poetic" ( NYTBR ) collection in which Levy " conquer s] the genre which demands she fashion perfect jewels" ( The Independent ). The stories in Black Vodka , by acclaimed author Deborah Levy, are perfectly formed worlds unto themselves, written in elegant yet economical prose. She is a master of the short story, exploring loneliness and belonging; violence and tenderness; the ephemeral and the solid; the grotesque and the beautiful; love and infidelity; and fluid identities national, cultural, and personal. In "Shining a Light," a woman's lost luggage is juxtaposed with far more serious losses. An icy woman seduces a broken man in "Vienna," and a man's empathy threatens to destroy him in "Stardust Nation." "Cave Girl" features a girl who wants to be a different kind of woman--she succeeds in a shocking way. A deformed man seeks beauty amid his angst in the title story. These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humor and curiosity. Levy's stories will send you tumbling into a rabbit hole, and you won't be able to scramble out until long after you've turned the last page.

From the Publisher: New Directions has long published poet William Carlos Williams' entire body of short fiction as The Farmers' Daughters (1961). This new edition of The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams contains all fifty-two stories combining the early collections The Knife of the Times (1932), Life Along the Possaic (1938) with the later collection Make Light of It (1950) and the great long story, "The Farmers' Daughters" (1956). When these stories first appeared, their vitality and immediacy shocked many readers, as did the blunt, idiosyncratic speech of Williams' immigrant and working-class characters. But the passage of time has silenced the detractors, and what shines in the best of these stories is the unflinching honesty and deep humanity of Williams' portraits, burnished by the seeming artlessness which only the greatest masters command.

One need only read the first lines of Tess Slesinger's title story-or indeed any of her stories-to know that hers is a unique literary voice, one that rivets a reader's attention to the page from the very beginning and holds it to the very end. Hers is, one soon discovers, also a wholly feminine voice: compelling, filled with insight, acute at observation, sure of its tone, and everywhere discovering the reality behind human appearances and pretensions. This is a remarkable collection of short stories by a brilliant young writer who was cut off in her prime when she died of cancer in 1945. “An intensely feminine book, in which bleakness, unemployment, heartache and heartlessness are combined with an agreeable feeling of settling down for conversation with an intimate, disillusioned, gossipy, malicious and often witty friend.”- New Statesman . “A genuine short-story writer...she has a good eye for the little tombstones of life.”- Nation .