Books We Read

In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-two interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents hoping that the alcohol seeping through their skins might help him sleep, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who tells his stories long after people stop listening, and Jimmy Many Horses, dying of cancer, who writes letters on stationary that reads "From the Death Bed of Jimmy Many Horses III," even though he actually writes then on his kitchen table. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and mostly poetically between modern Indians and the traditions of the past.

A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territory–a place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can illumine the arc of an entire life. The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a “frizz of reddish hair,” just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl’s practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoon’s wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime. Men and women are subtly revealed. Personal histories, both complex and simple, unfold in rich detail of circumstance and feeling. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage provides the deep pleasures and rewards that Alice Munro’s large and ever- growing audience has come to expect.

DUBLINERS is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914.

Classic Bradbury, this collection of tales offers images that are as keen as a tattooist's needle and as colorful as the inks that stain the body. Featuring a new Introduction, "The Illustrated Man" presents 18 startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin.

A newly expanded edition of Octavia E. Butler's only collection of short stories. Butler graces new mansions of thought with her eloquent, distinguished and poignant prose. Although this book is little in size, its ideas are splendidly large.' - Booklist 'The title story is justly famous. Splendid pieces, set forth in calm, lucid prose with never a word wasted.' - Kirkus Reviews This New York Times notable Book includes the Hugo and the Nebula awards winner Bloodchild and the Hugo Award winner Speech Shounds.'

From the beloved and award-winning author Junot Díaz, a spellbinding saga of a family's journey through the New World.   A coming-of-age story of unparalleled power, Drown introduced the world to Junot Díaz's exhilarating talents. It also introduced an unforgettable narrator-- Yunior, the haunted, brilliant young man who tracks his family's precarious journey from the barrios of Santo Domingo to the tenements of industrial New Jersey, and their epic passage from hope to loss to something like love. Here is the soulful, unsparing book that made Díaz a literary sensation.  

Readers are invited to take a new look at "Labyrinths," the classic by Latin America's finest writer of the 20th century--a true literary sensation--with a new introduction by cyber-author William Gibson.

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Winner of the National Book Award The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must ConvergeandA Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death--is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century.Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A N ew York Times Editors' Choice A Pulishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Birds of America is a stunning collection of twelve stories by Lorrie Moore, one of our finest authors at work today. With her characteristic wit and piercing intelligence she unfolds a series of portraits of the lost and unsettled of America, and with a trademark humor that fuels each story with pathos and understanding.

These eight stories by beloved and bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. Rich with the signature gifts that have established Jhumpa Lahiri as one of our most essential writers, Unaccustomed Earth exquisitely renders the most intricate workings of the heart and mind.

Ward Six and Other Stories is a broad sample of Chekhov's narrative genius. The work has been viewed as a symbol for the bureaucratic quagmire of czarist and Stalinist Russia. It is also a universal comment on the person versus the state.Ward Six is a hauntingly symbolic depiction of the world of an insane asylum, an upside-down world where doctors ignore the sick, where hospital filth spreads infections. In The Duel, with its theme of moral degradation, two characters are locked in a confrontation and observers on the sidelines pass judgment. The essence of A Dull Story is the reflections of a man dying of old age. The Name-Day Party is the tale of a prominent professor who, despite his fame and success, is unable to emotionally connect with his wife and improve their troubled relationship.

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob. By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

Selected from a survey of more than 200 English professors, award-winning short-story writers, novelists, and fiction workshop directors, a remarkable collection of North American literature written since 1970.Sherman Alexie • Margaret Atwood • Toni Cade Bambara • Russell Banks • John Barth • Donald Barthelme • Rick Bass • Richard Bausch • Charles Baxter • Madison Smartt Bell • Amy Bloom • Kate Braverman • Robert Olen Butler • Ethan Canin • Raymond Carver • Sandra Cisneros • Michael Cunningham • Junot Diaz • Stuart Dybek • Tony Earley • Louise Erdrich • Richard Ford • David Gates • Tim Gautreaux • Ron Hansen • Amy Hempel • Denis Johnson • Edward P. Jones • Thom Jones • David Michael Kaplan • Janet Kaufman • Jamaica Kincaid • David Leavitt • Reginald McKnight • Lorrie Moore • Bharati Mukherjee • Alice Munro • Joyce Carol Oates • Tim O'Brien • Cynthia Ozick • Annie Proulx • Mark Richard • Lee Smith • Susan Sontag • Amy Tan • Melanie Rae Thon • Stephanie Vaughn • Alice Walker • John Edgar Wideman • Joy Williams

In 1992, Richard Ford edited and introduced the first Granta Book of the American Short Story. It became the definitive anthology of American short fiction written in the last half of the twentieth century--an "exemplary choice" in the words of The Washington Post--with stories by Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and forty others demonstrating how much memorable power can lie in the briefest narration. In the years since, Ford has been reading new stories and rereading old ones and selecting new favorites. This new collection features more than forty stories, including some he regretted overlooking the first time around, as well as many by a new generation of writers--among them Sherman Alexie, Junot D#65533;az, Deborah Eisenberg, Nell Freudenberger, Matthew Klam, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Z. Z. Packer. None of the stories (though a few of the writers) were in the first volume. Once again, Ford's introduction is an illuminating exposition of how a good story is written by a master of the craft.