American Literature Collection

The first ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. A young, probably gay, boy named Gordo puts on a wrestler’s mask and throws fists with a boy in the neighborhood, fighting his own tears as he tries...

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the...

A new collection of electric, searing stories from award-winning, bestselling author Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence—sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing—but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire and by...

A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers—an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an...

Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver's mature writing and give his devoted fans a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver's writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have already entered the canon of modern literature.

With heart-stopping stories by Zane, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, Joy M. Copeland, Robert Fleming, Terence Taylor, Francine Lewis, Brandon Massey, and 12 other established or up-and-coming writers, Dark Dreams is a must-have contemporary anthology for fans of the supernatural.

One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade's worth of cult-reputation essays - it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.

In the 14th edition of this seductive series, erotica's veterans and up-and-coming new writers join forces to explore how tantalizing crossing the so-called Lolita gap between youth and middle age can be.

For this special edition, Susie Bright has gathered human sexuality in all its diversity: pleasure and desire in all its forms. Featuring erotic stories by: Bret Easton Ellis, Poppy Z. Brite, William Harrison, Michelle Tea, Aimee Bender, and Molly Weatherfield.

Natalie Spencer was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess. Like most women of futile lives, she lacked a sense of proportion, and the small and unimportant details of the service absorbed her. Such conversation as she threw at random, to right and left, was trivial and distracted. Yet, the dinner was an unimportant one. It had been given with an eye more to the menu than to the guest list, which was characteristic of Natalie's mental processes.

"Black Is Blue" by Victor L. Martin delves into the life of a corporate woman who falls in love with a thug and finds out just how easy it is to stray from the straight and narrow.

Eighteen and hungry, Wiz's only addiction to drugs is the money it makes. But Crystal changes all of that and shows him just how powerful a woman can be, in "The P is Free" by LaShonda Sidberry-Teague.

In this shattering and iconic American novel, PEN prize-winning writer, Smith Henderson explores the complexities of freedom, community, grace, suspicion and anarchy, brilliantly depicting our nation's disquieting and violent contradictions. After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished...

Now is an extraordinary time. Across the country, people are losing their loved ones, their livelihoods, their homes, and even their own lives to COVID-19. Despite the pandemic, countless protests erupted this summer over the recurring loss of Black lives. Reverberations of shock and outrage remain with us all. There's a Revolution Outside, My Love captures and articulates all of these roiling sentiments unleashed by a profound national reckoning.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley details a beautiful erotic interlude in an otherwise sordid real estate deal; Mary Gaitskill celebrates the unexpected ardor of one middle-aged couple; Steve Almond reminisces about the best one-man/three-girl Ecstasy party ever; Nelson George recounts the erotic escapades that befall a young man who accompanies a celebrity athlete when he picks up a gaggle of girls; and Carol Queen explores the joys of making love with summer fruit.

In The Best American Erotica, Volume 11, we learn about the very first penis in science-fiction hotshot Geoffrey Landis's bawdy fairy tale; Touré's breathless prose poem sets us up with an evening's worth of erotic visitors; and in Jerry Stahl's story, a man recalls his boyhood fascination with his mother's friends and their elaborate undergarments.

This is the ideal collection for all lovers of first-rate erotic literature. Edited by Susie Bright, whom the Utne Reader calls "one of the leading thinkers and visionaries of our time", this fifth annual edition of a best-selling series brings together the most outstanding erotic writing of the year.

This is the ideal collection for all lovers of first-rate erotic literature. Edited by Susie Bright, whom the Utne Reader calls "one of the leading thinkers and visionaries of our time", this fourth annual edition of a best-selling series brings together the most outstanding erotic writing of the year, including peculiarly dark and dangerous takes, as well as cutting-edge forays into the world of cybersex.

From Susie Bright, America's most outrageous and outspoken chronicler of the nation's sexual practices, comes this volume of the crème de la crème of erotic literature of 1999. Edited by Bright, whom the San Francisco Chronicle describes as "the X-rated intellectual" and The New York Times hails as "the voice of sweet reason and literacy", this sixth annual edition of a best-selling series is sure to satisfy old fans and leave newcomers begging for more.

When 27-year-old Jakiyah Smith left New York after a failed relationship, she had no plans of returning, but the death of her sister has forced her to come back. Now Jakiyah must help to care for her sister's child, but she soon finds herself surrounded by drama. German, the man she thought she would be with forever, is still with the woman he left her for. To make matters worse, Jakiyah's mother is the side-piece's newest friend.

T.C. Boyle was first feted as a master of the short story for his critically acclaimed Greasy Lake. With these stories applauded by People magazine as "wickedly comical," he displays once again a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America today. Without a Hero zooms in on American...