American Short

For fans of American Housewife and the work of Lily King, a provocative, razor-sharp, and riotously entertaining story collection exploring the dark side of family and femininity. CONTAINS “COMORBIDITIES,” WINNER OF THE BBC SHORT STORY PRIZE In my life, I had always been a good woman...

Samrat Upadhyay's thrilling new collection brings stories of thieves, lovers, political prisoners, fractured families, and of Nepali-Americans attempting to navigate the strange customs of the United States. It reaffirms Upadhyay's brilliant contributions to the international literature of exile.

From a Hong Kong movie idol fleeing a sex scandal to an obedient daughter turned Stanford pretender, from a Chinatown elder summoned to his village to a Korean American pastor with a secret agenda, the characters in the collection illustrate the conflict between self and society, tradition and change. In "What We Have Is What We Need", winner of the Atlantic's Student Writing Contest, a boy from Mexico reunites with his parents in San Francisco. When he suspects his mother has found love elsewhere, he fights to keep his family together.

A captivating read spanning 5,000 years of the ocean's history Conquest of the Ocean tells the 5,000 year history of the remarkable individuals who sailed seas, for trade, to conquer new lands, to explore the unknown. From the early Polynesians to the first circumnavigations by the Portuguese...

In New York City, an art student finds an unexpected subject when she moves in with a grandmother from Xi’an, and boundaries are put into question. When a newlywed couple moves to Arizona, adapting to unfamiliar customs keeps their marriage from falling apart. A woman grapples with what it means to care for another, and the limits of that care, when her dying husband returns from Beijing years after abandoning her. And during a rainy summer in Texas, a visitor exposes the unspoken but unburiable history that binds two families together.

This anthology edited by the American writer, philosopher, and patron of the arts Alain Locke brings together some of the most influential pieces of African American works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Featuring the voices of Zora Neale Thurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes, Locke included commentary on the emergence of the New Negro Movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negro is considered to be the definitive text on the movement.

A young Black girl watches as her aunt’s multiple suitors disrupt her family’s privacy. The same girl, now on the cusp of adulthood, shares her family’s growing fears that her father has disappeared. Acclaimed author Ann Petry penned these and the other unforgettable narratives in Miss Muriel and Other Stories more than 70 years ago, yet in them, contemporary listeners recognize characters who exist today and dilemmas that recur again and again.

In this powerful and virtuosic collection of interlocking stories, each one "a marvel of concision and compassion" (Washington Post), Peter Orner, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and "master of his form" (New York Times), takes the short story to new heights. Through forty-four...

The acclaimed, award-winning author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace presents a “carefully observed journalistic account [that] widens our view of the modern ‘immigrant experience’” (The New York Times Book Review) as he closely follows four Los Angeles high school boys as...

“This timely novel takes on friendship, desire, fear, and vulnerability in one incisive, witty, and powerful package.” —People “Astonishes with the force of its unexpected beauty.” —The New York Times Book Review The author of the “graceful and compassionate” (People) New York...

The National Book Award finalist for Refund returns with a new collection of stories that boldly examines the changes in American culture over the last two years through the increasing presence of violence, bigotry, sexual harassment, and the emotional costs of living under constant threat. In the title story, the competition between two middle school cellists is affected by a shooting at their school, and it is only years later that they realize how the intrusion of violence affected the course of their lives.

“With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of everyday American anxieties.” —Time A razor-sharp story collection from the "furiously good" A.M. Homes, author of the forthcoming novel The Unfolding (Zadie Smith, bestselling author of Swing Time). With her signature humor...

From National Book Award finalist and the New York Timesbestselling author of The Year We Left Home comes a “powerful, beautifully crafted” (People) family saga about three generations of women who struggle to find freedom and happiness in their small Midwestern college town. A Cloud in the...

Blistering and deeply personal, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son records Russell's quest to understand, through his journalistic subjects, his own appetites and urges, his persistent alienation, and, above all, his knotty, volatile, vital relationship with his father.

Loose Woman Seductive, earthy, and at times confessional, Sandra Cisneros's vibrant collection of poetry celebrates the females aspects of love--from the reflective to the overtly erotic--in a voice recognizable from her powerful works of fiction. These poems offer narratives as formally elegant...

In The Italian Quartet, Sara Marcello, a writer with roots in Italy, is invited to the island villa of Ugo and Olivia Bellini, two wealthy and worldly antiquarians. In this place of myth, belonging as much to Homer and Prospero as to the present, Sara discovers that she is at the center of...

A literary jigsaw puzzle of a debut novel set in Colombia during the peak of its decades-long conflict, and in New York City While her parents are away, a teenager finds herself home alone, with the household staff mysteriously gone, no phone connection, and news of an insurgency on the...

It's 1942. With the Nazi party at the height of its power, the occupying army empties Poland's towns and cities of their Jewish populations. As neighbor turns on neighbor and survival often demands unthinkable choices, Poland becomes a moral quagmire - a place of shifting truths and blinding ambiguities.

Following the best-selling Everybody's Fool, a new collection of short fiction that demonstrates that Richard Russo--winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls--is also a master of this genre. Russo's characters in these four expansive stories bear little similarity to the blue-collar...

Held captive by her employers -- and by her own demons -- on a mysterious farm, a widow struggles to reunite with her young son in this uniquely American story of freedom, perseverance, and survival. Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself...