Short Family

The truth is, as a character in this provocative new collection puts it, "passionate, beautiful, and hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it's always liberating." In "After the Season", a man of humble means falls quickly in love with a woman belonging to a much elevated financial status and wrestles with his feelings and his beliefs about the rich. A son takes his distant father to a Bach festival in "Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen" only to learn that perhaps he was the one who was never really present in their relationship. And in "The Night in Baden-Baden" a man who's caught in a lie changes his ways.

The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters love and betray one another; their richly fraught relationships can act as anchors, lifelines, or deadly poison. Bonnie Jo Campbell's working-class protagonists are at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny, and they are always getting into or out of trouble.

These are some of the stories of Manorsfields' residents, their relatives and their caregivers. There is humor, poignancy, even romance, but above all they demonstrate that life is very often stranger than fiction.

Nothing ever goes the way it should. Marty is barely a friend any more, and the roommate from hell is doing Naked Guy on my couch again. It's bad enough that it feels like my life is coming apart at the seams. There's one man that has held it together for the past few weeks, but things change. All it takes is a few words and everything shatters.

A collection of contemporary short stories involving families, friends, and distant relations. It is the hazards of daily life that test the soul. Nobility, bravery, decency, kindness, and mercy are the shafts of light that pierce the darkness of the human experience. All the drama and excitement of a novel experience in compact short stories, contemporary lives moving through dark trials to light and hope.

Thirty years ago, David Leavitt first appeared on the literary scene with a gutsy story collection that stunned readers and reviewers. Just 23, he was hailed as a prodigy of sorts: “remarkably gifted” (The Washington Post), with “a genius for empathy” (The New York Times Book Review), and “a knowledge of others' lives...that a writer twice his age might envy” (USA Today). “Regardless of age,” wrote the New York Times, “few writers so effortlessly achieve the sense of maturity and earned compassion so evident in these pages.”

Growing up homeschooled in Berkeley, California, Beatrice Quinn is a statistical genius who has dreamed her whole life of discovering new mathematical challenges at a school like Oxford University. She always thought the hardest part would be getting in, not convincing her parents to let her go. But while math has always made sense to Beatrice, making friends is a problem she hasn’t been able to solve. The compromise? The Connecticut Shakespearean Summer Academy.

Holly, North Carolina - where it’s Christmas year-round and miracles can happen. A good thing for the O’Connor family - four local siblings, four sexy stories, four unique journeys to happily ever after.

Gifted empath and security expert Landon Love has spent a lifetime trying to keep everyone at arm's length, never wanting to know what people personally think about him. His gift of sensing emotions isn't one he'd wish on anyone...ever. Beautician Alexis Love has been called many things by her family. Mother Nature on crack is the most accurate, thanks to her unusual DNA. The weather and the vibrations of the earth are her playground.

A series of linked stories following the members of a large Latinx family exploring the pressure points of familial obligations and the complexities of love. From the author of Malas comes a short story collection that centers the challenges of family, with characters constantly trying to...

A stunning, fierce collection from a master of the short story and one of the most important writers of our time Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff’s electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read together, they hum in exhilarating resonance. Ranging...

In Panhandlers, Nic Schuck tells a raw and unflinching story of Hank Ackerman, a boy born into poverty in the forgotten lumber town of Sullivan, Florida. As Hank struggles to break free from a legacy of hardship and addiction, he learns that escape isn’t just about leaving—it’s about finding something worth running toward. Hank’s journey unfolds alongside the lives of Sullivan’s other denizens—mostly dreamers, drifters, and the down-and-out—each carrying their own burdens and desires.

The first collection of short fiction from Lambda Award-winning novelist Dale Peck spans 25 years of writing, including two O. Henry Award winners and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. The stories in What Burns examine the extremes of desire against a backdrop of family, class, and mortality.

These interrelated stories are arranged in two sections, one devoted to virtues ("Bravery", "Loyalty", "Chastity", "Charity", and "Forbearance") and the other to vices ("Lust", "Sloth", "Avarice", "Gluttony", and "Vanity"). They are cast with characters who appear and reappear throughout the collection, their actions equally divided between the praiseworthy and the loathsome.

The best-selling author of Snow Falling on Cedars returns to his Pacific Northwest settings -and moves beyond them- in 10 sharply observed, funny, and wise new stories that explore the mysteries of love and unravel our complex desires to connect with others. Ranging from teenage to middle-age, the voices that inhabit Problems with People offer humorous or searing but always tightly focused accounts of the universal quest to understand one another - individually, and as part of our political and historical moment.

In “The Pleasure of Her Company,” a lonely, single woman befriends the married couple next door, hoping to learn the secret of their happiness. In "Long Distance," a man finds himself relieved of the obligation to continue an affair that is no longer compelling to him, only to be waylaid by the guilt he feels at his easy escape. And in the incandescently wise and moving title novella, a dentist, aware that his wife has fallen in love with someone else, must comfort her when she is spurned....

In Fort Hood housing, like all army housing, you get used to hearing through the walls. You learn too much. And you learn to move quietly through your own small domain. You also know when the men are gone. As Siobhan Fallon shows in this collection of loosely interconnected short stories, each woman deals with her husband's absence differently.

A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions quickly escalate between them and their religious neighbors. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband. Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope.

In the 10 luminous stories of D. Wystan Owen's Other People's Love Affairs, the people of Glass, a picturesque village on the rugged English coast, are haunted by longings and deeply held secrets, captive to pasts that remain as alive as the present. Each story takes us into the lives of characters reaching earnestly and often courageously for connection to the people they have loved. Owen observes their heartbreaks, their small triumphs, and their generous capacity for grace. Surprising and powerful, these stories mark the debut of a remarkable new talent.

John Updike reads six stories he has selected from the hundred-odd he has published. "A&P", recounting a moral crisis on the checkout counter, is his most anthologized story. "Pigeon Feathers," the longest story included, tells of a fourteen-year-old boy's fear of death and the answer he finds...