"The stories in the collection explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home"--

With a new foreword by Domenico Starnone, this stunning debut collection flawlessly charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide. A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions...

You could hear the voices murmuring, small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body. A peerless American storyteller, Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury- eighteen startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin. In this phantasmagoric sideshow, living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled...

"Acerbic and ruefully funny, Always Happy Hour weaves tales of young women, deeply flawed and intensely real, who struggle to get out of their own way. They love to drink and have sex; they make bad decisions with men who either love them too much or too little; and they haunt a Southern terrain of gas stations, public pools, and dive bars. Though each character shoulders the weight of her own baggage, whether it's a string of horrible exes, a boyfriend...

"A chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from the multiple award-winning author of the national bestseller, The Cabin at the End of the World, and A Head Full of Ghosts"-- "A chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from the multiple award-winning author of the national bestseller, The Cabin at the End of the World, and A Head Full of Ghosts. Featuring nineteen pieces of short fiction, Growing...

"Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis) "In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets. That's it. Flat out. No mitigating conditions." --Paul Metcalf A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday--uncovering moments of grace...

"In Tea Mutonji's disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic.These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator's...

A newborn's absent face appears on the back of someone else's head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he's after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses--whether...

Stories of overcoming adversity and experiencing life after coming out.

With her irresistible storytelling voice, a celebrated author presents this marvelously satisfying suite of stories exploring the universal themes of love, hope, home, and family.