The Neon Wilderness

Written by Nelson Algren
Afterword by Studs Terkel

Format: Trade Paperback, 308 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: January 8, 2002
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-1-58322-550-9 (1-58322-550-1)

“The Neon Wilderness is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren’s career--the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated the idiosyncratic, bedeviled, cantankerously poetic sensibility that would see him ranked among the few literary originals... Read more >

Things We Didn't See Coming

Written by Steven Amsterdam

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: February 8, 2011
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-47360-8 (0-307-47360-0)

Richly imagined and darkly comic, Things We Didn’t See Coming follows a single man over three decades as he tries to survive in an increasingly savage apocalyptic world that is at once utterly fantastic and disturbingly familiar. Here, coming-of-age is complicated not only by family troubles and mercurial love affairs, but... Read more >

Going to Meet the Man
Stories
Written by James Baldwin

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 25, 1995
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76179-2 (0-679-76179-9)

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women of eight short stories grasp the aforesaid truth on an elemental level, and their tales, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in... Read more >

Gorilla, My Love

Written by Toni Cade Bambara

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 30, 1992
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-73898-5 (0-679-73898-3)

In these fifteen stories, written in a style at once ineffable and immediately recognizable, Toni Cade Bambara gives us compelling portraits of a wide range of unforgettable characters, from sassy children to cunning old men, in scenes shifting between uptown New York and rural North Carolina. A young girl suffers her... Read more >

The Sea Birds Are Still Alive

Written by Toni Cade Bambara

Format: Trade Paperback, 220 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 12, 1982
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-394-71176-8 (0-394-71176-9)

Here are ten stories of Black life written with Bambara's characteristic vigor, sensibility and winning irony. The stories range from the timid and bumbling confusion of a novice community worker in "The Apprentice" to the love-versus-politics crisis of an organizer's wife, to the dark and bright notes of the title story... Read more >

Lost in the Funhouse

Written by John Barth

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: March 1, 1988
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-24087-1 (0-385-24087-2)

Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction. Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection. Read more >

Hush Hush
Stories
Written by Steven Barthelme

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: October 23, 2012
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-61219-159-1 (1-61219-159-2)

If you’re up $16,000 at the casino and missing dinner with the woman you love, how do you find the strength to drive away? If you give up your career and your beautiful wife and find yourself drinking vodka and fixing cars for a living, is that necessarily a step down?... Read more >

The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch

Written by Richard Bausch

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: April 23, 1996
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-64017-2 (0-679-64017-7)

Richard Bausch is a master of the short story—and this selection brings together ten pieces which perfectly showcase his incisive wit, perception, and artistry. "He brings to life characters and situations as vivid and compelling as any in contemporary literature."—Michael Dorris, The Washington Post Book World. Read more >

Something Is Out There
Stories
Written by Richard Bausch

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 5, 2011
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-27914-9 (0-307-27914-6)

Winner of the 2012 Rea Award for the Short Story

In these eleven unforgettable stories, Richard Bausch plumbs the depths of familial and marital estrangement, the gulfs between friends and lovers, the fragility and impermanence of love—and manages to find something quite surprising: human hope.

Bausch’s assured style, signature grace, and penetrating wit... Read more >

Believers
A novella and stories
Written by Charles Baxter

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 29, 1998
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-77653-6 (0-679-77653-2)

With his five previous books of fiction, Charles Baxter established himself as a contemporary literary master, in the traditions of Raymond Carver, William Maxwell, and Alice Munro. This radiant new collection--seven short stories and one novella--confirms Baxter's ability to revel in the surfaces of seemingly ordinary lives while uncovering their bedrock... Read more >

Gryphon
New and Selected Stories
Written by Charles Baxter

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 14, 2012
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-73952-0 (0-307-73952-X)

Winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story

Ever since the publication of his first story collection in 1984, Charles Baxter has slowly gained a reputation as one of America’s finest short story writers. Gryphon brings together sixteen classics with seven new stories, giving us the most complete portrait of... Read more >

Gryphon
New and Selected Stories
Written by Charles Baxter

Format: Hardcover, 416 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: January 11, 2011
Price: $27.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-37921-4 (0-307-37921-3)

Ever since the publication of The Harmony of the World in 1984, Charles Baxter has slowly gained a reputation as one of America’s finest short-story writers. Each subsequent collection—Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger, and Believers—was further confirmation of his mastery: his gift for capturing the immediate moment, for revealing... Read more >

Burning House

Written by Ann Beattie

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 29, 1995
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76500-4 (0-679-76500-X)

The now-classic, utterly unique voice of Ann Beattie is so dry it throws off sparks, her eye endowed with the emotional equivalent of X-ray vision. Her characters are young men and women discovering what it means to be a grown-up in a country that promised them they’d stay young forever. And... Read more >

Distortions

Written by Ann Beattie

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 2, 1991
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-73235-8 (0-679-73235-7)

Haunting and disturbingly powerful, these stories established Ann Beattie as the most celebrated new voice in American fiction and an absolute master of the short-story form. Beattie captures perfectly the profound longings that came to define an entire generation with insight, compassion, and humor.

"Magnificant, a pleasure, a significant literary debut." --The... Read more >

Park City
New and Selected Stories
Written by Ann Beattie

Format: Trade Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 29, 1999
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-78133-2 (0-679-78133-1)

For more than twenty-five years, Ann Beattie's short fiction has held a mirror up to America, portraying its awkwardly welded families, its loosely coupled couples, and much-uprooted children with acuity, humor, and compassion. This triumphant collection includes thirty-six of the finest stories of her career including eight new pieces that have... Read more >

Secrets & Surprises

Written by Ann Beattie

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 7, 1991
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-73193-1 (0-679-73193-8)

These fifteen stories by Ann Beattie garnered universal critical acclaim on their first publication, earning Beattie the reputation as the most celebrated new voice in American fiction. Today these stories — "A Vintage Thunderbird;" "The Lawn Party, " " La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans," to name a few — seem... Read more >

What Was Mine
& Other Stories
Written by Ann Beattie

Format: Trade Paperback, 252 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 16, 1992
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-73903-6 (0-679-73903-3)

A collection of short fiction, twelve works in all, including two never-before-published novellas. Here are disconnected marriages and uneasy reunions, nostalgic reminiscences and sudden epiphanies--a remarkable and moving collage of contemporary lives. Read more >

Fidelity
Five Stories
Written by Wendell Berry

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: September 28, 1993
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74831-1 (0-679-74831-8)

"Berry richly evokes Port William's farmlands and hamlets, and his characters are fiercely individual, yet mutually protective in everything they do. . . . His sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world."—New York Times Book Review.

“In this powerful new collection, the noted poet, essayist and fiction... Read more >

Pure Slaughter Value
Stories
Written by Robert Bingham

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: June 15, 1998
Price: $11.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-48867-9 (0-385-48867-X)

Open City co-founder and co-editor Robert Bingham makes a notable literary debut with this collection of stories that tracks the conscience and consciousness of a generation that grew up privileged, educated, and in search of meaning. Bingham's lean, potent stories recall Fitzgerald in their chronicling of a young, reckless social elite... Read more >

God Lives in St. Petersburg
Short Stories
Written by Tom Bissell

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 3, 2006
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7542-3 (1-4000-7542-4)

Here are six fictional stories about Americans colliding with a remote and often perilous part of the world:

Two journalists, stranded in wartime Afghanistan, are taken in by a warlord who becomes the arbiter of their fates.

A female scientist investigating the Aral Sea disaster is drawn into a trap by a former... Read more >

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
Stories
Written by Amy Bloom

Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: July 31, 2001
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70557-1 (0-375-70557-0)

Amy Bloom was nominated for a National Book Award for her first collection, Come to Me, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Antaeus, and other magazines, and in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. In her new collection, she enhances her... Read more >

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

Written by Ray Bradbury
Introduction by Christopher Buckley

Format: Hardcover, 1112 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: April 6, 2010
Price: $32.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-26905-8 (0-307-26905-1)

One hundred of Ray Bradbury’s remarkable stories which have, together with his classic novels, earned him an immense international audience and his place among the most imaginative and enduring writers of our time.

Here are the Martian stories, tales that vividly animate the red planet, with its brittle cities and double-mooned sky... Read more >

Dogwalker
Stories
Written by Arthur Bradford

Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 27, 2002
Price: $13.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72669-9 (0-375-72669-1)

Tender and satiric, hilarious and humane, Dogwalker plunks readers down in a land of misfits and the circumstantially strange–where one young man buys drugs from a dealer who locks his customers in a closet, while another lands a cat-faced circus freak for a roommate, and yet another must choose between his... Read more >

Things that Fall from the Sky

Written by Kevin Brockmeier

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: July 8, 2003
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72769-6 (0-375-72769-8)

Weaving together loss and anxiety with fantastic elements and literary sleight-of-hand, Kevin Brockmeier’s richly imagined Things That Fall from the Sky views the nagging realities of the world through a hopeful lens.

In the deftly told “These Hands,” a man named Lewis recounts his time babysitting a young girl and his inconsolable... Read more >

The View From the Seventh Layer

Written by Kevin Brockmeier

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 10, 2009
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-38776-9 (0-307-38776-3)

Peering into the often unnoticed corners of life, Kevin Brockmeier has been consistently praised for the originality of his vision, the boundlessness of his imagination and the command of his craft. Once again, in this new collection of fiction, Brockmeier shows us a fantastical world that is intimately familiar but somehow... Read more >